Mountain Children’s Foundation
Changing the way the world perceives and works with children
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How the MCF is structured: The basic tenet of the MCF is to encourage self-motivated groups of children to drive the Mountain Children's Foundation. The MCF never believes in telling children what to do. It rather leads them on in a process of discovery and exploration of their community, their mileu, their environment and eventually themselves. In keeping with this basic approach the MCF is structured as a loose network of self-evolving children's groups which call themselves variously as parvitya bal manches (PABAMs), bal panchayats, bal sangathans. These groups are organized as local conditions warrant, sometimes within a single village or at times across a cluster of villages. There are districts which have several children's groups while some make do with only one across the district. Since the children drive the MCF, they grow it at their own pace.
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MCF Children's Groups (Chapters) in Uttarakhand: The MCF today has chapters in all thirteen districts of Uttarakhand.To see what the young members of a particular district are doing, click on that district's name in the map. To see a roundup of recent activities from all the active MCF chapters, please see our workshop section. The MCF global desk in Dehradun and the MCF partner organizations provide facilitation, support and assistance to these chapters, but in each group the young people decide for themselves what issues they want to take on, and how. Sometimes they participate in programs being carried out by their supporting NGO. At other times, they identify problems within their village or community and tackle it themselves. During the ICMC in May 2002, young people from Nepal, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and from mountainous areas in Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh came together with those from Uttrakhand to form the MCF. As we move the MCF forward, we have focused on the area most within our reach, the state of Uttarakhand, which is located in India's Northwestern mountains. As the world's newest mountain state (Uttarakhand became a separate state in 2000), it seemed a unique opportunity to influence the policies and programs that would affect children. But the young people from those other regions are still very much members of the MCF - we just need to assemble the resources to help them get their chapters up and moving. |
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The Mountain Children's Foundation,63-A Vyom Prasth, G.M.S Road,Dehradun, Uttarakhand 248001, India |
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