Child Rights Training and Resource Centre

Over the past decade of working with children in Bhavnagar, Shaishav has developed expertise in the areas of child rights, particularly children’s participation as well as education, and skill development. We are experiencing an increasing demand for our competence in these fields and would like to share more extensively with other actors both nationally and internationally. This is the rationale behind our intention of setting up a Child Rights Training and Resource Centre in Bhavnagar. The Centre will have the following functions:

Material Development

Shaishav has accumulated a wealth of resources for children and related to children. These include books, pamphlets, audio-visual material, teaching-learning materials and activities. These resources will be catalogued in manual format and systematically produced at the centre to make it available at low cost to children and organisations involved in similar work.

Trainings

Children who are actively and regularly participating in our programmes are given intensive training in topics such as child rights, life skills, leadership development and teambuilding through games, role-playing, stories, songs, films and group discussions exercises etc. We are also giving training in methodology and skill development to municipal and private school teachers in collaboration with the Education Department. Such trainings will be conducted regularly at the campus. To involve more local people into our programmes, the centre will provide a training programme for parents and the Lokshikshaks who teach in the communities. The centre will also conduct trainings for organisations and other members of society on various aspects of child rights.

Child Centred Space

The centre will serve as a child-friendly ‘home base’ open to all children, not only those enrolled in the programmes. The  centre will include a Children's University with ongoing courses and educational activities. The centre will provide a campus to conduct children’s meetings, educational theme fairs and camps in conjunction with Shaishav’s various educational programs.  It will also serve as a meeting space for parents, teachers, volunteers and interested community-members as well as other organisations working with child rights who want to conduct seminars and make use of the centre’s various resources.

Communications

At present children in Balsena publish a newsletter/update at their team level, but to spread it at the collective level to reach out to all the children in Balsena, we will encourage the children to have their own monthly Bulletin Board. We will initiate this in such a way that the children themselves play an active role in producing it and facilitation will be provided at the campus. We will also encourage the children to make a publication which covers general news and events from children's perspective. Moreover, the centre will publish a periodic newsletter to update stakeholders and the society at large on Shaishav’s ongoing work.

Action Research

The Centre will conduct action research on various child rights and field related topics. The research will support current child centred programmes run both by Shaishav and other organisations. The research findings will be used as guidelines for implementation of the programmes so the impact can be more effective.

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