Madly

 P LACEMENT ACTIVITIES ARE IN FULL SWING. T HE KIDS HAVE BEEN VISITING COLLEGES, SCIENCE PARKS, HOTELS A ND EVEN WARSHIPS…………...... 2

Issue 1.1

2009

You know you don’t need capes and tights to Make A Difference

-NOORUL HIJAZ

 THE KIDS AND THEIR AWESOMENESS. THE M AKE A DIFFERENCE TREE, ITS LEAVES AND BRANCHES…….. 3

 J UST MADDING ....... ... 4

 A ND FINALLY— THE

PRESIDENT ’ S NOTE AND THE PEOPLE YOU CAN BLAME……………... 5

Make a Difference

The first six months of the year witnessed the MAD expanding from 4 to 11 cities. On 10-12 April, the First MAD National Conference took place at the Avenue Regent, Cochin. Excerpts from the conference are as follows -

The National Conference The 3 day event, popularly called as the MADCON was attended by (then) 8 cities. The idea was to spread the MAD process to the new cities, working on the same framework at a national level. It was also intended to be a platform for volunteers from different cities to interact and mingle with each other. The first day was to “Dream”. To dream of new ideas and how to implement them. By the end of the first day, the boundaries between the various cities had completely resigned to the world of oblivion; a perfect manifestation of national inte-

gration. The second day was to “Decide” the MAD policies. And rest of year wants us to “Do”. After two full tiring days of constant discussions and debates, the delegates went for a House Boat cruise in Allepey. Enjoyed authentic Kerala sea food of Kappa and Meencurry, Karimeen etc beside the serene backwaters. The conference was coming to an end and one by one the delegates started departing to the airport. Truly, the MAD Conference was an amazing start to the academic year. Parul from Bombay has a post on the blog; read it here.

MADLY

MAD bagged the coveted Ashoka Youth Social Entrepreneur Award last year in the month of November last year. Ashoka is a community of leading social entrepreneurs from around the world who work collectively to transform society and design new ways for people to become more productive, entrepreneurial and globally integrated. The purpose of the Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition was to discover and promote youth who had positively engaged with and impacted their communities.

Conquering the World: Ashoka Style There were 521 entries for the competition from around the world. Of these, the judging panel selected 15 as finalists, of which MAD was judged the winner through a massive online voting process. The award has given MAD a global platform on which to raise awareness about volunteering. The project is now a global platform for youth who want to impact their community by volunteering. In June 2009, Jithin C. Nedumala, National President, went to Boston to address the World Youth Summit, where he presented the fundamental equations of the organization and its implementation across different locations in the country. Read On. And the winner is

Content by—Jr, Karthik

The placements activities started off with the V.Y.B Camp held for the kids from Valsalya Bhavan, YMCA and Bal Bhavan. The placement coordinators visited their respective centers and gave the kids a talk about possible future careers and how placements will help them.

MAD believes in not just educating the children, but, also developing them in all relevant areas so that they will fare well in life. Therefore, the goal MAD

has been targeting is to ensure that our kids have a better future, a better say in tomorrow’s world.

Our kids were at the Southern Naval Command. Read about it here. Amaara cultural presentation The kids got a dive into some rich culture in the course of their visit to Amaara Coffee Shop. They got a brilliant opportunity to interact with artists from different fields.

A field trip was organized to C-SiS (Centre for Science in Society), CUSAT. They were enlightened on topics like resonance, pixels and the formation of images in digital cameras etc. and witnessed some of the many wonders of science in everyday life. Harsha & Blesson share their experience.

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We are also happy to announce that 13 of our kids wrote the 10th std. examination and all of them passed. 11 of them have continued with school and Binoy has been placed with Skiltek for Vocational Training. MAD is pooling in all its resources synergistically to make the placements projects work and to ensure that our kids have the best opportunities available to them. This is the ultimate goal which we have been trying to achieve.

A trip to Adarsh centre for spastic/ disabled children is being planned. This is intended as a career and general awareness program. A Chartered accountancy career presentation will be done by Elizabeth Benny.

Rajagiri Engineering Awareness Program A study tour to Rajagiri College of Science and Technology was organized to expose them to engineering as a career possibility. Read on. Casino Hotel—The kids had an opportunity to visit the Casino Hotel, Willingdon Island. They got a vantage view of the working of the hotel industry in the course of their interaction with the hotel staff. Paul has written class 9ish looking report here.

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 Niki

A legal awareness camp will happen soon considering the number of our kids who want to be lawyers. A visit to the National Institute of Oceanography is being discussed.

