– Radhika Mathur, Right to Information Branch

While we lie comfortably in our cushioned beds of our bourgeois households, there’s a continuous struggle in the larger world. By this struggle, I’m not referring to the popular and remarkable, larger struggles of society of ‘fast unto death’ to get a Parliament bill passed in a democracy or a ‘Pride Parade’ against the discrimination faced in the country on the basis of one’s sexual identity. It is a much smaller and an everyday struggle within the realm of another household to secure the most fundamental prerequisites for what can be called an ordinary life.

It is a universal assumption that democracy is the best form of governance. Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister during the Second World War era, shared his opinion on democracy to the world – “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” As the latter school of thought believes, with our options otherwise running out, democracy is the last form of governance in the contemporary world.

In India, we are privileged to have the right to choose our representative in Parliament.But is that all democracy means, the availability of this right? Most of us don’t end up exercising all the rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution in our lifetime. For instance, when awareness on the Right to Information Act, (2005) was mapped in the country in the year 2008 by the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), the result supported my statement – only 2% young urban people were aware of the act.

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- Sumaya Saluja, Programme Coordinator

Blending Spectrum began in 2007, on the basis of 3 realizations:

1. There was, and still is, a divide that sections young people into two, i.e. ‘privileged’ and ‘underprivileged’ sections.
2. There are many organisations working on child rights but there exists to date, a lack of sharing of resources, on being able to learn from our collective successes and challenges from the field and the effective tools for implementation that exist amongst us.
3. Young people have the time and the skills to be able to work with other young people on sharing knowledge, skill and resources.

It started out as a fairly simple process. We brought together young people from schools and colleges to work with urban street and slum children across the NCR at three locations - the New Delhi Railway Station, a home for the orphaned and the abandoned run by a partner NGO, and at the Nizamuddin Basti (an urban settlement of a community of rag pickers at large), which was inhabited by 30 families.

Over the past five years, we have progressively increased our involvement with these 250+ children, from providing material resources to help with clothing and shelter, to  getting the children into school and helping them with their academics and homework, to finally implementing a Life Skills based education model. The focus is on empowering the community to realize their rights through raising awareness on health, socio cultural and civic issues; building their communication, interpersonal critical thinking skills; developing self management and coping mechanisms while assisting the children in their access to and progress in formal schooling.  The approach has involved using interactive mediums such as theatre, dance and art, through a peer to peer educational approach. Three years into the programme, the Global Fund for Children came on board to support the programme as has the NGO Dream A Dream in 2010, as our Curriculum Development Partners.

We learned from the responses given and feedback received from the children and their parents and have developed a response based on what the community identified as their needs. With time and continuous interaction, our understanding of these issues have strengthened, as have our ties with the community.

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When I was 17 years old in 2002 I saw a video on television that I will never forget for as long as I live. It was an image of a group of children being burnt alive in a street in Gujarat, a state in Western India. These children were from Hindu and Muslim communities and they were being burned alive in the name of religious fundamentalism, in one of the worst incidents of state sponsored genocide in India’s history. We were having dinner at my home that day, 3 generations of family sitting together and this was the evening live news coverage.

And later on, when the media asked the Chief Minister of that state, what he thought was the reason for riots between two communities and why the government had done nothing but watch this massacre, I will never forget his response. ‘Every action,’ he said, ‘has an equal and opposite reaction’. It hit me hard, when I read those words that we live in a country with zero accountability. Where government officials can quote Newton’s Third Law of Motion as sufficient justification for communal riots. Where so many of us silently accept the violation of people’s human rights because somewhere, we’ve accepted the idea that we can do nothing.

I was a high school student that year, preparing to give my final year examinations. The images and statements from the riot kept coming back to haunt me. As a young woman, I realized that I was powerless and that I was not alone. Young people constitute 31% of India’s population. That’s 315 million young people in India, who think they have no ability to affect change. Would this be the legacy that we left for future generations to come? That my generation stands and watches silently as people lose their lives?

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Written by Ishita Chaudhry for Music Basti, featured at musicbasti.org

Six years ago, I met a young lady over a cup of coffee. A few features of that meeting stand out in my mind. It was early evening; the lady in question was meticulous, interested, with a cool reserve and friendly interest in exploring not just what was, but the possibilities of what could be. Her notebook, stands out in my mind, for no particular reason, other than the fact that I had nothing to write in and wasn’t quite sure what my answers were going to be, to some serious questions about what The YP Foundation was and how we could work together.

But if you know Faith Gonsalves like I have, the questions are always specific. A blend of curiosity mixed with intent, pure purpose, genuine passion and the seriousness of ability in a conversation that will always challenge you to think and then think again. The stakes are always higher with some people when you work, because they raise the bar, by virtue of how they think the picture can be re-crafted to begin with. They bring a new kind of challenge to the work that you do, force you to move outside your comfort box. They help you grow, in immense outspoken, quiet ways.

Close to nine years of working with more than five hundred young people, in the staffing structure of an organization like TYPF that has worked with over five thousand young people over the past nine years, sometimes it is hard to remember each and every contribution made without needing to peer down the books of memory lane.

Yet sometimes, it isn’t hard to remember at all, for people’s presence is marked so clearly by their contributions, their inimitable footprints in the sand.

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Join us for a cocktail reception to meet Ishita Chaudhry and learn more about The YP Foundation’s work and sustaining youth led movements

February 10, 2011
6:30 – 8:00pm
Change.org
1825 K Street, NW, Suite 825
Washington, DC 20006

Suggested Minimum Donation: $25.00

With a core focus on supporting and enabling young people to create programs and influence policy in the areas of gender, sexuality, health, education, the arts, and governance, The YP Foundation’s mission is to promote, protect and advance young people’s human rights in India by building leadership and strengthening youth led initiatives and movements. Founded in 2002 by Ishita Chaudhry at the age of 17, The YP Foundation has worked directly with 5,000 young people over the last 8 years, training them as peer educators for more than 200 projects in India.

The YP Foundation believes in empowering young people’s access to information, services and rights such that they can build collective platforms to challenge and develop their leadership potential and impact positive social change. They empower young people by supporting their work through three key focus areas of awareness and advocacy, community partnerships and programs and communications and skills development.

Please join us to learn more from Ishita Chaudhry about how her organization has reached 300,000 children, adolescents and young people between the ages of 3-28 years and what more can be done to support the largest ever generation of young people.

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Please click here to RSVP for the event and include your first and last name for security purposes.

To donate to the YP Foundation, please click here. ***Be sure to indicate that your gift is in honor of “TYPF-Project 19” in the name field.

Suggested minimum donation is $25.00 to attend the event. Gifts of any size are welcomed and tax-deductible. If you can’t attend, please still consider making an online donation to this important work. Please make checks payable to IWHC and write “TYPF-19” in the memo section of check.

For more information, please contact the event hosts, Melinda Fox and Jennifer Redner at 202-669-7764.