Esha Launches the Season of Inclusion

 Its the season of cheer. 

Let's also make it the Season of Inclusion 

Esha invites you to conduct a Blind Walk wherever you are! 

Help make this an inclusive world! 

More details here: 

https://eshabraille.org/current-projects/

The page and the program are running from Dec to Feb. 

Join us! 

Summer Project 2019 - Report

This year's summer project was one of the most productive Summer Projects that Esha has ever had.

Special Thanks to the Project Managers who managed this baton relay race so seamlessly that I had no idea when the project management changed!

They also managed volunteer selection, monitoring and reporting, and closure. Compared to the previous years, when our volunteers pick assignments and then drop out, this year, the sudden dropout number was very, very less. People were selected well, so they stuck to their assignments and the assignments were delivered high quality, on time, and with great professionalism.

The 3 main threads of this year's Summer Project were:

1. Content - Shreyas Kadam and Aprita Mary did an outstanding job of writing some high quality articles on the Esha blog.

2. Esha Research Project - Jainish Malhotra, Vikram Gaur, and Meenakshi Agarwal contributed to the secondary and primary research on this project. Their work was awe-inspiring because the insights that they picked up from the field, and their enthusiasm, can only be experienced, not described.

3. Voice Recording - This was, like every year, the most selected summer project option. This year, we laid special emphasis on career oriented content. So  you will now find previous years questions papers for upto the last 10 years for the following examinations:
A. SSC
B. NTPC
C. RRB
D. Civil Services Exam - Mains and Prelims
E. CLAT
F. CAT
G. SBI PO Exams


On the literature side, we added:
A. Viky Arya's poetry
B. Akbar Birbal in Marathi.
C. A story by Smita

And outside the Summer Project, Anil Bhagat ji, who is a long-time Friend of Esha, converted easy law (a long-pending dream of mine) from nyaaya.in to audio for our users.  He also converted the text of the entire Draft National Education Policy - 2019 (NEP-2019), so that the print disabled can give their feedback on the policy too. This initiative of his was much appreciated by Vasudha Kamat mam, who is part of the NEP Committee.

It was SUCH a pleasure to be a part of the Summer Project 2019. Here's to every year being like this, or better. :) 

Vedant Hingu's Blind Walk for his school project

Vedant Hingu (Grade 6 of Lancers School) had to do a social connect project at school. His mother got in touch with us and they decided to do a Blind Walk.

The Blind Walk was done at a club in Gurgaon and at the INA Metro Station, Delhi.

Here is his experience, in his own words: 
I conducted a blind walk at INA station on 11 September 2019. I was unsure of asking people to participate but I still tried. Some people asked me why am I doing this and some wanted to know if I want donation. When I told them that this activity is to create awareness about making people spaces available and safe for blind, they were still not very convinced. But once they did the walk (where they had to close their eyes and use only the cane for help)- they realised what I meant. I showed them what the tactile tiles are meant for. I pointed out how people had kept their luggage on the tactile tiles - blocking the way of the blind.  5 people did the blind walk today and I was happy that they realised how important it is. I wish more people would participate and help the blind

Explaining what the Blind Walk is about to the staff at the Club

Experiencing a Blind Walk 

At the INA Metro Station

Explaining why a Blind Walk is necessary to create inclusive citizens

And he has everyone's attention 

The Esha Summer Project, 2019 is here!

Last year, Rohan, a student of just 16 years, conducted and presented his primary research report on Career Preferences of the Visually Challenged. A report like that has not been attempted in India before.


This year, we have come up with an even more important research project - which has far reaching use for people designing knowledge resources.


All Esha projects can be done from home, or in vicinity.


You can access the summer project options here.

NABCW visit by school students

One of the things we do under our sensitization vertical is to take school students to a blind school. Today, Grade 7 students from a Delhi based school ewent to N AB center for Women, Hauz Khas.

The children who entered the school were regular 12 year olds, but the children who came out were inclusive citizens. 

Here's to more such days. 

