Milaap will not charge any fee on your donation to this campaign.

Join Us In Making Education Accessible And Affordable

Story
Updates (24)

Important update and appeal:

With your help, we are supporting close to 400 students and their families with education kits and food supplies for more than 260 days now. We need your support to continue supporting these children for the year and beyond.

During these unprecedented times, Insight Walk is supporting 400 plus children with education kits. With these kits, our children continue to learn more than 25 skills hands-on while being at home.

As COVID-19 continues to spread, the future has never felt so unpredictable. These are challenging times for us all, and we hope you’re in good spirits and health! ⁣⁣Right now, we’re doing everything possible to support children and their families. Now, more than ever, our community needs us. And we need you.⁣⁣⁣

Impact of COVID-19 and Lockdown on Our Communities⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

Our children come from families who are daily wage earners and agri labourers, meaning they do not own any farming land for themselves. Hence, they are the worst affected during any crisis, be it lockdown, incessant rains, or floods. During such times, they are forced to depend on external help.
This year, due to the lockdown followed by incessant rainfall, community members lost their livelihood for more than 120 days. This meant no money for buying groceries, medicines, and education supplies. It was so horrid that a few parents even had to sell their cattle — something the agri labourers never resort to because cattle ensure a bare minimum income with the milk.

We are tackling the COVID-19 crisis in a two-fold way:

Immediate help: This includes distributing ration supplies, everyday essentials, and education kits and resources
Sustainable help: Setting up an In-house ration model for ending the hunger crisis, setting up a Community Library which will serve as an archive of best farming practices for more schools and for the nearby villages.

The goal is not just to distribute resources and supplies and fix the problem for the short term, but to address the issue at its roots and create a sustainable community-led solution that can be easily replicated, adapted, and implemented in the future during any crises.

How Our Students Are Creating The Impact

1. Supporting community with vegetables

When the families ran out of ration, our children distributed vegetables they had cultivated on their art farm. This includes spinach, fenugreek, tomato, brinjal, turmeric powder, green chilies, coriander, amaranth leaves, spring onion, lemon grass, dill leaves, etc.
This was distributed especially to the elderly people and agri labourers which helped them sustain for at least 2 weeks.

2. Using their skills to support frontline workers, farmers, and community members

When the Community Frontline Health Workers started surveying the households to contain the community transmission of coronavirus, they weren’t given adequate safety gear. During this time our students used their stitching skills to make face masks, hand gloves, and upcycled old plastic to make face shields for these community health workers.
When people started wearing masks, lip-reading got difficult for the hearing impaired. Our kids came up with a solution: A transparent mask and gifted it to the people.
Children also designed a contactless handwashing mechanism using trash and plastic bottles which have been installed at the entrance of the organic farm. After this, many people started replicating it and installed it at their respective houses.
Children also made a portable washing machine to wash masks every day and a portable dryer to dry the masks.

Read more about our work during the pandemic here

“The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.”⁣⁣
⁣⁣
― Ken Robinson⁣⁣

About Insight Walk
Insight Walk Education is a registered non-profit organization based out in rural Kolhapur, Maharashtra. We run an 18-month rural fellowship program for women fellows who work with 40-60 children from the respective village in an after-school intervention program. Our fellows are community women from the same village who go through rigorous training and receive continuous support during their fellowship.

About Solidarity Art Farm Museum Project

What started as a mere organic farming project has now become a museum completely managed by kids from the age group 6-14.⁣

It is a space where children learn journalism, community research, documentation, photography, organic farming, miniature art, innovate from trash, make organic colors from flowers and plants, use paintings, illustrations, block-printing, hand embroidery, poems, storytelling, etc to document their community and much more.⁣

⁣

Watch our work in action:

1. Charka from trash to display and document the process of cultivating organic turmeric

2. Several farmers from the nearby villages visited our museum and asked kids about how they managed to grow turmeric without any chemical fertilizers.⁣
⁣
3. Kids from our arts lab at Golivane vasat in Bhendavade village of Kolhapur district converted their painting to a farm. ⁣⁣⁣

4. A robot that sketches circles for children.

5. Vacuum cleaner using trash

If you wish to know more about our journey please check here. To know more, please contact us at info@insightwalk.org and we will be happy to discuss further.

Note: Donations to Insight Walk benefit tax exemption.

Details for direct bank transfer / UPI payments

Bank Account details: Click here

Ask for an update

14th January 2021

Dear Supporters,

Thank you for the support

While redefining the education system and making it more accessible, it’s important to consider the vectors of gender inequality and how economic systems are built on it.

Farming compromises over 70% women and yet they go unnoticed. Our students have been documenting the lives of community farmers and agricultural laborer's for over a year through multiple artforms. They made paintings, bookmarks, hand-embroidery, quilling, and much more to depict the lives of women farmers.

As per Oxfam’s time to care report, “The monetary value of unpaid care work globally for women aged 15 and over is at least $10.8 trillion annually –three times the size of the world’s tech industry.

Meanwhile, at the bottom of the economy, women and girls, especially women and girls living in poverty and from marginalized groups, are putting in 12.5 billion hours every day of care work for free, and countless more for poverty wages.”

If you look around, you will find how several unequal vectors are normalized, and policies end up neglecting these factors. Students from our community centers spend a lot of time on field observing their village and surroundings and analyze what’s wrong with the societal structures.

Campaign link to contribute:
https://milaap.org/fundraisers/support-insight-walk-education-1

These artworks are an attempt to blend arts, economics, sociology, community development with action-based research that can inspire and help in solving the problem.

5th January 2021

Hello everyone,

Hope you are doing well.
Here’s how our kids helped and inspired hundreds of people in 2020. This wouldn’t have been possible without your support.

Thank you for your consistent support❤️

Happy New Year ❤️❤️

Campaign link to contribute:
https://milaap.org/fundraisers/support-insight-walk-education-1

29th December 2020

Thank you for the support so far

In their 2020 Hope Edition, Mid-day covered how our open-air Solidarity Art Farm Museum proved to be a game-changer during the classroom-disruptive pandemic.

During the lockdown, our children (6-14 age group) learned how to make cloth masks and face shields from upcycled scraps and plastic bottles for healthcare workers, and pulley-run hand sanitizers. They even made motorized vegetable cutters, hand blenders, floor cleaners, portable washing machines, and dryers, out of trash.

"They turned into innovators, farmers, problem-solvers. Why wait for a crisis when you can make local learning part of your everyday living?"

Campaign link to donate:
https://milaap.org/fundraisers/support-insight-walk-education-1

https://www.mid-day.com/articles/making-lockdown-innovators/23164207