Sarthak Yellow Rooms
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Sarthak Yellow Rooms (community based intervention)
“Yellow Rooms are the heart of our work. Situated right in the middle of the community, the Yellow Rooms work for years and become engines of transformation. We think that Yellow Rooms are magic.”
For more than a decade, Sarthak Foundation has been running an intensive, in-depth and long term intervention in the poorest urban slums of UP. We establish permanent safe spaces called Yellow Rooms in the heart of urban slums and rural poor communities. Each Yellow Rooms setup comprises two rooms painted bright yellow. We place two permanent Educators there who spend 6 hours each, every day, all year round, for years in the Yellow Rooms. The aim of this immersive project is to turn children from very marginalised backgrounds into complete and well rounded human beings by taking education, financial empowerment, emotional and physical wellness to their doorsteps.
We serve children between the ages of 3 and 21. While working with children from very marginalised backgrounds we realised that any touch-and-go intervention will have a very limited, if any, impact on the lives of children whose issues go much beyond ‘education’ and include substance abuse, hygiene and health issues, sexual and physical abuse and emotional and mental health issues. This is why we imagined our Yellow Rooms as not just centres where a child could go to get a free class but as permanent safe spaces right in the middle of their slum communities.
Sarthak Yellow Rooms are completely free of cost for the children and the community. We use physical instruction as well as digital aid (through Smart Boards/TVs) to run classes for school subjects (Mathematics, Science, Languages), and also put equal stress on Social Emotional Learning. Our SEPEt (Social Emotional, Physical and Ethical) curriculum covers topics on values, etiquette and manners, gender awareness and gender equality, health and hygiene, solving community issues, industry exposure, nutrition, general knowledge, animal welfare, communication and etiquette. We provide nutrition in the form of regular fruits and other healthy food items. In addition we provide uniforms, stationery, clean drinking water and other school essentials to our children. We also form committees of children to manage community issues and take care of animals.
A child, who spends 3 hours each day, 6 days a week, all year round for 10 to 15 years in a Sarthak Yellow Rooms, will display dramatic changes in her personality. We use digital tools, arts and crafts, yoga, talks by inspirational people, soft skill sessions, ‘why’ sessions, general knowledge sessions, happiness workshops, gratitude workshops, indoor and outdoor games, dance, children counselling, parents counselling and many other such tools to bring about a deep impact on the children.
When we start a new Yellow Rooms, almost half the children in the community are not going to school. We start by getting these kids to the Yellow Rooms and over the years we ensure that almost 100% of the children in the community attend formal schools. Under Sarthak School Inclusion Scholarship we raise funds to get the brighter children, specially girls, admitted to better private schools. We also fund their college education for them to become empowered. Under the Sarthak Empower Program, we provide digital and vocational skilling to older children to make them more employable. The aim being to not just impart cursory literacy, but do more – ensure that the children are equipped to use the tool of education to move themselves and their families out of poverty.
The impact of our work has been life-altering with dramatic improvement in the children’s education, gender and general awareness, health and hygiene, confidence, etiquettes, school performance, outlook to life & future and overall happiness. We reduce school dropout to almost 0%. Girls’ school attendance improves markedly and instances of girls getting married at the age of 13 or 14 become almost zero.
Because we also undertake outreach in the communities we work in, over years we have observed improvements in areas such as parent-child relationships, community cleanliness and access to government schemes and helping them receive their entitlements. We also work closely with parents counselling them.
Curriculum & Pedagogy
TaRL Approach (Teaching at the Right Level): Children are grouped by learning level, not age: Tenderfeet, Learners, Advancers, Aspirers, and Empower batches. The goal is to progress each child to age-appropriate learning levels.
STEM Curriculum: Activity-based instruction using NCERT-aligned content and Khan Academy resources, delivered through Smart TVs and tablets. Each batch attends 3–4 hours of class every day, 6 days a week, all year round — that is 900 to 1,200 hours of class per year. About 70% of this time is spent on STEM and language sessions.
SEPEt Framework (Social-Emotional, Physical and Ethical): Takes up about 30% of Yellow Rooms time. Covers: daily yoga, identifying emotions, learning about gratitude, children and parent counselling, nutritional element and uniform distribution, gender sessions, exposure activities, children panchayat and animal management committees, summer workshops.
Empower Program: For older children in Classes XI and XII. Digital tablet labs with pre-loaded or online subject classes. Career counselling and guidance sessions. Uniforms and nutritional elements. 90% subject sessions, 10% communication and gender sessions. Many of these students are the first in their families to enter higher education.
Sarthak School Inclusion Scholarship: Bright children, especially girls, are placed in residential schools such as HCL Vidyagyan, Navodaya, Avasara, and Atal Awasiya Vidyalaya. College education is also funded. This is funded separately from CSR donors.
Child Safeguarding: Sarthak Foundation has a formal Child Safeguarding Policy that is pinned and visible in every Yellow Rooms. A Suraksha Circle is painted on every centre’s wall to help children identify safety resources. The policy is explained to all children during orientation.
We currently run 48 Yellow Rooms in 4 districts of Uttar Pradesh, India serving close to 6130 children 56% of these are girls.
