Bake sale

What is social work? 

                For me, Social work is about giving back to society and helping others. In the past few months, I have kept myself engaged in social work by conducting bake sales during festivals and using the funds raised to feed stray dogs.

 I also started working with an organization called 'TribesforGood', wherein 100 students like me in a batch were divided into different educational groups. I was a part of the community library group. Alongwith the issue of educational inequity for the underprivileged, our group focused on the lack of community libraries. Our team decided to make a virtual library. We worked with PRATYeK with Students of grade 8/9, about 6-7 students each class. We Conducted storytelling sessions with them to understand their fields of interest as well as their level of understanding and the difficulty of books that would be suited for them. There were around 3 sessions per week and each session was about an hour long. For the first five minutes we interacted with the students and once we were comfortable with each other we introduced the topic through videos and ppts that we had made.

Importance of libraries and why is it worth working on them?

       The shortage of libraries in India is a serious problem because reading improves concentration and helps students gain more knowledge about the world around them. They can gain awareness of important social issues. Increasing the number of libraries would not only improve the total number but also provide better opportunities for people to gain knowledge

We decided to target younger students through storytelling sessions because stories are an engaging way to help them decide and figure out what topic interests them and what doesn't. This could help them in the future while choosing a stream as well, and also give us a better idea of which and  what sort of books to have in our library.

Types of books we included in our virtual library:

• Academic Books (both related and unrelated to regular school syllabus)
• Story Books
• History
• Mythology
• Fiction
• Marine Biology
• Encyclopedias
• Astronomy
• National Geographic
• Classics(Oliver twist, black beauty, Huckleberry Finn, Jane Austen)

We graduated on January 15, all the teams had to prepare a presentation and present it in front of a panel for the final time, it was a lot of fun to see diverse ideas and to know about different projects that each team worked on

Overall the feeling of achieving something and using it for the betterment of society gives a feeling that's unexplainable. I have learned a lot from these past few months, I learned to cooperate and work in a team together, manage my time better, and got greater exposure to the severity of lack of education, I figured out places where I'm strong, and where my skills could help the society. I hope I can give back more to society in the upcoming weeks