“Life is a wheel of fortune and everyone in the world gets a chance to spin it.”
Khushboo Welfare Society(Khushboo) is giving that chance to the children with special needs with concern, care and compassion.
A while ago, few employees of a childcare organisation in Gurugram were dissatisfied with the quality of care being given to the children coming to the centre. Instances of parents withdrawing their children due to bad experiences were very frequent. Repeated requests to the management did not yield any results. All of them strongly felt that they need to do something about it.
The group of employees also discussed this with their respective families. The collective opinion was to start a care centre on our own, where things could be done in a proper manner. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. The journey started with this idea and the families offered full support for this initiative. Parents of some special children who had withdrawn their children from the care facility, also welcomed this initiative and offered their support.
It was also felt that this should be done in a structured way rather than informally. Decision was taken to form a Society and thus Khushboo was born, and this group of employees, their family members and the parents of some special children became the founder members of the legal entity.
They reached out to the parents who had withdrawn their children from the other center and shared about the plan to establish a new day care facility. Many of them gladly agreed to send their children and Khushboo started functioning from a small rented accommodation with 5-6 children.
Soon it had to move to a bigger accommodation, as the number of children kept increasing. The God was kind and in the year 2000 Khushboo was able to get land at concessional rate from Haryana Government. This came as an opportunity to expand the wings but as a challenge also. The total cost fixed by the government was around 30 lacs. The team worked hard to arrange the funds to get the land and with kind support of donors KWS arranged the funds not only for the land but also for constructing a building. 3 years back Khushboo added another block to the existing building. Over the years new facilities and services were added, many of them very special ones. Khushboo now takes care of 116 children and aspires to do still more for the betterment of special children.
A team of qualified counsellors, therapists, doctors, special educators along with all the needed facilities such as Audiometry lab, Computer lab etc. provides Life Skill development, Counselling, reading and writing skills, classes of art & craft and yoga to improve the body balance. Khushboo services are delivered through two distinct programmes.
Covid-19 has proven to be more challenging for the team as most of their students always need someone to take care of them and the first challenge was that kids were not able to come to the care centre during lockdown. Parents of some of these kids were engaged in work from home and were not able to devote full time to the kids. The management soon decided to go online and started sharing small videos of activities and requested the parents to record the videos of their wards engaging them in those activities, later they moved to live online classes. Currently the team has created a timetable and created 8 groups of kids with different capabilities and trying to continue with the same program which they were running before lockdown.
While sharing his experiences Mr Rakesh Jinsi, President Khushboo said “We do everything for the improvement of these kids and putting our best efforts to keep our engagement with the children as much as possible. This is extremely important as a break in the therapies and other interventions will lead to deterioration in the medical condition of the children. We are now a large family and wellbeing of the children is of a prime importance to us. So while we are fighting with covid-19 situation and waiting to return back to our normal life, we will try to do whatever best is possible.” He further added that “We have identified another need of these families. Their concern is that who will look after the children when the parents are gone. So we are working on providing a full time residential facility for these special kids. We have purchased a piece of land in Tauru, in Nuh district in Haryana and about to start the construction. We have completed all our paperwork and are reaching out to the Corporate sector for sponsors to help us to construct this facility. We will construct 7-8 houses where 5-6 kids will stay in each house with a dedicated caretaker.
Khushboo was established on 13 November 1995 as a non-profit organization under the Societies Act, 1860 to provide holistic care and multifarious services to people with mental and multiple disabilities with a mission to help the physically and mentally challenged to become self-reliant, realize their full potential and enhance their capabilities to the maximum possible.
Mr. Rakesh Jinsi is one of the founding members of Khushboo and President of KWS. He is an engineering graduate and has over four decades of diverse experience in the corporate, not for profit and education sector. His current professional engagements include change management facilitator, independent director of few companies and senior leadership coach.
Mr Rakesh Jinsi feels that “The society and government should focus on long term care of special children, especially those who do not have their immediate families to look after them. And this can only happen if we have compassion for this cause”.
To support Khushboo please visit: www.kwsindia.org or dial +91-124-4140885/86/87.