New School in the network - Aurangabad

Very happy to share this. Over the last two days - December 24th and 25th, I was at Aurangabad. The brief visit had 2 happy occasions:
1. We took the message of creating an inclusive society to over 100 young students at the MGM Institute. The students were from Class 11, and from classes 7 and 8.


I had so much fun doing this! The students were active and eager. We asked for 6 volunteers for the blind walk, and got 14, with more waiting. The learning was Braille was done with much gusto and the questions at the end were thought provoking. Thank you!


The visit to the blind school was equally good. We saw the basic and clean facilities, understood their requirements and were surprised to see the very low level of audio penetration, even though the students are working towards competitive exams.


The school is now a part of our audio library network and will share requirements.
Special thanks to MGM, and Dr. Aparna Kakkad in particular, for enabling both these interactions.

With the Grade 7 and 8 students, the principal and teachers

Talking about why inclusive spaces are necessary

With the Grade 11 students who asked some very interesting questions

This young lady asked a really interesting question - mam, how do you train them. This is her being trained on getting on stage without stumbling, and walking straight. It was very nice to see her confidence surge when she reached the stage on her own, and turned around to address the audience, all with her eyes closed!

A full house!

The hostel is in a simple, single builing

The school gate

The team after the discussion. MGM has consented to play an active role in the development of the audio library for the school

November 2018 Roundup

What a lovely November this has been!
In this month, we:
A. Conducted Read Fests at KPMG, Moodys, and SOIL (School of Inspired Leadership)
B. Did a Trust Walk with the German exchange students at The Shri Ram School, Aravali
C. Conducted Blind school visits for the Grade 7 students of The Shri Ram School, Moulasari, to the NAB Center for Women, Hauz Khas
D. Added some more Braille Cards customers, one of whom is a very prominent one.
E. We also visited the Namchi Blind School in South Sikkim to take stock of their learning needs. This is one of the remote schools from which we take requirements for our audio library. We noted the requirements for the next year and also gave them a free resource which they will use every day now - the daily newspaper for children, which is an initiative of our founder. This paper will now be shared with them every day at no cost. The school will use the in built screenreader of Adobe to read out the news to all the children in the assembly. Currently, the teachers have to make the news every morning in Braille and then the children read it out.




The audio content recorded during these Read Fests will particularly help Indian history fans (Original Kautilya Arthashastra in Hindi), and IAS aspirants (All 2018 Mains papers and Prelims papers recorded in audio)


80 files in English, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Oriya and Malayalam were recorded. These will be a part of the next release, which is due this week.


The Blind School visits almost always make us very happy, because they help us sensitise a lot of children, and the children who walk out of that school truly understand the key words that we stand for - Dignity, Empowerment, and Enablement.


On the technical front, we made the code of the mobile app - CLABIL, more robust, and are working to improve the code even further. We have heated discussions on security for the mobile app, and I love those discussions!


Here's to an equally outstanding December.

Lead The Rest Through Read Fest!

As the doors opened for the Read Fest to be held at School of Inspired Leadership, we could see a plethora of eager volunteers gearing up for the same!
As the flurry picked pace, the excitement grew paramount with participants enquiring for the same, curiosity & inquisitiveness pretty evident from their expressions!

"So.. What's This About? Can You Brief Us?" 

                                                                                      - Anudeep, Student SOIL

The Esha Volunteers left no stone unturned be it through providing information to students or motivating them to record.

Needless to say, the students were very excited & eager to help.
Help implied they had to miss classes & record audio content for Esha..

"We want to help! But we have classes till 6:15! How to go about it?"

                                                                                                - Analytics Student, SOIL

It seemed like an uphill task to convince them to stay back after classes.
The time had come to enlighten the students on how just 10-20 minutes of their time could help a Blind person in understanding & interpreting the world he lives in, in a better way.

The Esha Volunteers did succeed in getting recordings in languages ranging from Tamil to Bengali.
The mission resonated well with the students & they could well understand the impact this was creating on the society they live in..

