Asha for Education

Project Brief: Khushboo Welfare Society- A center for children with mental and multiple disabilities, provides special education, vocational training, therapeutic assistance, and early intervention programs.
Project Type: Children with Disabilities (description)
Primary Focus: children with disabilities (description)

Secondary Focus: vocational training

Area: Urban
Supporting Chapter Contact:
Austin

Status: CLOSED - COMPLETED
Project Steward: Rangakrishnan Srinivasan
Project Partner(s): Rakesh Jhinsi
Project Address: Khushboo Welfare Society
Sector 10A
Near Lions Public School
Gurgaon, Haryana 122001
Tel: 91-9910063867
Stewarding Chapter: Austin

Khushboo Welfare Society has four main divisions : Sparsh (early intervention program for children from 0-6 years), Blessings (the school for children from 6-15 years), Samarth (vocational training program for adolescents and adults from 15-30+ years), and Samvedan (for children with profound disabilities). Currently, they have a student: teacher ratio of 10: 1 with an assistant in a classroom for mixed group of children with different disabilities. Further, the ratio is 5: 1 for children with severe and profound mental disabilities with a committed attendant for looking after feeding and toilet needs of children with disabilities. The teachers have degrees/diploma/training in special education, and have years of experience.
Khushboo Welfare Society recently underwent a significant infrastructure expansion, that lead to addition of more classrooms for therapy and arts. Their new initiatives program include imparting lessons in arts, music, dance, yoga and computers, while integrating therapy into the main school curriculum. Therapy includes occupational therapy, speech therapy, physiotherapy and clay therapy. It is seen that the children enjoy all of these new activities which are highly therapeutic in nature. This year, Khushboo plans to open a state-of-the-art Audiometry lab.
Khushboo also works closely with the leading hospitals in the Gurgaon region to provide their beneficiaries access to health care.They have helped obtain the health insurance and disability certificate for most of their beneficiaries. They conduct medical camps regularly on their campus for their students.They are also engaged in community based rehabilitation programs, for children with multiple disabilities in communities who do not have accessibility to the direct services of Khushboo.
Asha-Austin supports ~70% of the salaries associated with these new initiatives staff, and is about ~10% of Khushboo’s operational needs. Asha-Austin, knowing as to how important, it is for an organization to retain its dedicated staff, especially teachers, decided to fund this project towards remuneration of salaries.