Society for Development Activities (ProjectKHEL) works towards empowering adolescents, paving the way to a more equal and inclusive society. ProjectKHEL is an acronym for Kids Holistic Education and Life Skills, and is an initiative of the Society for Development Activities based in Lucknow. It imparts life skills to transform adolescents into informed and gender sensitive citizens, leaders in their communities, and widen the scope of their future opportunities. Harnessing the power of play, it creates safe play spaces and implements holistic, interactive, and experiential learning methods through sports, story-telling, theatre, crafts, dance and games.
Its core program, Made in Maidaan, has equipped more than 2,000 adolescents with personal, social and cognitive skills that has changed their lives for the better. The transferable skills that the beneficiaries learn here help them aspire for better and previously unthinkable opportunities. To complement these efforts, the NGO also facilitates theme-based workshops to inform adolescents about the crucial issues they face such as personal hygiene, civic-responsibility, peer pressure and tobacco and substance abuse.
These theme-based sessions have been branched out into three workshop-based programs:
Ab BAS! : This program builds awareness around topics of Child Sexual Abuse which affects children of all groups, gender and social backgrounds. The NGO conducts sessions with children who are 3 to 18 years old. To date, they have reached out to over 5,400 children and 1,000 parents and teachers, directly through these sessions.
Red Spot: This is an inclusive initiative that empowers adolescent girls, through activity-based workshops on understanding and revaluing menstruation as a clean and biological natural process. They have reached out to more than 2,420 adolescent girls and women from various backgrounds and 500 men through these workshops and events. They have conducted 40 sessions till date.
Teen Talks: This is an open discussion forum for teenagers with focus on a variety of topics like puberty, health and safety. It is to provide a space to have free flowing, unbarred and non-judgmental discussions where the participants can directly and openly ask questions. The NGO has reached out to 2,221 teens through more than 46 discussions.