" Yes, it did take time. Yet, I feel like I've done something of greater value today!" 

                                                                                                   - Marketing Student, SOIL

The Impact could be felt in the conviction & tenacity the Participants showed despite the fact that there were multiple takes at recording owing to technical glitches & noise disturbances.

" We thank you with all our heart & soul. You guys have done a great job!"

                                                                                            - Shivangi Sharma, Volunteer Esha

 

                     In Picture: Two Students supporting Esha in Audio Recordings in Bengali & Oriya at Read Fest

The Experience was enriching & provided lots of learning to both SOIL Students as also Esha Volunteers.

The Impact could be felt, somewhere in between the softened mumbles of students & the sighs of the Volunteers....

Blind Walk At Government Schools

The experience was nothing short of amazing when the sensitization was carried forward through government schools & awareness was spread starting right at the grass-root level!

" Are there schools for the Blind? How do they study? " quipped Neha, a 10 year old as she completed her Trust Walk exercise...

As the curiosity levels soared & youngsters got not only more aware regarding blindness, but also traces of concern & inquisitiveness could well be seen bubbling in the innocent yet curious eyes of the budding change makers..

" I feel amazing after interacting with these young minds.. I've talked to them about blindness before on  multiple counts as my sister is also going through the same " 

-Teacher (Saksham Bal Vikas Sansthan)

It's wondrous how deeply can we impact the lives of these children by making them aware about the blind, sensitizing them so that they develop not only the strength to help & support them but also take inspiration from their tenacity & determination with which they lead their lives..

" So how do they eat? ", asked Arjun, his face gleaming with curiosity 

We sensitized them not only about the Blind & how their strength gets them going but also about Braille & how they study!

" Can I learn Braille too? ", quipped curious Sambhav as he looked intently at his teacher

The positive vibes could very well be felt as the drone of noises that schools are known by could be channelled into positive dialogue with the impact very well received by the students.

Let's do a Blind Walk!

Now that summers are over, we look forward to another year of sensitisation.

If you are in Delhi NCR, we would love to do a Blind Walk at your office, housing society, colony park, school or college. Contact us and we will set up a date.

Blind Walk is an event that Esha has conducted successfully to sensitise people to the need for inclusive environments.

We hope to do 5 Blind walks in July 2018 and our aim is to create at least 1 lakh sensitised people this year. Let's get started!

There is no charge for a Blind Walk. So if you are an employee engagement professional looking to do a free activity that is also Fun@Work, contact us today!

Blind Walk at Nagarro Software - March 2018

The Esha Summer Project 2018 is here!

The Esha Summer Project 2018 is here!


The work options this year are greater than ever before and for the first time, there are 3 research projects too!


The best thing to do would be to download the presentation and see it in slide show format. Each slide indicates what that project entails, the time credit that you will get and the time that you need to invest.
...

And then tell us what you would like to do!


The ppt version of the Summer Project details is here:
https://bit.ly/2HUv8wz
The pdf version is here:
https://bit.ly/2F9txjq


All queries and registrations to eshabraille@gmail.com

Blind Walk at Nagarro Software

On the 28th of March, we organised a Blind Walk at both the offices of Nagarro. The team of SOIL completely owned and realised this event.


Sharing some pictures.

Blilnd Walk @ Leisure Valley, Gurgaon - 24th Feb, 2018

On Saturday, Feb 24th, at 11 am, we conducted a Blind Walk at Leisure Valley, Gurgaon.


Harminder Soni and his wife Meera, Aditi Hingu and her son Vedant, and Md. Vohra, Siddharth Birla, and Rouble Munjal, students of SOIL, were the volunteers who helped at the event.


We had some Decathlon vouchers left over from the Tour de Vision event, so we were able to give out the vouchers to participants at the Blind Walk.


The pics are a combination of the 3 cameras. :)


But here is what I love about Blind Walks. When you tell people that they are going to have an eye opening experience in the next 10 minutes, they smile at you - that nice, indulgent smile that says, 'you're optimistic.'


