Happiness knows no bounds yet when Shades of Happiness was founded our vision was limited to imparting quality education to the children belonging to all the lower socio-economic or less fortunate sections of the society. We wanted to focus on the overall progress of a child through methods of learning that would be joyful and informative at one and the same time. The over-arching aim was to help these little children grow as little rainbows that would spread happy smiles, wherever they went. Lucky for us, we are living our dreams and more than just the dreams we started the foundation with.
We began our work back in 2008 and since then, we have not only helped to impart all-round education to more than 1000 children but also helped 100% of them to get enrolled into schools and in the process, we have had a lot of fun spending time with them. Shades of Happiness Foundation (SOHF) was registered in 2011 as a youth-driven non-governmental organization under the Trust Act, 1882 and focuses its area of work in the nation’s capital, Delhi. Over the years, we have steadily grown as more and more people have come forward as volunteers, donators and cheerleaders and helped us in clearly identifying our newer and bigger missions.
SOHF is all about having fun with the little we have at hand, in a conscious, responsible way. With more than 3000+ teaching hours, we believe we have learnt just as much as the children have, if not more. Over the years as the organization has bloomed, we decided to carry forward our tasks of educating, enabling and empowering into all the various hierarchies of the less fortunate society. To that effect, we have spread our wings into the fields of women’s rights and menstrual hygiene, sanitation, gender rights and environmental education among many others. We conduct action programs that can focus on each of these subsections individually with care. Gender awareness with a focus on youth and children, women’s health and hygiene education with a focus on women and offering to counsel to various kinds of trauma survivors are few things that we have successfully ventured into in the past few years and we are both overwhelmed and inspired by the responses that these have generated among the participants. Besides these, we conduct theatre workshops, books and stationary drives, encourage participation in art and crafts workshops with the children and make sure that we spend all our festivals with everyone who abounds in the SOHF family.
Looking back, we have come a long way and the goal is to keep striving, to keep moving forward and to keep dreaming about these various shades of happiness that light us up – we, our volunteers and our participants.
Written by Ahendrila Goswami