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Fund Raising Through Learning

by Subhranil Mandal
(West Bengal, India)

I am an active member of Naihati Institute of Science and Culture, an organization involved in people's science movement for last 25 years and more. Fund raising is our every year's activity. We actually help out poor boys and girls (25 each, each year) by providing them with money for the admission in Science Group after passing the School Final (i.e. Class X). We also provide books and other necessary items for one year in advance. Because studying science group is very costly in our country. People say, not we, this first year's help holds really good for them as they could manage something (like doing private tuition etc.) from the next year.

Previously we would arrange a lottery draw or a social function etc for this purpose. We would sell tickets of those programs and collect money. Deducting the expenses for those programs we would distribute the excess money among the students. But 6 years back a unique plan came to one of our member's head. He proposed that since we were collecting money for the students we should arrange such program which would not only fetch money but also educate the students who would buy the tickets of that program. This way we could be able to get more buyer of the tickets as parents would come along with the students to watch the programs.

At this point I suggested a program where I could help to arrange it. I had completed my certificate course on Positional Astronomy from the Birla Planetarium in 2002. During that time I, being a good student, had a chance to come very close to the curator of the planetarium, Mr. Amalendu Banerjee. He was also the Director of the Positional Astronomy Centre, India at that time. I suggested that we could arrange 3 or 4 programs in 3 to 4 different auditoriums of different places based on basic Astronomy and History of our Solar System. I knew that he had tremendous slides for this topics and he is a very good presenter of the same. I even knew that he is a long follower of people's science movement himself who believes that Science should not be captivated in book but it should be sprinkled like a shower among people especially to young ones. Then, what was left? I brought his consent for the dates, I even helped him driving the overhead projector. The rest could be described as "Houseful". We could collect more than we needed that year. During this six years our collection has grown so much that we have now created a fund to assist financial support to 2 poor students every year from 2010 for medical studies.


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