Monday, July 9, 2007

The exhibition is over and was quite a success. All of us loved working for it. But now we are a little stuck!! It is difficult to sustain the exhibition model as these street children/adults need a regular /everyday source of money. I have realized that before working on any other issue with these children, it is important to work on their income generation.

As part of that effort, we are trying to market the stuff that these boys are making. One of the items that we are making are shopping bags made of discarded and new clothes. As a marketing step, we are requesting different grocery stores in Chandigarh to keep these cloth bags at the check-out counter and give an option to the customer to buy these reusable bag (at a nominal cost of Rs 10) or use plastic. At the same time, we are also doing a drive against the use of plastic. Here is the picture of the bag that we are making-

The message on the bag is - "one less plastic bag for the environment,

one more alternative for the street children"


We are also making other items like environment friendly File Folders (perfect for use in a workshop), Jewellary, handbags, penstand etc. All these items are made mostly using waste material. Please see the pictures of some of the items in the blog entry below -
If you are interested in marketing any of these items, please write to me and I can send you the soft copy of our catalogue.
Please note that all the proceeds from the sale of these products directly go to these children.

4 comments:

Shveta Puri said...

amazing, thank you!

Shveta Puri said...

i would love to help with curriculum if i can do so from so far away, please let me know!

Shalu said...

Hey Liza, I'd like to try to market your curriculum. Please, email the soft copy.
Great job! I think, one of the most important things', which you have instilled in these kids is - self confidence and an awareness, that they have the capability to do other things as well :)

Gagan (Liza) Chawla said...

Shveta,

Thanks for your offer on helping out with the curriculum. It would be great if you would like to try out.

Basically, we want something for the kids in the age range of 8 to 14 years...they have never been to school so the curriculum has to include ways of increasing their focus and concenteration, enhance their imagination, co-operative games and include basic numeracy and literacy (mainly hindi and english).

BTW, do you know hindi?? Let me know if you up for it and we can discuss more.

love,
Liza