By Paramjeet Singh | President and Chairman
The new school year has started in June and this year we have improved by mid day meal program to a great extent.
Our Approach Till Now : The Mid Day Meal Program is a food and hunger relief program for students in low income and budget private schools
Our New Approach - The Mid Day Meal Program is now a holistic health improvement program and not just a food distribution program
How and Why
Applying design thinking principles,DBM evaluated why is the over all health of these students/children so low? Why do so many of kids suffer from undernourishment and low quality food supplies. How is the health of these students affected by their surroundings
We realised the following
1) Parents are unaware of nourishment principles and what constitues a good diet?
2) General hygiene and sanitation facilities are low - leading to lower immunity and regular health issues
3) Focus on physical activity and good health maintenance habits is lacking
How did we change our approach
1) We have started with conducting awareness sessions with parents and have involved nutritionists in this process. We will now we doing 1 session with parents every quarter and will give them health reports of their wards
2) We have arranged for doctors and health professionals to conduct sanitation and hygiene sessions every quarter and will have regular health checkups and BMI checkups for these kids. Children who are very close to the malnourishment zone - will be given special diets and supplements.
3) Schools will organise yoga and PT classes for the children on a weekly basis and DBM will organise sport days and annual days to propogate better physical health and good health habits.
Expected Impact
A more holistic approach will clearly affect the health of the students in all aspects. most importantly being the intervention with parents who will understand the nutrition needs of their children better. Currently, parents just handover some money to their child to eat what they want, which ends up being sometthing that tastes better(junk food, street food) but is not good for health.
The new approach will change that and impact the root cause of the program leading to overall better results, especially during non school days when the students are completely at the mercy of their parents.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
