“The spirit of service is the heart of humanity.”– Lailah Gifty Akita
 
All students of Grades VI to IX do 12 hours of Community Service for a cause that they choose, and they are required to put in consistent effort. The school helps them coordinate with the institutes they want to volunteer for, and involve the parents in supervision of the same.

1. Hadapsar Karuna Badhir Vidhyalay, Hadapsar Pune:

As a part of the program, the Grade VI students worked with Hadapsar Karuna Badhir Vidhyalay. This non-profit organisation caters to the academic and socio-economic needs of students with hearing and speech impairment. 

The students of The Kalyani School conducted a Computer Literacy Workshop for the students. They taught the students to use Google Search , use MS Paint, MS Word effectively and gave an introduction to MS Excel for their day-to-day needs.

They also Painted the boundary wall of the school and planted a number of pots to improve the environment of the school campus.

2. Making students aware of social-cultural realities:

• Bharat Yatra by Shri Kailash Satyarthi against child abuse: The Kalyani school hosted Nobel Laureate, Shri Kailash Satyarthi’s team and our students participated in the march. They also sought to spread awareness through a street play, posters and songs.

 
• Earn for your country project: Students earned money by doing extra household chores. The money collected was used for upgrading the cafeteria infrastructure of a ZP school.

3. Opportunities for budding Social workers to inculcate volunteering and leadership qualities in them:

As community service is an integral part of our curriculum, we facilitate opportunities within the school, for our students to satisfy their zeal to do something for the community in general, and the society at large.

• Our students bake cakes and cookies as part of their Home Science lessons. These students are allowed to sell their products to the parents and staff and the proceeds from the sale are spent on philanthropic projects.
• Our senior students who love teaching, volunteer after-school hours for teaching language skills to our first-generation English learners of Grade III. Every week, batches of Grade IX and X students alternate between Wednesdays and Fridays, facilitating language learning lessons for Grade III students. The volunteers work extensively with these students, who hail from non-English-speaking backgrounds. The volunteers follow the curriculum that has been designed keeping in mind the needs of these students. They also provide feedback after every session. This has inculcated in them a sense of responsibility and accountability.
• Students are also involved in composting of wet waste, paper recycling, reduction of use of plastic and garbage segregation. This helps them develop green values which is of prime importance in today’s world.
• An Organ Donation drive has been done by Grade IX For Mad About Health and Wellness.
• Apart from these, we also have Primary class students who display and sell their artwork during our Mad About Events. These include paper cards, bookmarks and paintings.

4. Measures taken by school to ensure sustainability of each project year on year:

We are extremely conscious of our responsibilities towards our surroundings. This has led us into initiating and sustaining environment or eco-friendly projects and products, as an institution as well as inculcating the same values in our students. Some of our projects aligning with the same are as follows:

• Composting: We collect wet garbage from our cafeteria and classrooms. This is then used for making compost. Our gardens and lawn use the final product as organic manure.
• Digitisation: Most of our processes and documentation are digitised, so as to avoid wastage of paper. We try our best to keep paper usage to the bare minimum by encouraging our students and staff to recycle and reuse.
• Water Harvesting: We understand the need and necessity to conserve water and hence we have introduced water harvesting as a part of our Environmental Education curriculum. Our students have designed projects based on the same and understand the working of these projects. Our assemblies are also around these topics, which further help our students to learn and understand the importance of saving water, through various means.
• Festivals and other celebrations: Our enthusiastic parents are our largest pool of resources. Very often they conduct workshops for our students teaching them to make colour pigments out of husk, coconut husk, dry leaves and flowers. Our curriculum also ensures that our students are taught to make eco-friendly Ganesha idols, rakhis, crackers and decorative buntings. This enables us to celebrate festivals responsibly.
• Earn For Your Country: To encourage our students to value dignity of labour, we have introduced ‘Earn For Your Country’ – a money box project. Our students collect the money that they get as a reward for doing odd jobs or chores, from their parents or neighbours. The money collected is accumulated in the school, at the end of the academic year. This is then used by the school, to rebuild or improve a municipality school in the neighbourhood.