Community Led - Action from their Dream building_Dima Community

[Dheeraj Lepcha]

Hi everyone ! This is Dheeraj Lepcha from Rural Aid NGO working with support from Global Fund for Children in Alipurduar District, Kalchini block (State of West Bengal, India) on the issue of  Prevention child trafficking.  We had already started working on community sustainability and ownership in our tea gardens through CLCPC SALTs approach.

Community’s sustainability and ownership is one of the dreams of Rural Aid and to lead a community sustainable and ownership we have chosen three tea gardens as a model of sustainability community. Therefore, out of three teagarden Dima teagarden is one of them. After many Salt visits, we prepared the community for a common dream building in Dima tea garden. 

As results of community led - actions; The five (5) dropout children have enrolled and continue their schools and Rural Aid’s remedial tuition centre at Dima tea garden. For ref - previous enrollment blogs link: https://aidscompetence.ning.com/profiles/blogs/community-led-action-for-enrollment-of-dropout-children

To strengthen the communities on sustainability and ownership, I with the coordination of my team members Rati Lama, Pancham Minj, Sanjay Lohara & Nityam Ghosh continuously visited the community for the encouragement towards their dreams. On 19th, 20th September and 1st October 2023, we organized the community review of dream building and CLCPC cycle process to all the community members and also with the few active stakeholders and young youth.

As a reflection; During the meeting, young youth members has understand their common dreams and process CLCPC. The community are enthusiastic to take actions as soon as possible which they have highlighted for action practices and also realized the strength of unity than individual from the facilitators facilitations. 

The community has highlighted some of dreams and practices to implement for action, out of them one of dreams and practices which states” Keeping village  on cleanliness, avoid throwing trash at surrounding and roadsides”.  

To implement this practices; On 2nd of October 2023 at the occasion of ”Gandhi Jayanti” and ”Swachh Bharat Abhiyan”, the communities along parents, ICDS workers, young youth and adolescent children group has took initiated to led action on village cleanliness and have reflected the message of cleanliness in community covering the 3 lines of Dima tea gardens which were Munsi line, Khariya line and 8 number line church area. 

           

As reflections from the action; one of the adolescent children has shared that today she feels good to work together as a unity for the good cause of the community of cleaning drive rather than any other work she does.

A few participant community members have also shared that from this cleanliness program it has sent the message of encouragement and can change the thinking capacity of other communities.

And also said that it has prepared the way towards sustainability and ownership through the action led for the common dream building of Dima tea garden.

We were also so fortunate to be witnessed to celebrate birthday of one adolescent children with the communities.