Celebrating Tamil New Year at an old age home, the faces of the young volunteers brim with satisfaction as the elder ladies have a whale of a time with games, celebrations and music.
Social service might be a hard cause to champion, but they are here to promote it — Mayudharan, Venkat and Yogi, who run a social service venture called colours2life.
A new goal
Colours2Life is a non-governmental, non-profit social organisation started by co-founders Mayudharan and Venkat Raj a year ago from today. They had always harboured an inclination towards social service and finding methods to bring a positive change.
During the NSS camp in his college, Mayudharan realised that the service being done was not catering specifically to the needs of the people they met. The lack of direction and problem-specific solutions among such organisations led him to begin this entrepreneurial venture.
Mayudharan, the founder member, elaborates: “Our primary aim is to initiate as many youngsters into social volunteering as possible. Most of today’s youth want to come ahead and lend a helping hand towards making our society better. However, due to lack of resources, direction or company, they opt out or hesitate to begin social service. I want to tell them that the contribution of a single person too can make a remarkable/noticeable difference to the society. My aim is to put as many of them in touch with social volunteering as possible. To encourage them to materialise their volunteering ideas, we provide inputs, workshop content, planning, materials and funding if needed for different activities such as blood donation, organ donation, child education, women empowerment, skill development workshops among the underprivileged, and many such social initiatives.”
Since the formation of the organisation a year ago, the volunteers at colours2life have played a remarkable social part by participating in multiple activities.
They have visited villages and talked to women to identify their specific social problems, offering solutions and resources to rectify them.
Among other activities, the volunteers have organised awareness workshops and tuitions in slums called “Refining Dreams” classrooms — where the four-fold objective is to promote child education and opportunities, financial and social empowerment of the elderly, improving hygiene, cleanliness and environmental awareness parameters and helping the youngsters discover their unique skills and talents.
These volunteers visited the Kilpauk Medical Centre and gave a facelift to the children’s ward by making it cleaner, more hygienic and painting the walls with vibrant coloured cartoons. A volunteer says, “The children not only felt more comfortable afterwards, but they were also reported to have faster recovery due to the improved ward conditions.”
Looking ahead
Currently, they are working towards developing a model of groups of people adopting a village and aiding their education and development with both finances and resources. Another volunteer, Grace, teaches children at government schools how to convert trash to treasure, through junk art and craft workshops.
Yogi says, “The initiative to start and take ahead such causes came about because we have been passionate about social change and want to actualise youngsters ‘wish to make a positive social contribution.”
With an organisation so diverse as to have their fingers in such causes as elderly empowerment, orphan education sponsorship, social awareness and creative skills development simultaneously, volunteering for a cause today has surely become easier than ever before!