10 minutes later, after just the first format, when they open their eyes, the indulgent smile is gone. The eyes are open as if they are seeing the world for the first time, and most of them are speechless. They are overwhelmed. Most of them take time to come back to reality, and then just nod their heads, part incredulous and part...well, speechless, unable to put what they are feeling into words. And it happens EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Harminder S Soni doing Audio Guidance with a participant

Nidhi guiding Vedant on the 3rd format while Md. Vohra and Meera Soni look on.

Meera Soni guides Aditi Hingu

The team at the end. Harminder and Meera had to leave at 1215, we continued till about 1240

Harminder Soni guiding Md. Vohra on his first Blind Walk. You have to experience it before you volunteer and guide others. Some of the participants look on.

One of the participants experiencing the Blind Walk

Blind walk at Good Earth City Center on 8.03.17

Good Earth City Center is one of the most happening places in Gurgaon, therefore we opt to conduct one of our Blind Walk here. Also, we invited Goibibo employees who work in the close vicinity of the venue. We conducted eight round of blind walk, engaging 51 people. Before we began with our event, we just tried to enquire upon, how good is Good Earth City Center for the people who are visually unabled. Unfortunately, we could not find much infrastructure which could be friendly to these people. With an aim to let people empathize with blindness, we conducted this blind walk.

We were glad that 51 people participated and shared their experience post the event. They also realized how we commoners are ignoring this section of society who are rarely observed in public spaces. Goibibo employees were first time experiencing an event like that, they invited their friends to experience the world without eyes. An event which started with just a blind walk turned out to be a lesson for a lifetime for almost every one of them. We took the recording of the experience of the participants which is available on our Facebook page. We just need a little empathy to make this world beautiful and accessible for everyone, including the visually unable. As a moderator of the Blind Walk, we felt that, everyone who participated have almost forgotten about those who are differently abled, but when they underwent through a similar situation as blindness they are going to remember this for a long time. We thank our NGO ESHA for enabling us to conduct Blind walk at this venue.

Corporate Blind Walk

Today we went to Amtex for conducting blind walk. We met Dankush and HR Neha and they were very supportive. We were introduced to the staff of Amtex . Earlier they all were working but when they were told by Neha about the noble cause for which we were there they all came to support us in this good initiative. We first announced them the reason to conduct the blind walk as it was to sensitize the people towards the difficulty faced by the visually impaired people. We looked for a place where we could do the blind walk.We asked the employees to take initiative and two of those came forward and we instructed them the way to do blind walk and told them the stretch till where those were supposed to do the blind walk. There were a few obstacles in the stretch but everyone used their canes to overcome obstacles and we as Esha team also kept guiding them during the walk. Once the walk was done we asked them about their experiences and they all said it was really tough to walk and they could understand the difficulties the visually impaired people felt. They all thoroughly enjoyed this as well.

After that we recorded the experiences of HR Neha and Dankush as well and they said they were really happy to be part of this activity. They also assured us that their organization would definitely like to be part of the activities conducted by Esha foundation

Blind Walk and Read Fest

Last Wednesday, we did a Blind Walk at the Good Earth Mall, Gurgaon.


Next Wednesday, we have  chartered Blind Walk for Inventcare in Gurgaon


On March 16,17, Moody's is hosting a private (open to employees only) Read Fest at its premises.


Looking forward to an eventful week ahead!

Theater Workshop, Read Fest, Media and Braille Cards stall!

Today is a very happening day at Esha.

Today we have:
1. A theater workshop at Nagarro
2. A Read Fest at The Sri Ram School, Aravali
3. A stall at the Diversity and Inclusion dialogue at The Lemon Tree Hotels, Aerocity, Delhi.
4. We got featured in the Economic Times, Delhi edition.

:) To more such days!!!


On Feb 6th, we also got featured in the Times of India, Delhi edition. In print, it was the second page center. :)

TSRS Visit to NAB Center for Women

Working with children is always super special to us. Because when we create inclusive children, we are creating an inclusive future.

