MANTRA4CHANGE

Six youthful minds shaped up MANTRA Social Services in Bangalore

2013.Mantra4Change is a Bengaluru-based non-profit organisation that attempts
to transform public schools and low-cost private schools for empowering
underprivileged children in acquiring quality education. It seeks to address the
lack of delivery of Quality Education in the under resourced school.
The Schools serving students from less-privileged localities are the ones often
stuck in a cycle of poor performance and under-achievement. Although the
system, supported by various policies and interventions initiated both by the
government as well as non-governmental agencies, strive to address the gaps in
quality and equity in education, the key is in a sustainable model that works in
sync with the school community, rather than through policy measures that are
often imposed upon these schools. They help in transforming these schools by
physically being present there.
No matter how trained the teachers may be, even in private schools, if they
don’t work in an enabling environment that supports their continuous
knowledge building and promotes innovative practices, they will not be able to
perform. And in an attempt to solve this problem is that Mantra4Change was
born.
Mantra came up with STEP (School Transformation and Empowerment
Project) initiative to bridge the learning curve. STEP is a two-year holistic
intervention programme that bids to improve the quality of education in under-
resourced schools for children from underprivileged communities. It is designed
to empower all four key stakeholders in any school, viz the administrators,
teachers, students and the community.
“They work as part of the school team over the entire two-year period for
implementation of STEP by conducting sessions with the school leadership,
through teacher training sessions and classroom interventions for better learning
outcomes and also work towards community engagement”.
Mantra4Change model and its partnership with organisations - BEETF
(Bangalore Effective Education Task Force) and the STIR initiative, a global
teacher-led movement for improving children’s learning in developing
countries, could perhaps lay the much-needed foundation for students in under-
served communities in India.