Give2Asia, founded in 2001 by The Asia Foundation, promotes and inspires philanthropy by delivering services that meet the needs of donors and the Asian communities they care about.

For the year 2010, Give2Asia has formed a partnership with the Mountain Children’s Foundation in Uttrakhand, India, to empower the young people to make positive changes in their lives and communities by providing a forum from which they can speak and be heard, access resources and take action. The MCF plans to hold two day workshops with 5 partner organisations which would impact a total of 150 children.

Each workshop will be a carefully structured two days full of discussion and activity with the children that will build their leadership and presentation skills and teach them about working together. Through these workshops the children will discuss issues concerning them and will be encouraged to build strong organic and concerned communities through their ability to interconnect and build networks across various local sub-groups and identities within the village, including making their own “bal sangathans” (children’s groups) in their villages.

The MCF also plans to make the concept of caring for the elderly and indigent a prominent theme in these workshops.

Bringing the Right to Information to the Grassroots through Children

The Silicon Valley chapter of Asha for Education has formed an unprecedented partnership with the MCF to help young people tap the power of the Right to Information Act (RTI) to improve their communties.

The project will involve more than 2,700 children in gathering information about the current situation in their communities, especially with regard to their school facilities, and teach them how to use the RTI to learn about the resources available to their villages. These children will then be able to teach the rest of the community.

By learning about government schemes available to their community and seeing the gap between the money allocated and the results on the ground, we believe the children—and through them the community as a whole—can improve the quality of education, water and sanitation and a host of other problems that plague rural areas.

Background of the RTI project

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For more information on the different MCF chapters, please click on the links below:

Almora — Bageshwar — Chamoli — Champawat —Dehradun —Haridwar — Nainital — Pauri
Pithoragarh — Rudraprayag — Tehri —Udham Singh Nagar — Uttarkashi