DDB Mudra Group India launches community engagement program – The Green Batti Project

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mentor and mentee.jpgDDB Mudra Group in association with Teach India and Social Quotient have initiated a unique community engagement program which will bridge the gap between the young and educated workforce of India and the under resourced children of the country.

Inspired by America’s Big Brother, Big Sister program; Green Batti is a one on one mentoring program in Mumbai that pairs 500 mentors with 500 mentees from under resourced backgrounds. Green Batti was launched in September by the DDB Mudra Group, initiated by Social Quotient (a startup which creates platforms for youth to enable positive social impact) and Teach for India as its knowledge and outreach partner.

Green Batti has been launched with an objective of enabling a relationship between the children and their mentors where the children can find a friend, motivation and inspiration in the mentors. The mentors in return get an opportunity to learn and gain insight from the interactions and the program as a whole.

The program has been created with an intention of having a positive impact on the health and hygiene, life skills, the social skills, exposure to opportunities and learning and developing a social perspective. The purpose of this program is to instill skills and values that the children can take back into the classroom and out in the world which will help them take that leap forward, away from the confines of their society.

group pic.jpgGreen Batti works as per a simple format wherein the mentors between the age group of 21 years and 29 years are chosen after a personal interview basis their social background, competency in Hindi and their general behavior towards companionship/mentoring and children in particular. The mentors are being chosen from several corporates and agencies who have nominated their employees to don a role of a mentor.

The mentees are chosen from the under resourced communities between the age group of 10 to 12 years. Teach for India, Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Mumbai Smiles will be taking the lead in sourcing the 500 mentees.

The Green Batti program is scheduled to launch on November 14, 2014, Children’s Day. The first phase will be spread over a period of 6 months covering 24 meetings between the mentor-mentee pair. The interactions which will happen between the mentors and mentees will be one on ones but will be held as group meetings. The sessions will include confidence building activities, special workshops, movie screenings, music and theatre performances and visits to interesting cultural spaces.

Utmost care will be taken to ensure the security of the mentees and the mentors with the help of software which will track the whereabouts and meeting status of the pair in real time. With the help of the Teach for India team, various methods have also been conceptualized to measure and monitor the impact of the activities on the kids.

Quoting on the initiative, Samyak Chakrabarty, Chief Youth Marketer, DDB Mudra Group and Co-Founder, Social Quotient said, “Mentoring as tool has immense power to bring about equilibrium of opportunities in society. While of course the mentees would greatly benefit, we feel that this experience will also broaden the horizons of our mentors who would get insights into a world outside of their own.”