MAD’S GOT TALENT: This is by far the biggest event MAD has ever planned. We’re planning to do an inter-center talent show for our kids. It will be a day of competitions and the five best programmes will be shown to a larger audience.

2 Arjun David, Azeera, Blesson, Harsha, Paul, Niki.

MAD believes in not just educating the children, but, also developing them in all relevant areas so that they will fare well in life. Therefore, the goal MAD has been targeting is to ensure that our kids have a better future, a better say in tomorrow’s world. MAD has come up with the idea of making placements as another core activity. The placements activities started off with a V.Y.B camp held for the kids from Valsalya Bhavan, YMCA and Bal Bhavan. The placement coordinators visited their respective centres in the beginning of the year and gave the kids a talk about possible future careers and how placements will help them.

A newbie experience!!

Sunday afternoons are no longer about trying to forget the Monday blues As a part of the placements project a field trip wasin organized for the kids to visit C-SiS (Centre for Science Society), CUSAT. Theyweek were at flashing the background..its about having theinbest time of the enlightened on topics like resonance, pixels and the formation of images in digital cameras/TV etc. and witnessed some of the wonders HG. Accomplishment is not accompanied by fretting, being poker faced o f s c i e n c e i n f r o n t o f t h e i r e y e s . stop being and have all that In Physics lab, the kids were taught toand use thermometers andyoung stop clocks. Theycarefree. also learnedMaddies to find out the time taught period of ame simple penand more. Not all kids are what I was at 10(read grumpy, bored and dulum. There was a PHYSICS PAVILLION which had a marvelous set-up named the “Circus Of Energy” to explain transformation of en- a totalthepain! My kids HG are mostin amazing I’ve Kids, ergy. It also had telescopes through which kids viewed distantat buildings. Thethe kids were awe watchingwomen the fountain testmet! and pop test of hydrogen in Chemistry lab. They performed litmus test and displacement reactions; burnt magnesium with their uninhibited enthusiasm make you believeribbon, that etc.Biology you can lab start had formalin-protected specimens and hanging skeletons. They prepared slides of skin and leaf cells and watched it under a microlife from scratch. Lil Beula scrunching up her face to spell eleven just for scope. The lady-in-charge of the Science Park showed them the usemakes of pulleys, periscopes anddreary a hydro-electric generator lit cola very good from you you feel the interview waswhich worth every orful LEDs. In Computer lab they opened websites and familiarized with the working of Google earth. The kids went to a library which moment! MAD brings so much…..hopes dreams love change pride but most showcased a huge collection books. Maths lab was emporium of wooden models of varied geometric shapes with which they proved of all… it gives you the opportunity of making yourself and others truly Pythagoras theorem and found out the sum of angles of a triangle and a quadrilateral. A jigsaw puzzle of a cube was also solved. The happy through plants endeavors like My and Little Women changed Herbal garden had a variety of medicinal and ornamental on display. Theirthis. aesthetic medicinal valueshave were explained. Thenot

my life as I knew it’ J. - Aditi

EZ Vidya Training, Chennai

experience was informative blended perfectly fun. just mywith Sundays but

On the 24th of July, 40 volunteers around South India geared up for one of the most memorable MAD meetings ever, the Mentor Training at Chennai. A cheerful Jaishree Ma’am greeted us, welcoming us into what lay ahead for the next 3 days of our learning experience there. Introductions & ice breakers over, we were promptly divided into teams. The abundance of activities (& the squabbles at the score board) over the course of the three days not only taught us a lot, but helped us understand that we all are children at heart & that no number of birthdays are going to change that! We learnt about various methods of teaching, class control & about including talent-specific activities with our syllabus training. I am very grateful to the EZ Vidya team & MAD for having presented us with this unforgettable experience. Kudos to MAD Chennai for being the perfect host (not to mention including certain life savers like the AC hall & plentiful cups of coffee!). We left Chennai armed with the knowledge that we were going to take teaching to a new level at MAD P.S. that was one of the very contagious song and dance sequences at Chennai. I’m afraid it is worse than swine flu and has already claimed most of the MAD centers - Sharon

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Next time your at OBERON… Check out the Madge!!!

MAD embarks on it’s second year of acquainting our kids with the computers!! This year we wade into deeper waters with hardware, navigation, paint, MS Word, MS Excel and Power Point forming the core of our curriculum. Our 110 computer students at 5 centers also utilize their PCs to build their English skills with the help of a variety of softwares. We look forward to acquiring the necessary infrastructure to kick start this project in 6 more centers by the end of this year!!

