Beneficiary Committee Meeting held for Education projects

The Beneficiary Committees are made for all our projects, which consists of the beneficiaries and their parents, to ensure that the best quality of services are provided to the beneficiaries by way of honest feedback and healthy discussions with the project team and management of Mumbai Smiles directly.

The Education unit looks after three projects, namely the Higher Education project, the Girl Child Education project and the Life Skills Empowerment project. And recently the final beneficiary committee meeting was held, considering the closing of all schools and colleges, in order to discuss the positives and negatives of the previous year so the positives can be strengthened further and negatives can be done away with, for better quality of project functionality in the coming academic year.

With 26 parents, their children and the Project Team, including the Unit Head of education in attendance, the meeting was highly interactive in nature. First, all the parents were addressed all the parents and explained to them how Mumbai Smiles is a mediator for providing scholarships and capacity building sessions, but the hard work has to come from the parents and students themselves to ensure good results in exams. Then the feedback session began with parents trying to get clarity on the continuation of scholarships for their kids. It was then explained to them that scholarships are given purely on need-based criteria as also depending on the funds available with the organisation, hence although there is no guarantee for the scholarships to continue for coming years, we are trying our level best to provide as much support as possible.

The parents and students then discussed the various activities of the year with the project team, like the Science fair, the Career Fair, the capacity building and awareness sessions etc, and discussed their positives and negatives as well as suggestions, such as requests for conducting more extensive sessions on addiction to alcohol and smoking; all of their points have been duly noted by the team and we will work our best to apply them as per the need of the hour!

Some parents, particularly of the LSE project specially mentioned the amount of improvement they noticed in their children post the sessions in the weekly modules.

Such feedback sessions are extremely important for us as an organisation as we completely believe in working with the communities and not for them and hence the interactions are essential to ensure that there is stone left unturned from our side in providing the best of the support to them.

We thank the parents for being so supportive of us and for being so active throughout the year!