Saathnirbhar
#SaathNirbhar: Wellbeing Together
Co-Nurturing Collective Wellbeing Through Relief and Recovery
#SaathNirbhar Wellbeing Together
In an overwhelming expression of interconnectedness, the vartaLeap ecosystem ventured heart first into relief and recovery response during the second wave of COVID-19. #SaathNirbhar: Wellbeing Together! became our clarion call. The coalition became a space where resources were raised, accessed and distributed. The members who had a strong presence in the grassroots became the last mile responders by reaching hundreds of marginalised communities. At a time when isolation, despair and hopelessness was being experienced by over 90% of the country, the shared feelings of collective love, leadership and solidarity that emerged from the #SaathNirbhar (interdependent) experience inspired us to take it out to the world.
Through mindfully designed intergenerational wellbeing experiences, we were able to reach young people and their communities to support them to learn how to navigate and neutralise their feelings by switching them towards more healthy and hopeful reflection through group engagements, positive action and dialogues. As a recognition of its scale with soul impact, #SaathNirbhar was recognized by the World Economic Forum’s COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs as one of India’s Top 50 COVID-19 Last Mile Responders under the category 'Leading Multi-stakeholder SocEnt-led Partnerships' This has inspired and energised us even further to resolve to reach at least 10 million young people in the country with the mission of self awakened active citizenship.
Communities: Migrant Labourers, Sex Workers, Persons from the LGBTQI+ community, Tea Garden Workers, Tribals, Dalits, Adolescent Girls, People with Disabilities, Senior Citizens, Artisans, Religious Minorities, Women and Children
Relief: 6.2 Lakh People | 65 locations |17 states
Recovery: 5000+ intergenerational participants across 21 states | 2.5 M+ online reach
Relief initiatives:
A1. Health
The second wave of the pandemic created an unprecedented demand for health care services which resulted in an acute shortage of hospital beds, ambulances, doctors, nurses, etc and the worst of all, oxygen. As people struggled to access meagre services within the restrictions set in place by the lockdown, the death tolls rose dramatically. Our members undertook relief initiatives, small and big, to bridge this gaping hole caused by the horrifying collapse of the healthcare infrastructure. In addition to running ambulance services, oxygen supply services, distribution of PPE kits, COVID care kits, organising vaccination drives and awareness campaigns, the members also designed many remarkable innovations like a maintaining real-time database for availability of medical resources to managing telephonic consulting helplines and connecting COVID patients and their families to doctors
5 lakh people were impacted through the health related interventions.
A2. Hunger:
The loss of livelihood due to lockdown created a hunger crisis for communities that structurally and historically lack social security. Restricted mobility during lockdown further aggravated the inaccessibility to food and other services essential for survival. With the daily access to food disrupted, marginalised communities were impacted most deeply. Our ecosystem members reached these communities and supported them by distributing ration kits, cooked meals, nutrition kits for children, biscuits/juice packets and running community kitchens.
1,20,880 people reached and 8,46,160 kgs of ration distributed
- Recovery/ Wellbeing interventions:
The urgency demanded by the COVID-19 immediate response in terms of relief work, left little room for reflection. The second wave bombarded people with traumatic experiences of hospitalisation and isolation, death and grief in the family and close community & loss of livelihood and social security. Those who weren't touched by the tragedy first hand, were constantly struck with information that triggered feelings of despair, loneliness, and the constant uncertainty about the future. This adversely affected the wellbeing of people and pushed some to acute depression. Two months into the COVID-19 relief initiatives, we reflected on and shared individual experiences of managing wellbeing during this time. We realised that young people are more likely to experience enhanced wellbeing when they feel in charge of their feelings as well as by experiencing the agency to contribute to social change.
Overall impact of the recovery interventions:
5000+ intergenerational participants across 21 states | 2.5 M+ online reach
- Togetherness Table: A collaborative and intergenerational intervention designed to help people to develop 'feelings literacy', such that they can identify, label, neutralise and transform negative feelings into ones that are positive.
Impact Story
An introvert by nature, Rahul was initially very apprehensive about the whole journey. He mostly kept quiet during the first session, but felt confident and safe while participating and sharing from the second session onwards. Rahul has gained an insight into how to empathise with someone who is facing emotional issues and pressure around him/her. He confessed that he now values 'togetherness' and would try to share joy and sorrows with the people around, which he had been struggling to do earlier. Hence, the participant Rahul Khateek came up with a positive vision towards life.
- Q-ki Championship is a reality check game show played by intergenerational teams who compete through interactive quizzes, plutory (Plural Story) performances and Imaginative practices that aim to foreground the need for building collective societal wellbeing during COVID-19
Impact story:
“I think my ability to express my viewpoints went through a considerable shift right when I was participating in the Qki National Championship. The situation that we were given during the match was of a woman who faced abuse, couldn’t leave her home etc. Now, my team had a lot of male members and they weren't able to put themselves in the shoes of this woman, but as a woman who has seen and experienced the same situation, I knew how to bring authenticity. Hence, when we were making the script, I would make sure that I put my points forward, I shared how we could create authentic dialogues, how we could act it out. At the end, I was able to confidently put my viewpoints forward in a team that was intergenerational”
- Lakshmipriya, Q-ki Participant
Brief about the Organisation
ComMutiny - The Youth Collective was incubated in 2008 by Pravah, a pioneer in the youth field, in collaboration with some of the other best youth engaging organisations in the country. Our member organisations work with a systems change perspective using the psycho-social approach to promote inside-out youth leadership. ComMutiny acts as a vibrant nation wide community of practice that promotes youth centric spaces through joint programming and public engagement on contemporary issues. ComMutiny works directly with 1000+ youth workers each year nationally and internationally to build their capacities for meaningful youth engagement and has been recognised as a frontrunner in shaping the field of youth leadership and active citizenship with 250+ members across 21 states.
In 2019, recognizing the need to go beyond sectoral boundaries and co-create sustainable population-scale change, ComMutiny incubated the The vartaLeap coalition, a cross-sectoral coalition of 150 (and growing) youth engaging organisations and individuals from development sector, government and educational institutions, media agencies and UN bodies to move youth-centric development from the margins to the mainstream, thereby engaging all spaces that hosts large population of young people. The vartaLeap Coalition provides a space for cross sectoral innovation, co-learning, leadership and scaling of common initiatives. The diverse demographics that the coalition engages with ensures a great reach to rural, urban, formally and informally educated youth populations as well as young people of all kinds of intersectional identities. The charter of the vartaLeap coalition can be viewed here and the membership can be seen here.
Over the last 27 years Pravah and ComMutiny-The Youth Collective has nurtured and actively engaged with over 1200 youth organisations and initiatives across the country supporting the learning and leadership of 680,000+ young people through public initiatives and youth-centric innovations to influence prevailing social norms and promote youth leadership in the areas of inclusion, constitutional literacy, gender, masculinities and social change in general. Our estimated extensive outreach through on-ground and social media campaigns is over 6.5 Million.