Friends of MAD FoM is an initiative by MAD to create a network of donors who are willing to guide and support us. To expand our network, FoM seeks corporate to provide us with kind access to their employees. We look forward to the management’s permission to conduct “peaceful” “Nondisruptive” campaigns within their premises and infrastructural facilities. The campaigns use tools like posters, mailers, videos, t-shirts, MAD teaser’s etc: Thos who sign up the FoM’s are required to fill up the Forms authorizing the EFT. The transfers happen automatically on a monthly basis, once authorization is done and the donor becomes a Friend Of Mad!!!! MAD invites all to post their comments/ suggestions views on the various volunteer The Madges are on the look out for activities, events and announcements that all those people who would like to make a difference and would put up one of us on your blogs!

To download the Madges Your connectivity with people who want to make a difference will help us spread the word.

A new endeavor of M A D to start libraries has seen the light of day at two of our centers: Palluruthy and St.Mary’s, thanks to our sponsors DP World and Mrs. Prema Roy. This is a project that ,donor. The books are we work on every time we find a suitablebought by volunteers who are familiar With Best Compliments

happen on the recently launched mad forum!!!!

http://makeadiff.in/ forum

with the kids of the respective centers and pertain to the level, interests etc of those kids. We look forward to bringing more centers under this plan. .

4 Bindia, Niki, Saju, Xavi, Teza, Karthik

AD’s

Greetings to donors, volunteers, well-wishers and alumni. MAD Cochin has decided to make a conscious effort to keep all stakeholders better informed of our activities. The first step towards this will be through this newsletter. We will be sending you updates on a regular basis. MAD has really grown in the last one year. The targets we set for ourselves at the start of the year were very different from what we were working on at the end of the year. MAD has grown from 4 cities in 2008 to 11 cities. That’s a 175 percent growth, almost 3 times what we were at this time last year! Our greatest regret is that we did not keep our alumni and donors updated on our activities. The main reason MAD was able to grow so large so fast was that every volunteer was involved beyond what we (volunteers) had initially intended, Owing to a high level of ownership and responsibility. National projects for the year include a formal curriculum to teach English as a second language to children, based on the Cambridge University syllabus. This will come with detailed instructions to increase the average teaching effectiveness. Also a cascading teacher training system through mentors and an online MAD application to bring all our stakeholders under one roof: including children, alumni, donors and well-wishers. City level projects include a robust Placement project to ensure that on completing our course, the children are ready to take off towards a successful future. This will involve a structured placement plan covering career awareness, camps, talent identification platforms and field visits. The computer project and library project have also been formalized and will be taken up for every centre. The Friends of MAD program has been formally launched nationally and once we meet our targets there, we will be able to meet most of our projects internally. Jithin, our National President, went to Boston in connection with the Ashoka Youth Social Entrepreneur Award that we won last year. We have been able to reach out to some major funding organizations. We are in the process of applying for our FCRA registration for this purpose. National Conference: We grew very fast last year. From 4 to 11 cities was a leap. We felt the need to orient the new city teams on the MAD spirit and give them an understanding of our systems and processes. Also to get their third party inputs before becoming a part of the system It was an amazing experience, creating bonds between cities and thereby enabling many intercity projects.

M ts even raining nd he lives ’ n i om et dT

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n ac t Bou oon to gr or a u O f es The t set nt ar e g e l a o t got ck at ies. S o d n d k a !! ta lm soon of al torm e s ” m i n t ny -fu eps a “wild t s r o do your

MAD ALUMNI

It’s time for some good news for all the maddies who quit volunteering and feels the MAD emptiness in their lives. Alas! The MAD alumni is here. Help us reach you :) Register here.

MAD ‘n’ ME DIA! MAD get’s happening a nd loud!! To ch eck out artic les of MAD tha t have appea red in the newsp apers of late , visit the media page The people to blame when things go wrong! Sanjana Kuruvilla (President) Shahnaz Thahir (VP—Human Resource) Jake Tomy (VP—Fundraising) Gautam Thomas (VP—Training) Saju Varghese (VP-Computers) Hannah Masood (VP—Finance) Nikhila Ramesh (VP—Placements) Karthik Madhavan (VP—Public Relations)

As MAD grows, we feel the need to have a strong administration in place. MAD National now has an employee: the National Coordinator, who is responsible for administration and city co-ordination.. We will soon be employing a national accountant to ensure statutory and accounting compliance. We have a lot of activities planned this year, especially with the Placement project being formalized and the FOM program be taken up at the city level. We look forward to support from all MAD stakeholders. We look forward to you feedback and suggestions on the journey towards our common goal!

Applaud, or we’ll malign you !!! Ashish Asopa, Harsha JayaKrishnan, Teza Jose, Hannah Masood, Karthik MADhavan

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