Organisation Name: Aangan Trust
Contact Parson: Alexandra Birladianu
Website: aanganindia.org/actnow
Country: India
Email Id: alexandra.birladianu@gmail.com
Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://aanganindia.org/actnow
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Aangan_Trust

Aangan Trust is a child protection organisation working towards building safe communities for children. It works in some of the most backward districts across six states with children vulnerable to child marriage, hazardous work, trafficking, violence and abuse. By working with community mothers, who are trained as volunteer child protection workers, to stand up for children, it enables safe communities where children, adults and governments together prevent and respond to the harm that these children face or may face.

#ActNow is a movement to make child protection everybody’s business, to encourage and build neighbourhoods where everyone is looking out for and taking action to keep children safe. It aims to make child protection a mainstream issue and not something that people shy away from and leave to ‘experts’, police or the government.

Aangan Trust has created the ‘Are you listening?’ video with four different stories addressing four different situations — child sexual abuse, child labour, child marriage and safety in schools. The video was created with support from Social Access and shared on social media platforms and NDTV channel. It continued the campaign with various activities, events and a social media mix of posts to raise awareness on the issues surrounding child protection. On the webpage, the general public can find information on the type of action they can take when they see a child in distress. They can also find stories of every day people who acted on behalf of children in danger. Aangan Trust enlisted support from Indian social media channels with a strong base of followers that talked about child protection and shared powerful stories.

Organisation Name: CHILDLINE India Foundation
Contact Parson: Sudeesh PM
Website: www.childlineindia.org.in
Country: India
Email Id: sudeesh@childlineindia.org.in
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/ChildlineIndiaFoundation/
Twitter: N/A

CHILDLINE India Foundation believes that the notion of child protection needs to be examined and understood beyond the set of policies, legislations and schematic interventions that govern it. It aims to raise awareness and garner support and spread awareness on various child-related issues. Over the past three years, CHILDLINE India Foundation has made a conscious effort to ensure all communication from its organisation is accessible to all children.

CHILDLINE India Foundation’s ‘I Pledge for Child Rights’ — a unique social media pledge and awareness campaign — created a buzz on surrounding issues of child rights and child protection across various social media platforms such Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, besides the CHILDLINE India Foundation website of course.

The campaign focused on the cause in the child rights space. About 43 per cent of India’s                      population of 1.20 billion comprises children below 18 years of age. Of these, 40 per cent or about 200 million are marginalised due to abuse, exploitation, disability, disease, poverty, calamities, etc. About 5 per cent of the Union Budget of the Government of India is earmarked for children, yet child protection is most neglected in the space with less than 0.8 per cent of the budget allocated for it.

The campaign carried out from March 20 to April 1, 2015, encouraged users/followers to actively participate in quizzes and pledge apps to spread the word on child rights, child protection and other CHILDLINE services. The campaign resulted in 1,05,837 engagements, with the total reach hitting 1.4 million people during the campaign? period.

Organisation Name: The Catalyst – TC
Contact Parson: Aliya Harir
Website: NA
Country: Pakistan
Email Id: aaghazedosti@gmail.com
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/aaghazedosti
Twitter: https://twitter.com/aaghazedosti

The Catalyst, a Pakistan-based registered group of students and young professionals, has been working to develop in the society, especially among youth, critical thinking that would equip them to think and lead for active citizenry, interfaith harmony, peace and social justice. Among the most important projects have been the Aaghaz-e-Dosti, which is a joint initiative of The Catalyst and India-based youth group Mission Bhartiyam.

Started in 2012, Aaghaz-e-Dosti is involved in peace building and conflict resolution by facilitating people-to-people contact, challenging hatred and suspicion, creating a culture of peace among people of both countries, and highlighting the issues of victims of conflicts. It strives towards this through interactive sessions in schools and colleges called aman chaupals, public discussions, peace workshops, peace-promoting activities in schools (writing letters and exchanging greeting cards on festivals), an Indo-Pak peace calendar, a virtual peace-building course called ‘Friends Beyond Borders’, and virtual campaigns.

Since Aaghaz-e-Dosti is a joint initiative, it uses social media to connect and coordinate activities with its collaborator in India as well as to reach out to people, the denizens being among its primary target groups. It extensively uses information communication technology (ICT) to connect Indian and Pakistani classrooms, facilitate interaction between activists in Pakistan and youth in India (and vice-versa), and even launched the first Indo-Pak peace building course called ‘Friends Beyond Borders’ wherein an Indian and a Pakistani is paired to have regular discussions on different issues over a time span of eight weeks. It uses social media pages as a platform for people to connect with each other, share their experiences, thoughts for peace and represent their country, culture to break stereotypes on either side of the border.

Special Mention

Organisation Name: Goonj
Contact Parson: Meenakshi Gupta
Website: www.goonj.org
Country: India
Email Id: meenakshi@goonj.org
Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/goonj.org/
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/goonj

GOONJ is a tool to experiment, to innovate some unconventional ideas that gets space in the development process and get each one to think out of the box…and take some action. Its work is around turning the age-old tradition of giving old material as charity into regular and dignified giving. Started with 67 clothes for distribution, it now deals with over 2,000 tonne of material every year. And one of its core values is collaboration.

Over the years, GOONJ has led several initiatives. Some of them are as follows:

Vastra Samman: To create awareness among urban masses on ignored basic needs like clothing, especially in winters, to generate collection of high quantity of material. This material goes through a detailed processing before it reaches to various parts of 21 Indian states.

Cloth for Work: This initiative calls for cloth and other material to be given as a reward to rural communities who come together for various development activities like road repair, digging of wells, cleaning ponds, making bamboo bridge, etc.

School to School: Under this initiative, under-utilised urban school material is used as a motivation for behavioural changes in the rural schools.

Not Just a Piece of Cloth (NJPC): Addressing an ignored basic need and building awareness around the taboo but critical issue of menstrual health and hygiene, GOONJ develops MY Pad from last shreds of cloth for thousands of village women/adolescents.

Rahat Disasters: Extensive and systematic relief and rehabilitation work is carried out after disasters.

Green By Goonj: It is a brand built around reusing and up-cycling even the last shreds of material Goonj receives.