Charity Spotlight: Delhi Council for Child Welfare
Tags: India, Charity spotlight, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Delhi
Suman is a cheerful 6 year-old from Delhi, India. She has been living with cerebral palsy, a congenital disorder of movement and muscle tone that prevents her from standing without assistance. On a daily basis, Suman’s parents take her to receive physiotherapy and speech therapy. Every day presents a new challenge that the family must overcome — but it is Suman’s bright disposition that helps them persevere.
Suman is just one of more than 300,000 children that the Delhi Council for Child Welfare (DCCW) has helped over the course of its six decades of existence. A non-governmental organization established just after the partition of India in 1947, DCCW has seventeen centers in and around Delhi. One of these centers is Bal Chetna, where Suman and other children with physical and mental challenges receive assistance, while their parents learn how to help their children back at home. At Bal Chetna, Suman is able to perform her daily exercises under the supervision of trained staff, while being surrounded by other children and families who are dealing with similar circumstances.
Yet, not all children that DCCW helps are like Suman. The organization’s focus extends to also supporting:
- Abandoned or lost children by providing a safe temporary home until they are reconnected with their family or placed in a foster home.
- Physically disabled children by providing surgery and rehabilitation, including vocational skills training.
- Special needs children by guaranteeing daycare and offering parents’ support groups.
- Undereducated children by ensuring that the child is brought to the appropriate educational level and offering financial support.
- Adolescent girls through counselling and vocational training especially for school dropouts.
For Suman, and the thousands of other children that receive assistance from DCCW, one of the most important lessons learned is that they are not alone. With over 25 million people living in the Delhi area, it is the second most populous city in the world (for comparison’s sake, New York City has around 9 million). Then account for a still devastating level of poverty in India, and it becomes even harder to imagine what many of these families must cope with on a daily basis.
Thanks to organizations such as DCCW, and the smiles of children like Suman, many of these families will receive the assistance they so dearly need. CAF America is grateful to its donors who are helping to support the important work done by DCCW.
