Note From President Shernaz Vakil
RCB AND EXPANDING MINDS
Last week we had a meeting with the NGO Save The Children, introduced to us by our DGE Sandip Agarwalla.
Once again, we are looking at an opportunity to support children in our communities who have remained unschooled and, in many cases, forgotten.
We are hopeful that this initiative will be the beginning of a longterm programme to support and provide opportunities to children of all ages of the Vaidu community that we are presently trying to uplift.
Twelve years ago, an eager group of Rotarians inspired by PP Ramesh Narayan’s vision started an initiative called Bhavishya Yaan that empowers municipal school-going children to learn English and computer and life skills. Later, we started Lighthouse for the children of Machimaar Nagar.
Our focus on giving these unserved children an opportunity to see a better life and to move out of their narrow backgrounds into a more and more expansive world will pay great dividends for the future.
We, at the Rotary Club of Bombay, recognise the challenges posed by the digital world, and propose to support a platform for education, skill development, and entrepreneurship to meet these challenges. We are creating a science and technology ecosystem for a thousand students in the rural areas, presently on a virtual format.
In the past several years, we have seen so many initiatives started by so many caring organisations, that I believe our country will move out of some of the darkness we see today, into a much brighter future. Educating, inspiring, and opening up the minds of the young will be the only way to bring India to the forefront.
Whether we support by giving tablets or setting up highly sophisticated robotic laboratories (as we are presently planning today), we will be expanding minds and providing opportunities to grow.
I now realise that no initiative that we sustain and support in the field of education will ever go wasted… Just watching these young minds soak up everything that we introduce to them brings so much joy to their world and ours!
These will be the projects that we, as Rotarians, will be most proud of in the future, as they will create the most lasting difference.
— President Shernaz Vakil