Our COVID-19 programs and how you can help us

Due to COVID-19, we’ve had to move our educational program online and support learning in local communities. We’re setting up three programs to encourage and empower our students in remote villages and tribal communities to continue to be engaged with learning and to not give up.

1. Village-level, Blossom Learning Centers: Equip student leaders to establish learning centers in their communities and help other village youth learn.

2. Digital Access Program: Empower and engage our senior students to stay engaged with learning by providing each student a laptop and modem for internet access.

3. Digital Education Fund: Provide tech support to students, pay stipend to digital curriculum experts and village teachers, and pay for teacher training to transition to online teaching.

Check out the details behind each program below. Please donate generously and set up our students for success in this new mode of learning.

1. Blossom Learning Centers

Due to COVID-19, our current students and alumni organized themselves in their villages and stepped into being tutors/teachers to help the village children learn. Three satellite programs have been started by our students in the villages of Chengara, Nilambur, and Oyur. Nobody asked them to nor provided them with a plan or any resources. They just stepped up. Vaishak, Vishal, Suraj, Harita, Shyam, and Sinu (with other village youth) are leading these remote learning programs. We’re so proud of their compassionate leadership in this time of crisis.

We now have Blossom Chengara, Blossom Nilambur, and Blossom Ayur…and many more to come. You plant a seed and it spreads goodness everywhere!

How can you help these new, budding youth leaders? By donating money towards a Blossom Starter Kit (each kit is $500) consisting of notebooks, writing supplies, whiteboards, books, reading materials, backpacks, and textbooks.

2. Digital Access Program

We want to equip our students who have been historically neglected by the school system and continue to be left out during COVID-19 due to lack of access to internet, TV, or phone. We’re launching a Digital Access Program where our current batch of senior students (Class X and XI) will receive a laptop and internet modem for remote learning. Students will sign an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) for computer use and the program will be set up, monitored, and supported by the team on the ground. Students will join online learning on Google Classroom and Google Meet. We see this a stepping stone for their economic independence and self-sufficiency.

Each laptop and modem will cost us $465. We want to start with 12 students in Phase 1. The total for this Phase 1 is $5580. Please help us set up our first batch of students for success in this new mode of learning.

3. Digital Education Fund

To ramp up from 0 to 100, our students (many of whom don’t own a phone) will need dedicated tech support and training to transition to this mode of learning. We also want to hire a digital curriculum expert to convert our materials into a robust online program/portal for all students. This fund will also be used to cover student teacher training and provide a small stipend to our youth leaders and teachers. We need this fund to cover 12 months of training and support.

We need $11,000 to get our online and remote learning program off the ground and run for 12 months (Aug 2020-2021).