Rakta Kranti Schools Revived!

Rakta Kranti Schools

Practices and theories developed as a young kid tend to be with us even as we grow older. This is specially true for myths and misconceptions. It becomes a little too hard to overwrite some fear developed early on.

Now think of voluntary blood donation. It is in the range of 55-60% in Karnataka. What if as young kids we all were told about blood donation. What if we were told that it is our responsibility once we turn 18. That’s what Rakta Kranti schools is all about. Started off in 2008, this Sankalp team visits schools to educate and high school students about the real facts related to blood donation. These students are made aware of the need and how their contribution as an adult will make a big difference. Sankalp came up a creative program consisting of skit/video, talks, and creative activities to make the young students aware and motivated donors. Till now more than 7000 students have been educated in around 40 schools in Bangalore. The major part of the program had a team performance till now. Over a few months a certain degree of slackness had come into the team. But in the last 3 months the team has developed to a level where a single volunteer performs program in schools. New flipcharts are used during the program. Students find it easy to understand the concepts with the help of these charts and their response is seen in the amount of doubts which they ask related to blood donation. Even other volunteers who are not a part of RKS team are now trained to perform program in schools. In last three months, 1000 students have been educated in 7 schools in Bangalore. The list is continuously growing with more and more schools showing interest in the program.

Apart from the students, the teachers also benefitted from this program in most of these schools. Teachers showed keen interest in the program and asked various doubts in the program.

The sessions were held at Air Force School, Sisa School, St Thomas, Kuvempu Vidya Kendra, Holy Cross School, Ujwal Vidyalaya and RGS School in Bangalore in the last 3 months. And in the month of November, about 566 students were given this awareness program. The team has increased with 2 new volunteers joining in to spread the awareness.

Disha

The freshers have now joined the Disha publicity team. They have been visiting various hospitals around the city of Bangalore. And some of these hospitals are a part of the revisit plan. The feedback and the learning curve has been pretty good for a start. The task @ hand is pretty big, but the young blood in the team have taken it upon their shoulders to take every step to make sure that the blood helpline number reaches the needy. This month the volunteers visited more than 50 hospitals and are planning to visit more in the coming months.

To make a process of all the work in Disha, now an online Disha Website has been hosted. The site is being upgraded, added with new features to keep track of things in a better way. Some of the features though adopted from the usage on other sites, they have been customized according to the needs of the team. Some of the features which the team proudly talks about are Hospital and opportunity management system. And they seem to have a good start as they are heard saying "Our new volunteers have started using it." :) The major focus during the next month in the exam times would be to build this website with all the details and make it up-to date for the next semester's work.

Finance

Sankalp finance has moved the accounting to a customized online interface. The incoming of this interface means greater transparency, simplicity and scalability in financial operations. This is also expected to be exceptionally useful in disaster Relief scenarios. Currently there are two receipt forms being maintained. With all the processes in-line as planned, next year would see Financial transactions maintained fully online including the receipts.

Project wise Expenses:

Financial Status as on 1st December 2010: Rs 105992.75

Admin

The feedback process was completed for this year. The feedback included one for self assessment, for the team In-charge, and for entire Sankalp as an Organization. There was an option of volunteers specifically asking individual feedback from other volunteers they wanted.

Annual report for 2009-10 released. It has been released for internal feedback process. Once it has been approved, it will be published here on the website.

Bank accounts transferred and updated. This would mean that the online transactions would be possible again.

Tech Team

Rakta Kranti School site changes are currently being undertaken. The team had some issues and needed few modifications and features added, thus the tech team is working on it. Similarly work on Disha website according to the needs of that team was also undertaken this month.

Team Red is another domain along with Sankalpindia.net. All the Rakta Kranti sites are hosted on this domain. The registrations of Team Red domain has been complete.

Karmabhoomi is a internal website of Sankalp to maintain all the working level details of the organization. Tech team was working on content type changes to handle Senior Volunteer meetings in Karmabhoomi to a new level. Also, the other opportunities and tasks requested by other Sankalp teams are worked upon.

Resource Team

With all the events happening in Sankalp (including some without resource involvement), the Resource team has been on its feet regarding the requests for this month. They have been listed here.

• Monochromatic printing of poster for donation camp, which will be given away in the camp. 4 different kind of poster was printed. Also brochures regarding the 10 ITPL drive motivating people to donate blood on the day of the drive were given out one day in advance.

• Newspaper first edition was printed this month. It was rather an experimental issue which will be used internally and waiting for a huge amount of responses from our volunteers. Also this issue is to be sent to Delhi in order to complete the process of registration of the Newspaper.

• The old poster used for the awareness in Rakta Kranti School is now replaced by a new digital printed plastic cover book known as "Presentation Book".

Rakta Kranti Bangalore

There were three blood donation drives held in Bangalore. On 12th November the first drive of the month was held for the first time in Huawei Technologies. There were 33 units which were collected in this drive. Although it was the first drive, the drive went on pretty smoothly. The response from the side of the company was good and Sankalp hopes it begins the start of a strong relationship with the company. :)

Following this, on 26 th November, another new company came forward to conduct a blood donation drive. Thus, the first ever drive in Education First. Here the interesting fact was the participation of the employees in the first drive. The number of units collected were 66 and this marked about 50% of the employees coming forward to donate. There was good involvement from the Team Red volunteers in the company. Awareness posters and emails were sent out 20 days prior to the drive. Also they spoke to individual employees and motivated them.

The 10th ITPB drive was organized in associated with Ascendas and Applied Materials. We had over 550 registrations with 491 donations. Ascendas provided us a Kiosk in the ITPB mall area one day before the drive which was used to distribute brochure and motivating employees to donate blood. E-Mail communications to all ITPB employees were sent 15 days in advance and posters were also put up in many companies. Please read about it here.