Having worked with over 5500 children in the past 3 years, we, at Saturday Art Class understand where they come from, their familial backgrounds and the environments in which they live. Thus, we have decided to use our understanding, reach and network to help this sector of society/ our students and their communities with Relief through essentials for their daily survival. Additionally, while our first priority will be to cater to the essentials such as food supplies, our efforts will go beyond this, to work on Recovery by designing and implementing a Social Emotional Well-being curriculum for children as well as adults

As an organisation whose roots are in Social Emotional Learning, we want our impact to go beyond just Relief. We want to work on Recovery through designing, developing and conducting well being based curriculum to help communities out of the sustained trauma caused by the constant negativity and loss of jobs, lack of income, domestic abuse and violence, lack of daily essentials such as food etc caused during the pandemic.

Why is Recovery crucial?

The ambiguity of the situation : Given that the number of people infected by the virus is increasing exponentially, it is hard to imagine a life without lockdown. It has become a permanent cause of worry especially considering the fact that work has stopped for many people. This constant state of stress calls for each one of us to look within for mental care 

Lack of Safe Space to Express : Children are physically confined in small spaces for extended periods. In addition, they are witnessing & dealing with hardships. It is understandable that these may cause behavioural issues as a result of not being able to express freely and safely resulting in the inability to fulfill their social-emotional needs.

Regular school time table has been disrupted : Schools are shut indefinitely. Given that there is a dearth of basic necessities in low income communities, education currently is a low priority. Children are unable to learn lessons at home due to these issues coupled with lack of technological aid and internet bandwidth issues. 

What RECOVERY work have we done already ?

The global pandemic and the consequential lockdown, made us realise the importance of taking steps towards helping the emotional well-being of children and adults. We have already set in motion certain partnerships and collaborations as a step to make way for a larger idea that could potentially enable us to impact lives at scale. 

Kshmata x Saturday Art Class : We collaborated with Kshmata, an NGO that works to reintegrate exploited survivors as dignified, positive and productive participants of the society, to conduct virtual classes with teenage girls in one of their centres. The lessons were conducted by trained Saturday Art Class Coaches (our part time teachers) and were based on social emotional learning through ART. The approach adopted by our coaches for these virtual lessons was to build a rapport with the girls in the first few virtual sessions and then build on that to provide them with a safe space to express their feelings related to various circumstances through different simulations.