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2 Mechanical Engineers creating an equal India for disabled through their Dance Festival now wants to build a dance school for Deaf & Visually Impaired.
Smileys India is a non-profit organization based in Bangalore, started by Vishal & Vishnu Soman from Kerala. Smileys runs Tandav, India’s only inclusive dance festival - that exposes persons with and without disability to dance in an inclusive atmosphere. Through Tandav we were successful in introducing the concept of inclusive volunteering (where none is beneficiary but everyone is equal) to 3000+ people in Bangalore and 600+ people in Delhi. This has paved way to inclusion of persons with disability in mainstream society.
IMPACT
Tandav is more than a dance festival as we saw birth of many more inclusive initiatives and leaders out of Tandav.
- Attam an inclusive dance troupe was formed by volunteers with disability.
- We maintain an inclusive dance community with Enable India’s community initiatives.
- Our partner organization, Enable India created an inclusive community for Deaf called Fingerchats at Tandav and later it spread to 5 cities across India.
- More than 10 volunteers who were coordinators of Tandav has started their own volunteer groups taking inspiration from Smileys.
- We have 5 volunteer leaders with disability grown out of Tandav who are creating awareness through dance.
- We have introduced 500+ volunteers actively into disability sector.
OUR AIM IS TO BUILD AN INDOOR DANCE SCHOOL FOR DEAF & VISUALLY IMPAIRED ASPIRERS.
This crowdfunding campaign is set to raise 5,000,00 INR to build dance school for Deaf and Visually Impaired aspirers. This will give us an opportunity to bring together people who are passionate about Dance and in that process create inclusion in our country.
Evolved out of our inclusive dance classes at Cubbon Park, our Dance School named THAALAM (Means Ryhtm in Tamil) is aiming at creating an inclusive dance space and two staff to manage the same.
In below video you can see our volunteer dance teacher newton teaching Bhangra to Visually Impaired!!
One Staff for fundraising for all our inclusive dance projects and another person to manage the various projects. Various inclusive dance projects under Smileys are
- Tandav Dance festival,
- Tandav Fight dance classes in NGOs,
- Attam Inclusive dance troupe,
- Thaalam Dance School for Deaf and Visually Impaired.
- TacMuc – A wearable for Deaf to feel music (Pilot stage)
OUR UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION
We at Smileys use volunteer dance facilitators to teach dance. This give opportunity to have persons without disability to understand and respect dancers with disability. Using this support of volunteers and with the help of two staff managing them we aim at clocking manpower of 10 staff a month. We are constantly evolving our techniques of inclusion and process based on technology and the feedback we get from our partner organizations which work for livelihood of persons with disability. We are always looking to make our projects more cost effective and innovative so as to make it a positive platform to make inclusion a part of anyones life so that next generation persons with disability will be empowered at younger ages As per the Ministry of Statistics and Programme implementation of Government of India 2.21% of Indians have disability and it is supposed to be increased in next couple of years.
COST BREAKUP - WHAT WE NEED
See Table below that outlines the cost breakup of 500000 INR
Requirement | Cost |
Rental of infra structure for an year | 10 x 12 months = 1,20,000 |
Salary for Project Coordinator | 10k x 12 months = 1,00,000 |
Salary for Fundraiser | 10k x 12 months = 1,00,000 |
Inclusive audio setup for Deaf | 75,000 |
Speakers and music system (JBL) | 45,000 |
Infrastructure Accessibility | 40,000 |
Admin Charges | 20,000 |
Media
Multiple media had reached to us in last 3.5 years to know more about us. We are mentioning few of them here.
