A quiet, young boy begins to visit his school library every day after classes are over. At first, he goes to  just look at the colourful illustrations in the books brought to the school by smiling didis and bhaiyyas.  When asked why he stays back, he replies, “This is the world I want to stay in. This makes me happy.”  He slowly begins interacting with his fellow students who came to the library abd begins to make friends. The books have opened up his world; at school and beyond. The didis and bhaiyyas who stocked the library are from the NGO, Mantra4Change.

The idea for Mantra4Change took shape in the minds of Khushboo Awasthi and her partner Santosh More in 2010. “Deep inside us was the strong belief that if there is anything that can change the future, it is education. When children don’t have access to quality education their life choices shrink. It was these beliefs that triggered the concept for Mantra4Change.” Khushboo elaborated. At the time, Santosh was a Teach For India (TFI) fellow while Khushboo was pursuing a Masters programme.  But they both knew that they wanted to start something of their own in the development sector.

It was 2013 when Khushboo and Santosh founded Mantra4Change and started working on their education project in part-time capacity. In 2014, Santosh joined Mantra4Change full-time and in 2015, Khushboo did the same. They began formally recruiting members through the TFI career portal and Azim Premji University campus recruitment process. In a span of a few years, Mantra4Change has grown from a 2 member team to a small organisation of 12 passionate individuals.

Mantra4Change’s  key initiative is ‘STEP’: School Transformation and Empowerment Project. Through STEP and a two-year partnership to ensure its efficacy, Mantra4Change has till date had a positive impact on over 9000 students and 350 teachers in 13 schools. Most of the schools they work with cater to underserved children in the not-so-popular narrow alleys of urban and peri-urban Bengaluru.

A trickle down effect

To effectively implement STEP, the organisation first contacts the head of the school and then works down from there, connecting with each part of the school team on a personal level to understand their needs and challenges.  In one of the schools, teachers in the primary school mentioned the need for better books for children to read. Mantra4Change reached out to  Pratham Books and helped acquire Library in a Classroom kits. This kind of rapport building, ensures that within 4-6 months 70% of staff are onboard with the programme.

Empowering children

Khushboo and her team believe that students must be empowered and encouraged to step out of their comfort zone. She shared a story of how 12 students from Mantra4Change partner schools attended an  International Geography Youth Summit.

“We had to convince the teachers that the children were indeed ready to take the stage. At the conference, to the surprise and delight of the children, two of their groups got standing ovations from the audience.  When they came back, you could see the confidence in them. They came up to the team and their teachers, and said, ‘thank you so much, ma’am, for giving us this opportunity. We would never have experienced this.’ We saw an an opportunity and took it to our students and they grabbed onto it. It’s their hard work at the end of the day.” remembers Khushboo.

Joyful reading material in their mother tongue

Under STEP, Mantra4Change is also implementing a library programme in which they set up libraries to make books more accessible to children. Mantra4Change has teamed up with Pratham Books to provide the children colourfully illustrated, multilingual stories. Describing the books and the library programme, one student told us, “The illustrations are very nice, the story is funny!” adding that she had begun reading at home more after the library had been set up.

In addition to the libraries, content from StoryWeaver is downloaded onto computers in the library for children to read and enjoy. There is an added excitement when the children get to read the e-books on the computers. Mrs. Morris, a librarian who conducts weekly storytelling sessions at the Citizen’s School, Bengaluru said, "The e-books work like a reward. The kids love operating the computer because they do not get a lot of opportunities to do so otherwise. I use the e-books for  partner reading and it is working great. Children read, then discuss what they read. This helps develop their comprehension and communication abilities.”  

“The whole atmosphere in the library when the children come is magical! Even those who can’t read fluently yet like to come and touch the books, see the pictures  and make up  their own stories  using their imagination. It’s beautiful to see.” Khushboo added.

Mantra4Change’s passionate team is determined to make a difference in the lives and learning of the children in the schools they work with  “Our team is here because they really want to make a change and affect education at the school level.” Mantra4Change hopes to  double the number of schools they work with  as well as the team’s size by May 2017. We’re sure they’ll get there, one step at a time!

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Pratham Books is a not-for-profit children's book publisher that was set up in 2004 to publish good quality, affordable books in many Indian languages. Our mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and we have spread the joy of reading to millions of children in India. In 13 years, we have published over 3000 books and distributed over 14 million copies of our storybooks and 16 million story cards.

Last year, Pratham Books' increased its footprint by going digital. As an industry leader, we were one of the first publishers in the country to open license our content. All this content is now available on StoryWeaver, which is a digital platform that hosts stories in languages from India and beyond, so that every child can have an endless stream of stories in her mother tongue to read and enjoy. The stories can be read, translated, versioned or downloaded for free. All stories on the platform are openly licensed.

Donate-a-book, is a unique crowd-funding platform for children’s books. The platform helps to bridge the gap between individuals who want to help children read and those organizations, schools and individuals who need books for children.

At Pratham Books, we are shaping a new, innovative approach to multilingual publishing because we believe that every child needs good books to read in a language of their choice.

Pratham Books is looking for a Graphic Designer to join our digital team. This is a full-time position based in Bangalore.

The candidate will be responsible for

• Designing picture books for print.

• Adapting original design files (in print), and converting it into sizes and designs that are suitable for StoryWeaver - Pratham Books’ digital story platform.

• Working closely with our Content Team to create and adapt content for digital and print mediums.

• Working closely with the production team for the first print run of the books.

 

Pratham Books is a not-for-profit children's books publisher. Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver is a digital repository of openly-licensed, multilingual children’s stories.

 

Required skills:

• Expertise in InDesign Creative Suite, Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw

• Basic graphic design skills and an interest in book layouts

• Basic understanding of the printing process (digital and offset)

• Minimum one to three years of relevant experience

• Ability to work quickly and accurately on design files

• Be a team player, quick learner

• Good communication skills

Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Please send your resume to [email protected] with ‘Graphic Designer - Digital' in the subject line of the email.

 

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UPDATE: 'The Elephant Bird' is available to read in  Assamese , Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Odia, Sanskrit , Tamil , Telugu , Bengali, Malayalam, Punjabi, Konkani  and English .

Pratham Books' One Day, One Story is back! The nationwide storytelling campaign is in its 5th year. Through the campaign, we encourage our community of volunteers to use one book to conduct reading sessions, free of cost with children from under-served communities. For more details about the event click here.

This year's chosen story is The Elephant Bird by Arefa Tehsin, Sumit Sakhuja and Sonal Goyal. The story about a magical bird, and a brave, curious child is also the tale of an unlikely friendship and rare courage. We totally love this one!

Last year 2500+ storytellers joined us to take The Boy and the Drum across India (and some other parts of the world!). This story was translated to 7 languages on StoryWeaver. The more languages a story is translated in, the more it will travel to be read and enjoyed by children.

This is where we need your help. 

Yes, you guessed it right - we need translation volunteers for this year's story. The Elephant Bird' is already availble in English, Hindi, Kannada, Gujarati, Telugu, Urdu and Marathi. Your contribution to add a version of this story on StoryWeaver will go a long way in multiplying the number of PB Champs' reading sessions and in turn, help reach more and more kids. Wouldn’t that be lovely?  

We need all the translations to be on the site before 20th August, 2016.

If you have any queries please write to us at [email protected]

Here's a quick and easy video tutorial on how to translate stories on StoryWeaver. Once you've seen it, you can head over to the site to start translating 'The Elephant Bird'

P.s: If you're interested in joining us as a PB Champ this year,  click here to enrol.

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