City teacher takes quality education to underprivileged students

Having started her career as a teacher, teaching computer science at engineering colleges in Chennai, RM Vanathi has always believed that education is the key to changing one’s life, irrespective of his or her socio-economic background. “Soon as I started earning even from the start of my career, I began helping children who couldn’t continue their schooling because they couldn’t afford it. Even after I switched to a job in Information Technology (IT), I kept helping several children in the same manner for several years. It was in 2014 that a few friends joined me in start an NGO, through which we could all support more children. We were all particular that we named the organisation as‘That’s My Child’, as our intention is to treat every child as one of our own,” recollects Vanathi, the founder.

While the group’s activities initially remained gathering funds and supporting children from underprivileged backgrounds pay their school fees, Vanathi says she soon realised it wasn’t helping the kids enough.

“We understood that paying the fees alone wasn’t enough to encourage the children to attend school. That was when we started teaching kids Science, making it fun through experiments and practical learning. We also began English and Math classes for government school students over the weekends through volunteers (who are engineering students studying in Chennai and other cities),” she asserts.

Over the years, the organisation expanded its teaching programmes from Chennai to Coimbatore, Pollachi, Tiruvannamalai and Tirunelveli. It currently works with seven schools across the state. Besides that, the group also offers career counselling, scholarships for refugee kids, and opportunities to learn sports and arts. “We found in rural parts of Tiruvannamalai, the children don’t have any exposure to the world outside. So, we began training about 30 girl students from a government school in IT and equipped them with technical knowledge of computers. This opens up their world and helps them realise they can learn and work to make a difference,” she adds. The organisation has also worked in remote locations, wherein they worked with children whose parents worked in the circus and travelled across towns. “Our aim is to make these students continue their education. We are soon planning to expand our programmes to more schools across Tamil Nadu,”Vanathi remarks.