Spark The Rise Round 2 Winners Announced! Voting for Round 3 & Registrations for Round 4 Are Open
Mahindra’s Spark the Rise works as a unique online platform for change-makers across India to connect with one another, collaborate and exchange ideas, procure volunteers and donors, and to compete for monthly grants from the organization. This year’s campaign saw socio-entrepreneurs from all over India share their insight for reinventing the ‘India’ inside India. Here are the top 8 social impact makers:1. Hastashilpi Gurukul: Setting up a Craft Ashram
Hastashilpi Gurukul aims to be a learning and production centre locally to secure livelihood for women & youth in Belda, in Narayangarh Block, West Bengal. They plan to organize trainings in dyeing and product development, skill upgradation, market linkages, and introduce modern technologies over a period of time so that the artisans achieve their desired goal in the Crafts Ashram, our consortium is building. The project that integrates technology, nature and people aims to tap over 400 villages in this region of West Bengal.
2. Mentor Together: Mentoring Destitute Girls and Urban Poor Youth
Mentor Together aims to provide committed, caring and trustworthy volunteer 'mentors' to destitute girls and youth from low-income families. The volunteer mentors take on a 1-year commitment to meet with their mentee 2-3 times a month and correspond with them online as well. Mentors and mentees are given curriculum of activities on English skills, Life skills, Career and Academic planning, which they utilize to structure their meetings. Mentor Together has an online mentoring platform which is used to monitor the relationships through the scheduling of meetings, submission of meeting logs and analytics on meeting frequency. Mentor Together also conducts pre and post program assessments of mentees on different psycho-social indicators like their self-esteem, loneliness, stress levels, mentoring relationship quality. They have been supported by IBM, Starbucks and IIM-B.
3. ERC: Affordable Eye Care Center
Inclusive,affordable,accessible and sustainable eye care for all. ERC aims to provide affordable eye care with its Rs.50 consultation,optical retail starting at Rs.99 and proposed cataract surgery starting at Rs.3500. It plans to expand its hub & spoke model across the region, primarily in underserved regions. In the hub & spoke model,district HQ will have a HUB-an eye center with surgical facilities.Each hub will be connected to 4-5 spoke/satellite centers providing basic eye care in the adjoining rural areas.The satellite centers will be run by optometrists with ophthalmologists supporting them.
They are in the process of opening our second satellite center by November 1st 2012. Their present Jorhat center has been running in this model since June 2012 with the revenue model in place. By January 2013, they expect to have 2 more satellite clinics in place-albeit in the basic model because they are yet to receive any angel funding.
4. Ummeed Child Development Center: Early Childhood Development -Scaling reach
Ummeed Child Development Center, a non-profit organization, works with children who have or are at risk of a developmental disability. In addition to providing direct services in assessment and therapy, Ummeed’s team of child development specialist s reaches out to unreached communities by training and building capacities of NGO’s working with children. The faculty at Ummeed consists of a team of experts including developmental pediatricians, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, autism therapists, speech therapists, special educators and counselors, with several years of clinical and teaching experience. The curricula of the highly innovative training programs have been designed by Ummeed, incorporating best practices and strategies developed at its Clinic. Ummeed endeavours to reach out to a 100,000 children at risk and their families through building capacities of other NGO's to address the issues around early childhood development in their communities.
5. Snehadeep: Computer Training for the differently-abled youth
Snehadeep runs a Free Residential Computer training centre to enable to be independent. It trains 30 students each year facilitating them to learn basic knowledge in Ms office, internet and independent scanning of their study materials. Snehadeep also provide hostel facilities to the 30 students to pursue college education. Snehadeep supports 1235 special children at the high school who are all visually, mentally, hearing impaired and physically handicapped.
6. Meaningful Livelihood for Rural Youth
The initiative involves rural youth through innovative engagement processes (“Yuwa Shaastra”) to provide a platform and stimulus which enables them to be informed, aware, confident, acquire desired skills and inculcate specific employability attributes for getting engaged with a secured and long-term income generating opportunity.
7. Animal Angels: Animals for Human Wellness
Animal Angels Foundation is the first and only registered NGO in India, working for the past nine years towards promoting the mutual health benefits of the human-animal relationship.
They train family pets to be therapy animals who work with therapists to provide emotional comfort / motivation to people in distress. It is managed by a team of pet owners, therapists and volunteers who together work for the goal of animals for human wellness. Started with just a couple of like minded people who believed in the healing power of pets, and now they have over 50 therapy dogs, 100+ volunteers across Mumbai Pune Bangalore.
8. sms4blood Connects Blood Donors & Seekers by SMS
sms4blood is a mobile sms based application for Blood seekers & Blood Donors. The application was developed in keeping view of common man knowledge and easy way to access the mobile sms to find blood donor and blood seeker. No Internet connection is required. Services will be available for all Indian mobile operators users.
Apply here and spark the rise!
