INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCE OF WASTE PICKERS

The International Alliance of Waste Pickers is a union of waste picker organizations representing more than 460,000 workers across 34 countries
Supported by Logo WIEGO

Posted by
Written by Chintan

Region

Country India

February 20, 2015


12/05/2014

Bhopura youth times pic

Chintan is proud to present the Bhopura Youth Times- a newsletter put together by the wastepicker youth at Bhopura, Tila Mod, Mangal Bazaar Ghazaiabad, an area which is home to a large waste picking community. The youth talk about their everyday life, their problems, their little joys and their celebrations. To connect young people to each other, their communities and adult role models, Chintan has mentored associated youth to bring out their very own newsletter.

Chintan’s No Child in Trash programme started a pilot project with waste picker youth ages 14-24 years at Bhopura with an intention to provide essential life skills and employability skills training to young people from the waste-picker community. The training comprises of essential skill strategies and techniques as problem solving, critical thinking, effective communication skills, decision-making, creative thinking, interpersonal relationship skills, self-awareness building skills, empathy, and coping with stress and emotions. These were aimed at empowering young people to take positive action to protect them and promote health and positive social relationships.

Chintan started the No Child in Trash program in 2003 with a purpose of enabling wastepicker children to move from dumpsites to schools. In a nutshell, Chintan identifies waste picking children (4-14 years age group) in an area, holds bridge classes, incentivizes children to attend these, and then finally, helps children to move to mainstream education. To prevent the mainstreamed children from dropping out due to academic pressure, they are provided supplementary education based upon NCERT curriculum in our support study classes. In order to do this, we use the learning centres as sites to prepare the children and their families, where these exist, for a formal education in multiple ways: pedagogically, emotionally and through legal processes.