My Reflections

As the first employee of Bala Mandir Kinship Care, I was given a list of Covid deaths and asked to meet their families. There were clear criteria for selection, including the financial status of the family and children under 12 years of age, among many other factors to consider for a child to be part of our ‘virtual home.’ Armed with a list of 20 such families, I made telephonic calls to gauge the family background and identified eleven families for my first visit. On the one hand, it was difficult to face such families in an emotional and financial crisis. As a social worker, empathy and compassion to help such families was a given, but doing the required due diligence and fact checking against this backdrop, was a challenge.

Today, after 2 years and visiting over 300 families, I see the pattern in the social-economic status of these families.

• Post the death of the only earning member, most of the widowed single mothers, moved back to their parents for support–both emotional and financial.
• Illiteracy among these widowed single mothers from the lower strata of society, made them look out for menial jobs as domestic help or housekeeping, with not much pay
• Widowed single mothers, could not take up a regular 9×5 job, because they were the only care givers for the children and had to be available when children came back from school or be with them during the summer vacation stretching to a month or two

As a social worker, I was quick to recognize the quantum of work we needed to do across the stakeholder communities over the long-term. I am glad, we found solutions for every problem we encountered and evolved as a team, as we built the Kinship Care programme in the peak of Covid.

Bala Mandir Kinship Care programme, was started in the year 2021, after the Delta wave of Covid’19 to help children who lost one or both parents to the pandemic. With over 74 years of expertise in holistic child care and development; Bala Mandir saw the need to support such children. According to research, a child who has been orphaned is vulnerable, likely to perform poorly in academics, have poor School attendance, feel less empowered and be disoriented psychologically and develop low self-esteem.

Today, Kinship Care has grown to 700 children across 9 districts of Tamil Nadu. Given the emotional turmoil that the mothers have gone through, Bala Mandir has organized for group/individual counselling sessions to help them tide over their past and face life courageously, and focus on the future of their children. There are skilling and livelihood support programmes offered to the mothers, to help with work from home. “When Bala Mandir supported me financially with a commercial grinder through the livelihood support programme and encouraged me to be on my own, it lifted my spirits and gave me a new found confidence. Today all my earnings are from the grinding business, with which I run my family independently and with dignity,” says a happy mother who has benefited from the programme.

I realize that early adverse life experiences, such as bereavement and growing up in disadvantaged communities, carry life-long consequences for children and their socio-economic attainment as adults. Education is a key moderator and a child’s best chance to escape the cycle of poverty. Focus on Education, therefore, becomes the pivot to our long-term goals. Paying the school fees to ensure no child drops out of school, is but the starting point. The other learning interventions such as our English learning programme or our Tab with pre-loaded content to strengthen foundational concepts in Mathematics in a self-paced learning environment; are programmes designed to help our children get an opportunity to reach their potential. It is truly satisfying for me as a social worker to know that our collective efforts will help see the child succeed over the long term.

Y Arulraj