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.

For almost a decade, The YP Foundation has been striving to help the youth community in numerous ways. Their determination to help and guide under-privileged children and young adults in context to health, education and development of the community as a whole has seen many success stories emerge where few were possible.

This year, I found myself part of this amazing project, helping their cause by raising money and volunteering to run in the Great Delhi Run. This was, needless to say, a very new and different experience for me. While collecting donations I found that it really isn’t difficult to get support from people around you as long as the cause is ‘worthwhile’. And I strongly feel that every cause, no matter what, is worthwhile as long as it helps someone even if it’s just ‘one’. It also made me realize just how many people need help and just how many people are willing to offer help.

Just a thought: At this moment there are close to 6470818671 people in the world, Some are running around scared, some are coming home, some tell lies to make it through the day, some just choose not to face the truth, some are evil and at war with the good while some are struggling against evil. Six billion people in this world, six billion souls and sometimes all you need is, one person trying to make a change.

What I learnt form my personal experience while raising money for the cause was that no matter how small or big the donation, it’s the thought behind it that really counts and at the end of the day passionate people make a difference.

Aarti Susan Mathew
Administrative Branch

Hello everyone! I am Monica and I work as a volunteer with the Administrative branch at The YP Foundation. Over 150 volunteers at The YP Foundation are raising funds and running in the Great Delhi Run on 21st Nov to show support for the causes that TYPF works for; imparting education and life-skills to urban slum children, HIV/AIDS, gender and sexuality, arts, governance, film-making and RTI. I am one of them.

I began my fundraising efforts and registered for the Concern India marathon on 28th of September.

MY GOAL: 20,000 rupees

Fundraising for the marathon at first seemed like a daunting task as I set such a high goal for myself. I played safe at first and started with my family members. Their support and contributions of 7,500 is what got me to believing that I could actually reach my target. I then broadened my view to my neighbors and college friends and am now comfortably close to my goal. I want to share an incident that truly touched my heart and in fact inspired me to work for a cause, that has always been very close to my heart.

One Tuesday morning I was talking to a few friends outside college about how The YP Foundation works for underprivileged children by educating them about life skills and helps them with academics when a 12 year old girl interrupted me to ask me “kya aap in paison se hum jaise bachon to padhai karate ho?” I thought it was cute and I smiled and nodded in affirmation to which she very dedicatedly said, “mera naam Meghna hai, main bapu dham basti mein rehti hun, mein bhi appke kaam ke liye dus rupeeye dena chahti hun.” This moment not only changed the way I looked at raising funds for The YP Foundation but also gave me a whole new perspective about donations. I was moved by the generous and kind thought of the girl who donated her money to a complete stranger based only on a promise and hope in an endeavor to help other children just like her own self.

It led me to ask myself a simple question, which now, I would like all of you, reading this blog to ask yourselves-’if that little girl, with no idea of how this world functions, who’s family struggles everyday for survival, could dare to dream, is it not our duty to make every possible effort to make her dream come true?”

Monica Gupta
Administrative Branch

Besides the insanity that’s taken over (someone should really put up some of the e-mails circulating within staff, the not-so-inappropriate ones), and the fact that the concert is 3 minutes before the exams start, YAY! And we finally have a website to publicize it on! Hee hee ..

As for V.O.I.C.E.S., we’re the School Project of the YP Foundation. We go into schools across the NCR and conduct FUN (yes, they’re fun!), interactive, facilitative Life Skills workshops on pre-identified themes (such as Peer Influence, Substance Use, Body Esteem, etc.). The idea being, to create a non-judgmental, open and interactive space for teenagers to discuss anything and everything (well, almost) pertinent to their lives. Our 10-year World Peace Goal? (Or World Peach Goal, as Maitreyi likes to put it). That School Students are able to effectively deal with the challenges of every day life.

After what feels like 45 years of research, we’ve finally arrived at a 3-part workshop model, which hopefully can be adapted and used as the VOICES model for some years to come. Ooh and, we’ve finally printed our Manual! YAY!!

And we have an awesome team of 13 people from colleges around Delhi, that all worked on the Manual BTW! Besides this, we’re looking at working with some other organizations, as well as using different mediums (besides the conventional workshop model) to engage with schools whilst the team is in and out for exams in December and January.

We’re at the 6th of December (haha, the delusional idea I had of starting studying on the 1st), and everything looks awesome! We’re pretty much sold out, which is always a good thing. And I’m sure it’s going to go off great! Really looking forward to it

Just read Angarika’s post and clearly the team has been working oh-so-hard and are pretty much losing their minds

AND finally we are doing a fundraiser! Its so cool to think that we will have a concert and actually walk away with some money as opposed to having no money to pay the band,printers etc and dealing with the repercussions next year.

Also I just read Ila’s post and now i’m under pressure to write a decent and ENTHUSIASTIC blog. I really didn’t know this could be so stressful! {smirk}

The website is UP and its so so so cool. I can actually say the sentence- “why don’t you go look at our WEBSITE, all the information you need is up there”!! all hail Gaurav Vaz and everyone else who worked on it!

As for blending spectrum we have our lesson plans for December and Jan ready and have also come up with health care lesson plans which will hopefully be approved SOON. We are hopefully going to paint sarai. YES. ACTUALLY PAINT THE ENTIRE PLACE. and everyone on staff is invited to get down and dirty with us and the kids.   (still have to talk to Aman Biradari though). Blending spectrum is also working on the Nutrition challenge which is driving Pattie and Chandini up the wall! ALSO WE HAVE NEW VOLUNTEERS! whoopee! Volunteers and money make people in the YP very very happy.

So all in all i’m really excited about the event!The performers and the MONEY that we will hopefully make!! I am sure it will be really awesome! looking forward to it!

There are 15 days to go for the first fundraiser we have ever put together and what a way to start! Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons on their first trip to India!

It will be a show like no other and what better way to do it than to support the young kids of Delhi actually doing something about things they are passionate about!

We are hard at work putting the whole thing together, we just hope you guys have marked your calendars and will turn up on the 10th of December with all your friends and support our cause when you go out and have fun!