Yashodhan, the story continues……

Mumbai Smiles adopted a three-tire strategy to turn around Yashodhan School and make it self-sustainable. Although established, the school lacked a strong infrastructure base and a trained workforce to progress further.  Mumbai Smiles stepped in at this juncture and brought the entire system back into a healthy loop, thereby ensuring that the three important aspects of education – teacher’s attendance, student’s attendance and overall academic progress, became sustainable. The journey began with supporting the school financially to ensure that the teacher’s salaries were assured, a step that would augment the teacher’s motivation to attend work. The presence of teachers was imperative to ensure overall academic progress. This financial support was marked by immediate stability among the teachers and improvement in their work attendance, which in turn directly impacted the student’s attendance. We supported the salary of 44 teachers and reached out to more than 1300 students who consequently started attending school regularly. It was indeed a trickledown effect that made way for overall academic progress.

Today, Yashodhan School stands with an additional storey, which was funded by Mumbai Smiles and capacitates several classrooms for secondary and higher secondary students. The School had a striking 100% success rate among 10th grade students this year. Further, Mumbai Smiles organizes several activities and workshops pertaining to career guidance, life skills, communication, stress management etc. to ensure a holistic development of the students at the School.

According to Jaume, “It has been a challenging but an amazing journey, in which we have walked during all these years, until reaching the point where Yashodhan School is completely self-sustainable. Mumbai Smiles got in touch with Yashodhan School 8 years back, when the school was facing financial problems. We decided to start together the strenuous process to improve the quality of the academic curriculum, optimize the infrastructure and strengthen the extra-curricular activities. Today, Yashodhan has a wonderful program for its students, and the center can proudly say that it has the best students in the area according to the state official results of the last few years. We are very proud and happy of having shared all these years with such a wonderful team of teachers, workers, students and families. It is because of their hard work and full dedication that Yashodhan School has reached the dream of any development project – To be self-sustainable by itself.”