While their children are in school, the mothers, elder sisters and aunts of our Beacon Learning Centre students get to learn something new and beautiful!
Yes, it’s true! 11 mothers, sisters and aunts of the children of our Beacon Learning Centres have completed a three-month course in Beauty & Haircare that we’ve piloted in the Shivaji Nagar slum community – a non-notified slum community which is home to many unauthorised dwellings. The men in this community are mostly daily wage earners and unorganised labourers, while the women are mostly confined to their homes as they have their children to care for. Some work as domestic workers too. In some families both the men and women work as waste pickers. They segregate waste, which comes into the Deonar garbage dump that borders their slum community and from this segregation, they make a living by selling the dry waste that can be recycled and reused. For a community with such struggles with poverty, this new option of creating a livelihood from Beauty & Haircare was a novelty, and many women jumped at the opportunity.
To begin with our Case Workers and Case Counsellors went house to house among our beneficiary families, informing them about the new course. The interested candidates were interviewed and shortlisted after two rounds of conversations to understand their commitment and desire to learn.
In September 2022, 11 candidates were all set to get trained and by December 2022 they had completed their theory and in-house practicals, and were sent to intern with local beauty parlours.
By the end of the three-month course the course participants were trained in:-
- grooming and hygiene
- knowledge about hair and skin types
- how to thread and shape eyebrows
- manicure/ pedicure
- waxing
- facials and clean-ups
- skin treatments for various skin types
- head massage
- hair spa, blow drying, setting, ironing and application of henna
- simple haircuts like the blunt cut, u-cut and layer cut
Before they even knew it, the students were ready to take up simple jobs like threading eyebrows for neighbouring women in the by-lanes where they lived. One of the women who is so pleased with her new skill says, “Mere gallli ke log mere liye eyebrow karne keliye rukte hai.” (The people in my lane wait for me to get home to thread their eyebrows.)
These new graduates have now received their Course Completion Certificates. Alongside their certificates, they received a Starter Kit with basic beauty products that they can use to earn a small income, work in local beauty parlours and upgrade their skills.
Seeing the success of this Skill Development and Livelihood Project course in Beauty and Haircare, our team of trainers have started the next two batches of students for women in Shivaji Nagar slum community, which is also open to mothers and sisters of our beneficiaries in nearby slums. This time, we’re having two batches run simultaneously, with eight trainees in the morning batch and eleven in the afternoon batch. Next we plan to head to another of our target slum communities – the Kalwa slum community -, and we have already set up the training room and materials for this course. We are waiting to find the right trainers to get us going!
Dear donors, we thank you for your consistent support and donations that help us think of creative ways in which we can not only educate children in these communities but also reach out to their families by helping them to think progressively and create an atmosphere of intergenerational learning in the family and community at large. Kudos to our young women and to you too for being a part of this.
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Vision Rescue exists to rescue children from all forms of exploitation by engaging and sustaining them in education. We are a registered NGO for child education under the Bombay Public Trust Act 1950.
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