The
Akshara Programme seeks to break a cycle of poverty by providing comprehensive educational and emotional support
to village children, with a goal mentoring each participant through to an initial professional or vocational placement, tailored
to the individual in question and his or her capabilities. The Programme has
been operating for more than four years, and has shown significant success.
It
is comprehensive in its mechanisms, understanding that addressing motivation, psychology, family dynamics, physical needs,
transportation, and nutrition can be just as crucial to achieving the desired result as improving curriculum and pedagogy.
It
seeks to reinforce existing institutions rather than supplant them, to enrich local schools rather than replace them, and
relies on integrating itself with families and communities and offering guided options rather than imposing them from outside.
The
Programme furthers Winterline Foundation's mission of "education for global citizenship" by extending educational opportunities
to some of the most humble and disadvantaged members of the global community in a way that reinforces their inherent dignity,
confronts the real-world challenges of translating education into opportunity in a South Asian village setting, and produces
individuals equipped to be contributing "citizens of the world" as that concept is understood in their immediate context.
The Foundation's governing body has established the Akshara
Fund as a restricted fund into which contributions designated for Akshara are placed and from which grants in support of the
program are made. We gratefully accept outside contributions designated
for the Akshara Fund.
