Rightly or wrongly when someone first told me about Volontariat I had some real misgivings about going to visit them. The thought of people in Belgium and France sponsoring children made me doubt that the organisation could actually be empowering it beneficiaries to take control of their lives, I had visions of sad advertising campaigns being run in Europe and people having their heart strings tugged like so many charities do, also how many people could the organisation help through sponsorship alone and how on earth was it a sustainable model.

Well, I have to say that I was totally wrong. I still have questions about the charity model and the organisations sustainability, I feel that there is still more that can be done to generate income and also help their beneficiaries to get the most out of the services on offer.

Ok lets look at what it was that changed my mind….

Volontariat is a Pondicherry based charity which has support organisations in Belgium and France. It was established in 1962 by Madeline de Blic a social worker from Belgium. Madeline worked within a maternity hospital in Pondicherry and in the evening she would wonder the streets and slum areas dispensing much needed medicines to the people who lived there. Before returning to France she set up the Charity and left a management committee in place to manage the charities operations. Once at home her focus was to raise funds to support the organisation and their beneficiaries in Pondicherry.

Starting with little to no funding Madeline called upon her friends and family to contribute and raise enough funds to support 50 families back in Oupalam, which is a poor ex-farming dalit community in Pondicherry. They started to deliver programmes that were driven by their ethos of not restricting their developments,

“we always leave the door open, not shut ourselves in planning actions or in fashionable programmes, on the contrary we act according to each situation.”

The charity initially started with treating children and babies with life threatening diseases which was coupled with a health prevention drive by teaching basic hygiene, they distributed milk to infants to prevent mal-nutrition and helped jobless farmers to find work.

Alongside this they also worked to improve the lives of local dalit communities, they built a new road which provided better access to the dalit huts which were situated on waste land, they worked with the local Indian government to help dalit families own their own houses, they introduced public lighting along the streets and they managed to get some of the men jobs as dustmen in the town. They also started to structure the Panchayat (village council) so that regular meetings were held and the dalit communities started to be heard.

The organisation has a strong focus on children, ensuring that their basic human rights are met. They worked hard to lower the rate of postnatal deaths, increasing levels of good nutrition and also increasing levels literacy by helping children to go to school.

For adults the organisation took donations of medicines from Belgium and helped a growing number of people by treating their illnesses. With an escalating population they started a family planning programme, educating people about the use of contraception , building their confidence and trying to put an end to the both male and female sterilization.

In 1968 the organisation secured European funding to build a community centre where the charities activities could be coordinated. The centre would also act as shelter when disasters struck, they mentioned that the dalit huts had to be re-built 4 times in 3years.

The next social problem that organisation tackled was that of leprosy. A leprosy colony existed just south of Pondicherry and in the sixties the organisation started to rebuild the mud huts and gave one young boy who had been cured of leprosy prosthetics. If you have been effected by leprosy, than in Indian society your life is pretty hopeless. Generally living in overpopulated spaces not having access to public transport and public spaces (resaurants, cafes, banks, shops etc) life was taken to begging to pay for alcohol to escape the real world.

For those who had been effect by Leprosy Madeline and her husband began a small weaving unit. After securing funds from Belgium, the organisation set about training these individuals in all weaving techinques. They started to make dish clothes and traditional mens cloth. Eventually they moved into making cotton fabric and for table cloths, wall hangings etc and started to export them to the European market. The organisation also started to give some of the pay in kind in the form of meat, eggs and vegetables, as the workers had very poor nutrition. once their physical health returned then they would receive it as pay.

Following a surge in the green movement the organisation started a farm just west of Pondicherry, Tuttipakkam. The farm took awhile to get going due to the quality of the soil. They now grow rice, sugar cane, coconut, guave trees, bananas, maize, vegetables and cotton.

When I visited the organisation, it was still thriving and the programmes have developed greatly. The charity has a proactive feel about it and it is obvious that they have done a lot of good work over the years. They are well established and well know within Pondicherry.

The staff were incredibly welcoming and proud to show me around and the children that I met had beaming smiles. This is a happy place.

Today the organisation has a large office building, big community kitchen, a comprehensive after school and training site, a childrens home, an old peoples home, a built up village, a farm, a centre for people with Leprosy with a decent sized weaving and cloth factory, a creche, a doctor’s and dentists surgery and access to social workers.

The kitchen provides lunch for over 1000 people daily. They work with the medical staff and children who are mal-nutrious receive a special diet ensuring that they remain healthy. in total the organisation sponsors 1450 children from the surrounding slum area, many of whom are orphans and works with a further 500 unsponsored children.

These children are taken through school and in the evening come to the training centre to get extra tuition, in maths, english, IT etc. They are also given the opportunities to learn extra ciricular activities that they simply couldn’t afford such as arts and crafts, music, dance, sport etc. Once a month the organisation will hold a party in the community hall for all the kids that had a birthday in that month, ensuring that everyone gets included. In the summer they hold summer camps for the children making sure that the kids are looked after.

The training centre also gives those children who drop out of school, unemployed adults and women that have been abused a chance to learn news skill that could lead to paid work. They run training in carpentry, embroidery, tailoring, jewelry making etc. A lot of the products that they make are sold overseas and in the their local shop.

More recently the organisation set up 3 creches which work with 140 street children under the age of 5. Parents can go to work and leave their children in the creche, the kids will be bathed and been given breakfast each morning.

There were rooms for 30 homeless old people within the old people’s home in the main centre and rooms for 5 homeless old people within the leprosy centre.

The medical centre administers basic first aid and runs programmes for nutrition, a herbal dispensary, it tackles alcoholism and sponsors cardiac surgery. They work closely with a cardiac surgeon from Chennai and every year they run a cardiac camp detecting children with heart problems, so far they have saved the lives of 28 children.

The charity has not been successful in the pursuit of all it’s income generating activities over the years, they have launched and closed quite a few craft based enterprises including wickerwork and rope making using the fibers from coconuts. They have also unsuccessfully tried to set up a animal breeding programme where they reared chickens, cows, rabbits pigs etc.

Though the organisation is doing some fantastic work there is still more that it can do. I got the impression that they were uncomfortable generating an income from there activities and re-iterated that they were a charity. It would be great to see them take advantage of their enterprising activities imagine how more they would be able to do!