Covid Work Reflections – 2

A fairly unique phone counselling project was started by us (Bhavishyath Counsellng) as part of Covid relief and is still ongoing. As we have all heard, an important difficulty around Covid is the myriad mental health difficulties that it has thrown at people. Bhavishyath has a database of more than 7500 students. During the pandemic we decided to set up a team of ‘Bhavishyath Fellows’ and call all these students to check in on them and support them as best we could. We started on June 2nd and have so far reached about 3600 of the students, and we expect to reach more than 5500 students by the end of the project (the balance are cases where we are not able to reach the student on phone due to invalid numbers etc.).

This project has proven quite successful and we are seeing lots of things come out of it. We plan to document these in more detail but some bits are below:

• we have reached so far about 20 students who lost a family member (usually a parent) to Covid. None of them seemed to be in severe depression in our conversations with them. In some cases the students opened up to the person who reached them on phone and shared their distress and grief. In one case a deeper bond got created and the student continues to be in touch with the Fellow. The student shared that her father who had passed away had a very altruistic mindset and our reaching out to her with counselling and material support at this time, made her feel her father’s spirit. In other cases, the student was not comfortable to share.
  
  We are providing emergency rations to these students’ families if needed, and we will be in touch with them once a week to continue to counsel them. Further down the line we want to create a project to support these and other students at risk of dropout in their educational future.
  
• we have come across 33 cases of students who asked for some financial support. After authenticating, we have been providing this support in the form of emergency rations that will last 1-2 months ( a groceries pack worth 3000/-). We are quite happy that we are able to help families in distress from across the district in this way. We were able to do this by using a network of local friends in different areas who co-ordinated. The groceries were bought from a local kirana shop. The students have been very appreciative. One family member said that whenever he thinks of the support we offered that came out of the blue, he feels confident that all will be well. One member of our network who has co-ordinated the delivery for us in one area, appreciated how we have been able to identify the really needy cases. We are very gratified and fulfilled with these validations.
  
• we have identified about 280 students who are at risk of dropout or have dropped out already from the educational system. In this case, we are collecting their information and formulating a project to work with as many of them as possible over time to reach more optimal educational and life directions
  
• we have also used this opportunity to gauge student interest in online courses related to career options or to their study subjects and we want to start online courses for them. The first such will be a online course for success in joining the Police and Army, which are very popular aspirations for students in the district.
  
• we’ve used the call to talk to the students or the parents about vaccinations and gathered some insight into the reasons for vaccine hesitancy in the area
  The ‘Fellows’ who we hired for a month to do this work have also gained a lot from talking to so many students and getting trained in counselling. They are also very fulfilled by seeing that they are making a contribution.
  
  We catalysed a set of postive and empoowering conversations in the district at a time of negativity, fear and isolation. This seems to be a model that can have wider applicability