Raindrop Campaign

Raindrop Campaign is a UK registered charity 

Our aim is to help children in disadvantaged and neglected communities in India to get a chance of a better life through education.

We currently have six trustees all committed to our cause and performing their duties alongside day jobs. We have no paid employees and our only expenses mainly relate to fund raising events, admin charges to online platform providers such as Virgin Money Giving.

Our ethos is to give as much of what we raise in donations to the cause we support

Our trustees are also donors to the charity and have in the past helped to cover major expenses of the running of the charity. Thanks to gift-aid which enhances donations from UK tax payers by 25%, donors can be confident that all of their donations go towards the cause.

Raindrop began as an idea in September 2011 on our return from India. My husband and I had been financial donors to a small Indian charity that for over 25 years has devoted itself to educating underprivileged children in India.

In late August 2011, we had our first opportunity to visit one of their schools in the remote town of Igatpuri a few hours drive from Mumbai. It was a boarding school for up to 100 children who are either hearing impaired or mentally challenged. Funded purely on charitable donations, the school desperately needed financial certainty.

Children with special needs crave familiarity and continuity. The school needed to find a way to attract and retain qualified, compassionate staff  to teach life skills to the children so they can grow into self-sufficient, independent adults, not deemed a burden on their families.

Raindrop Campaign was set up in February 2012 with a view to supporting projects such as the one in Igatpuri.  By focusing on just one project at any one time, we can make a meaningful difference to lives.

Since then we have donated £55,000 towards creating a Teachers’ Welfare Fund, repairs and maintenance of the school building and to repaint the dormitories to make the living environment more vibrant. We also helped populate their library with Marathi language books for the children and donated toys, clothes and other goodies.

Our other contributions were:

• We helped enlarge their donor base in India by creating greater awareness of their cause;
• We made great strides in making the school more able to self-fund itself for its wage costs;
• Provided input on measures the school needed to take to improve outcomes for the children and staff.

 

The search for a new project to support

In 2016, the trustees of Raindrop Campaign decided it was time to find a new project to support. In 2016 completed our due diligence and formally agreed to support a project in Bangalore focusing on children of migrant labour in slums.

These migrant families travel from other parts of India, do not speak the local language and eke out a living as rag pickers, labourers on a daily wage and domestic workers. Their children miss out on schooling because the free government schools are entirely in Kannada, the local language, which these children do not speak.

Samridhdhi Trust is providing intensive “bridge” schools for these children teaching them English, amongst other languages, so that after a year they are ready to join a mainstream school. They also ensure better outcomes by providing the children with nutritious meals, after-school support once they have been mainstreamed and finishing schools to help chances of getting a job.

We will also be partnering with Let’s Do Some Good Foundation, a platform for like-minded organisations and individuals who want to collectively bring about positive social change in a number of areas including education for underprivileged children, life skills and employability, mainstreaming of differently-abled children and vocational training.

 

Rohini Rathour
Founder and Trustee