The Ramakrishna Mission, as is widely known, was founded almost a century ago as a non-sectarian spiritual organisation. Today, in addition to its spiritual activities around the world, the Mission is devoted to a range of social work in the fields of education, healthcare, relief and rehabilitation and rural development.
In rural and tribal areas across India, for instance, the Mission helps set up agricultural infrastructure, provides seeds, fertilisers and renewable energy, and runs vocational skill-building courses. It also runs 14 hospitals and 116 dispensaries, organises regular medical camps for the needy and provides maternal and child welfare services.
On the education front, the Mission provides scholarships to deserving students and runs over 1,200 institutions, including a university, several colleges, training centres and schools. In 2014, the Mission’s Delhi branch founded the Awakened Citizen’s Programme, a three-year graded value education programme that has been introduced in more than 5,700 secondary schools across India so far. The programme is designed in the form of open discussions that enable children to open their minds, consider the consequences of various life choices, and recognise their own potential.
The project supported by MFE:
The Awakened Citizens Programme
This three-year project focuses specifically on streamlining and continuing Ramakrishna Mission’s Awakened Citizen’s Programme, and introducing it in at least 300 new schools – with 6 lakh new students from Classes 6 to 8 – across the country. The Programme currently has 57,000 trained teachers; the Mission aims to train 10,000 more teachers by as a part of this project.
To implement and monitor the success of this roll out, the Mission will make at least 2,600 school visits and 5,000 class observations. It aims to track 1,500 graduating students to ensure that they continue to engage with what they learnt in the ACP course and feel inspired to become youth leaders in their communities. Accordingly, the Mission will capture 100 transformational case studies of successful students.
It also aims to create a special “bridge course” for Class 6 students joining 600 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas across the country, to prepare them to delve deeply into the ACP course in Class 7.
Another objective of the project is to build a community of 75 value educators from among the trained ACP teachers. Finally, the project will launch a new course – the Awakened Ambassadors for Community Transformation – for students who have completed the three-year ACP programme. The Mission has committed to training at least 300 such ambassadors by the end of the project period.