LSE beneficiaries visit Kohinoor Technical Institute

Our New Age of globalised world offers an array of choices to everyone. Everyone who has the financial resources to avail the opportunities offered in terms of food, clothes, technology and even career options. With the advanced methods of education adapted in schools and colleges nowadays (especially private and missionary institutes), the students have the option of availing the career counselling sessions to implore their own strengths and weaknesses and explore the cast sea of career opportunities in the world. Gone are the days when parents only considered Doctors or Engineers as successful. Today, success embraces the likes of “writer” could mean an author, a journalist or even a blogger, there are fashion designers and not just tailors, there are stewards and stewardesses and not just waiters, photographers are not just limited to wedding-shots and an engineer is not just limited to building roads and bridges.

However, even though these opportunities exist equally for all, without any social or financial discrimination, there are quite a few from the underprivileged section of our society, who are not aware of the existence of a number of career options; reason being that not all the sections of the society (including the schools in those areas) are themselves well equipped with this kind of knowledge.

At Mumbai Smiles, our peaceful struggle against poverty adapts the approach of holistic growth of the society, for which we work with the community members to grow in all aspects – financially, socially and mentally. One of our Educational projects, called the Life Skills Empowerment (LSE) project believe in knowledge and not just bookish education, whereby the adolescents of the select slum communities in Andheri East area of Mumbai are engaged in activities to understand and imbibe in their minds the crucial life skills, including critical thinking, problem solving, leadership and other life techniques. Such activities are scheduled in tandem with exposure visits. One of the recent visits was organised to the Kohinoor Technical Institute (KTI), with the aim of introducing these LSE beneficiaries to skills-based and vocational career opportunities, in which KTI came forward to help by explaining about their 76 Soft Skills training and diploma courses available in their 77 branches across the state of Maharashtra.

The interactive session included a lot of questions and answers among the KTI staff and the LSE beneficiaries and was extremely high on energy! We hope to conduct many more such sessions that bear the fruits of a healthy and bright future for our city, our country.