At 21, I began volunteering at a home for at-risk children. I soon realized how disinterested the kids were in learning. I became curious & started to observe them. They hardly played. I noticed how the lack of play was building up the frustration and angst in these kids. Play enables children to grow as human beings who are emotionally stable and intellectually better equipped to solve problems.
The Opentree Foundation uses play to educate and empower at-risk children, addressing poor learning outcomes and lack of essential life skills. Started by simply distributing ethically good games to children, we now run our Play programs across Maharashtra, impacting 77,054 children everyday. Our partnerships team facilitates expansion, while continuous research ensures contextually relevant play materials and engaging play sessions. Our Outreach Play Workers deliver engaging sessions focused on building essential life skills such as Critical Thinking, Communication, Problem Solving, Resilience and Decision-making. We conduct transformative power of play training for the government and low-income private school teachers and caretakers from community organizations to enable them to become skilled Play Practitioners and use it to address students’ developmental needs in their everyday classroom teaching thus impacting the teacher-student bonding, creating safe learning spaces for all.
Our work has been spreading through amazing partnerships and collaborations with the government and nonprofits across the state of Maharashtra.
We provide them with our programs, play materials and the entire know-how of Play, while the partners provide us with their infrastructure and space to set up our play centers. Our foundation is providing these programs and training to the children and teachers entirely for free. We sign clear MOUs with all our partners and renew them on a yearly-basis. These MOUs spell out the deliverables for each of us, thus ensuring that our play programs get delivered diligently.
The idea for us is to build a strong mindset change first about Play and its deep relevance, within this spectrum and eventually push for policy change at the government-level.
We welcome potential partners to have access to our play programs. After a thorough assessment, partners receive an orientation and access to our play-based curriculum and session plans focused on Life Skills. We provide curated play materials with regular replenishment. Volunteer participation is open after background checks and facilitation training. Our work updates can be seen on our website.
