Holistic Development for children in shelter homes and orphanages

Muskurahat's flagship program, Project KEYtaab works on the holistic development of a

child, right from childhood to adulthood.
Currently in 11 shelters across 3 cities expanding to 20 shelters across 7 cities by end of the
year 2
 Social
Academic Career
Emotional
Support Incubation
Learning

3
SEL from the initial growing age gives a child a better understanding of themself, helps form
positive interpersonal relationships and shapes the way a child grows up to view the world
around them. Our SEL model covers our two pillars:
Our own values were inculcated We have identified 9 core life
into us through our parents,
skills essential for an individual
family and our immediate
surroundings. This shaped our in the 21st century. These skills
personality, perspective and such as critical thinking, decision
created the foundation of our making, resilience; helps build
fundamental sense of right and
wrong. This aspect of project higher order thinking in the child
KEYtaab works on introducing and guides his/her actions and
formative values and its positive the ability to make informed
reinforcement to enable the child decisions.
to inculcate them.
4
Our curriculum follows an experiential learning approach where every concept is broken
down to its inherent value and taught in a way that facilitates learning by doing and thinking
for themselves.
Primary Elements:
• Social-Emotional Learning: Continuous essential 21st century life skills such as Critical
Thinking, Resilience, Communication, Decision making, etc with the underlying
inculcating values (upbringing) that develops personal ethics, supporting informed
decision making
• Academic Support: Changing the approach of learning by rote to learning by doing and
understanding concepts in a way that helps develop a child’s perspective on gaining
knowledge over passing an exam.
5
• Mental Health: For any intervention or behaviour change to be effective, a healthy mind
is essential. Due to the nature of our consistent and regular intervention, our people on
the ground are trained and equipped to identify indicators of potential mental health
disorders that a child maybe growing through. This is followed with an expert counsellor
intervention who works with the child to remedy it. This holds especially crucial for us
owing to the background of our children who are orphans or come from unconventional
families and have dealt with and/or are living with traumas.
In order to ensure effective learning and keeping the child at the centre of everything we do,
the following elements are developed and implemented:
• Safe Space Protocol: Ensuring the physical and emotional security of the children
throughout the entire intervention and beyond just the curriculum intervention. Each
team member of Muskurahat is trained in establishing and maintaining the safe space to
ensure consistency in building the safe space.
• Value System: Part of social-emotional learning, values are what we inculcate from our
family as upbringing. This is largely absent in children from shelter homes who grow up
without a family structure. We focus on inculcating these values such as respect,
accountability, diligence, etc. as part of our sessions, using reiterations and positive
reinforcements to help children imbibe and practice these values.
7
 • Bloomers Programme
A S
• Basic schooling of values aimed to realign the child with his/her
5 - 10 years development stage C A
A F
• KEYtaab Basic D E
• Entry level intervention of social emotional learning, focussed on E
10 – 13 years inculcating the skills and values
M S
I P
• KEYtaab Advanced
• Advanced intervention of social emotional learning, focussed on C A
14 – 18 years application of skills and values S C
E
Our program is backed by a robust M&E system that regularly
gauges the indicators on each of our program’s parameters.
The M&E framework includes:
• Experiential assessments to ensure the child doesn’t feel the
fear of assessment and can exhibit his/her knowledge freely
• The data is gathered from multiple data sources including an
external assessment council so that at any given point data
can be triangulated to ensure elimination of bias and accuracy
• Due to the continuous nature of the program, data is being
gathered regularly to assess, improve and course correct in
real time.
9
 Rigorous mapping of impact through indicators across all levels of intervention
• Absent or lack of self-identity
• Low social interactions
• Poor basic literacy and numeracy skills
• Unable to process and express their
thoughts
• Often distracted and unable to
concentrate on tasks
• Tendencies towards disruptive
behavior
• Distrusting and fearful
• Starts realizing self- worth
• Participates in social interactions
• Develops critical thinking, problem
solving, decision making, creativity
• Starts managing emotions, stress,
anger, behavior
• Better literacy and numeracy skills
• Has clear set of values and ethics
• Becomes compassionate towards
others
• Active citizenship (contributes to the
greater good)
• Able to overcome obstacles
• Higher order of thinking
10
• To facilitate efficient monitoring of our program, we have developed an in-house portal
to gather data in real-time from our team on the ground.
• This helps us to keep an oversight of the program and at the same time analyse data
effectively and consequently improve upon the learnings.
• E.g. The children are assessed on the values they exhibit in each session. The facilitator
marks the child on a rubric, the portal generates reports in real time to gauge which child
is lacking in a certain value. This facilitates the program team to have meaningful
conversation with the facilitator in how to help the child to do better.

11
 “ “
The Sunday sessions are very fun and I
learn many things every Sunday. I
eagerly wait for them to come to our
shelter home every Sunday. Once they
taught us to design our own plane. Me
and my friends made a plane which can
land on water and land both. It was fun
making our own plane model and
presenting it to everyone.
- Prem
Age 12, Standard 8th
(Student - Snehasadan, Chakala)
The activity of planting the seeds was
fun. Bhaiya and didi got us mitti , khad,
pots and seed and all of us planted
seeds of marigold and sunflower. My
bhaiya told me to take care of it and
water it daily till the flower comes into it.
I really loved taking care of it. I also
learned different types of plants and
there uses. It also helped me in my
school.
- Sagar
Age 9, Standard 6th
(Student - Shelter Don Bosco, Wadala)
12
14