Which is why, the program where we take The Sri Ram Students of Grade 7 to a blind school, is among our favorite programs. 30 students enter that school, and 30 inclusive children exit. Their faces are so different when they come out..

This year also, the teams came one section at a time, and were left in awe as they understood how we use mobile phones, computers, chop vegetables, cook on fire, serve on plates, eat food independently, use libraries and resource centers, and use special aids to do everything else.

This year also, the students had a lot of immersive pre experiences. Every class did something to prepare for the visit. The children prepared songs that they wanted to sing at the school, some of them made beautiful bracelets and earrings and canvas pouches. It was soooo good to see them hand over things that they had made themselves..

The visit typically lasts 90 minutes, and is an experience of a lifetime - for everyone - the teachers, the students and us. Every single time, every single year.




Till next year, then!

The Esha Summer Project 2016 - Interim Report

On the 10th of April,we launched the Esha Summer Project 2016. We were aiming for a scale we had not done so far.

The summer project this year had about 6 options to choose from - each option had its own lessons and deliverables.

The objective was two fold - first, to benefit from the fresh perspective brought by the interns. The second, and the more important objective, was to expose the youth to the potential of this country through the formal, templatised, CLABIL Outreach Program.

We received 120 applications from various sources, of which about 45 interns were selected to share the summer with us. We also set up a remote collaboration project management office with 3 people - all of whom worked from home. Using simple google documents and online PMO platforms, we worked on managing this project without meeting each other.

Of the 45 interns, 7 are working on the CLABIL Outreach Program - in areas like Bareily, Devangere, Bangalore and of course, the NCR region.

A lot more volunteers are working on recording audio content in languages like Hindi, English, Malyalam, Tamil, Telugu etc.

We had one volunteer who interned with us on social media management and was able to meet social media metrics for Twitter,m Facebook and also SEO. This was a rare chance when a student got independent responsibility for Social Media metrics. 

We also had 2 interns who expressed an interest in creating communication videos, but they could not think of storyboards for their communication.

The best thing about the project was that the project management office was also staffed by the interns. One of the assignments was the PMO.

Some of the students would like to do COP near their houses once the schools reopen in July, and some have asked to continue to work with Esha after the internship is over.

Next year, we want to introduce a tighter selection process so that post selection dropouts are low. What we did well was to keep a tight feedback and followup loop so that all interns were able to keep on track with their progress.

This was our first experience of dealing with interns at this scale, and we now feel confident that we will be able to manage a larger scale next year.

The SOIL SIP Team is the best SIP Team of 2015-16 batch, and we have an article in The Better India

For some reason, we missed mentioning it here..

The SIP Team of 2015-16 - Saranya, Cauvery, Rethina and Vigneshwar, were adjudged the best outgoing SIP Team of SOIL. This is from out of 18 SIP teams this year.

https://www.facebook.com/atindranath.bhattacharya.3/posts/10209059202022189

And here is a link to the awesome videos that chronicle the journey of this group:
Esha Journey for this batch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaYggRDCD8M

Tour De Vision Promotion Events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp4EKTeA2u4

Tour De Vision 2016 Final Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92dOptvt6a4

Batch Feedback:

Rethina: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrJOc7vp9EM

Vigneshwar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NctvIfGe32s

And the previous year's batch, which truly laid the foundation for this batch's success:

Amit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziqKDdyNwW8

Vrishin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-SHeVjtOoc

Pooja Singh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDDxyFQoOp8

Karen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBAsZh5QF9o


Part II:
Just yesterday, the Esha blog was featured among the top blogs of India, and today, The Better India carried a story on our CLABIL and CLABIL Outreach Projects.

We are so grateful! Please do spread the word. The idea of CLABIL is not for us to get credit, but for everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, to get access to this knowledge and literary resource.

http://www.thebetterindia.com/56802/library-for-audio-books-india-clabil/