SAIIER 2018:Lilaloka

Last School		Nandanam Kindergarten
Lilaloka

The vision of Lilaloka (“the universe of Play”, in Sanskrit) is to be a Self-Learning and Resource Centre for the Child. Lilaloka offers various activities based on self-discovery and spontaneous self-learning through Play, which allow the child to reveal himself as an individual and amongst others, without competition or judgement.

Lilalola is open to all children, schooled or not, having difficulties or not, beyond all categorizations and allowing mixes of ages. The team of Lilaloka wants to work in collaboration with schools and parents, considering each child as an evolving being.

This year, a first room dedicated to activities has been completed (24 m² indoors + 40 m² terrace). This room will be fully functional for the next academic year and will allow us to offer more activities in better conditions. Our main focus went on conducting activities on the premises, building up a team of part-time facilitators, and initiating a concrete collaboration with the schools and Marion for children with specific needs in order to see how Lilaloka can participate in catering for the support needed in this field. Fundraising, communication, project coordination keep representing a big part of the work.

Areas of work in 2016– 2017:

Completing Lilaloka ‘Room 3’ and landscaping the campus
Team-building and sharing ways of working within the vision of Lilaloka
Fundraising and communication
Working with the children who benefit from Lilaloka’s activities, including homeschoolers, children who can only partly follow the schedule of the existing schools, long-term guests, and parents who joined in the sessions as participants.
Making contacts with the education community in Auroville to get better insight into which areas Lilaloka can be supportive and collaborative with the existing systems.

Activities of the year:

1. Completing Lilaloka ‘Room 3’ and landscaping the campus

The room was completed on 6th of March 2018: electrical connection, cement flooring, lime plastering, windows and doors. The total cost of this project was Rs. 3,521,529. A completion certificate was issued.

This room cum terrace can host a group of 12 children. It is used for collective and individual activities and allows us to conduct at least 2 activities on the compound at the same time, with clear delimited spaces for a smoother organization.

For the management of the garden and ongoing cleaning of the space, we employed a gardener for 5 days a week from September 2017 onwards. We are now able to conduct more activities in the garden, as it gets cleaned and set up. The gardener, the caretaker together with the children built a new entrance gate out of bamboo. The children fully participated from cutting the bamboo to transporting it to constructing the gate.

For next year, as short-term goals we plan 1) to get the water pipe to the entrance of the room, so that we have an easy access to water, 2) to get a permanent electrical connection as the existing one is only temporary.

2. Team and functioning of Lilaloka

Management of Lilaloka:

This year, while Rajan left the team in a harmonious way in order to dedicate himself fully to his own project, we recruited two new persons: 1) Jegan, who now works one third of the time with us, as a care-taker (administration, helper for Anna during Nature’s Theater sessions, workers' management); 2) Mani who works 5 days a week as a gardener. We are very happy with the team, as it is an efficient and down to earth team which allows us to run Lilaloka more smoothly. Our aim for next year is to be able to employ Jegan half of the time.
Accounting-wise, we stopped working with Mukti accounting in October 2017, as Kasturi, a friend of the project offered to do this work for us for free. She also manages better the accounts and this has reduced our expenditures.

Team of facilitators:

Anna offered 4 half days of Nature’s Theatre, and coordinates with the support of Yvelise the joining and conducting of activities by new facilitators. We integrated each person in a very step-by-step way, in order to build up on a strong foundation, aligned with the vision of Lilaloka.
Out of the work of starting to building up a team of facilitators, a start of collaboration with the schools, and collaboration with Marion for children with special needs, what emerged was a need for a new full-time team member. The perfect solution presented itself: Marianne, one of the founders of Lilaloka, approached us in order to join the team again, both for activities with children and management of Lilaloka. As the workload is consistently increasing, it really comes at the right time for us. We sent a request for a maintenance from City Services to HRT and BCC, as this is the condition for Marianne to be able to work with us. Her role will be: 1) Coordinating activities, children registration, parents contribution, and contacts with the schools, assisted by Anna; 2) Supporting Yvelise with the administration, fundraising, communication; 3) Offering individual sessions for children who need special attention through relaxing shiatsu massage and tuition for learning disorders (which she was trained in while at Transition School); 4) Establishing a database of resources for children with specific needs available within Lilaloka, in Auroville at large, and later in wider India (this will be done in close coordination with Marion).
3 new part-time facilitators started to offer activities at Lilaloka: Jitta offers 2 sessions per week of discovering medicinal plants. She will offer 3 half days next year. Megan offers 2 half days as a support to Anna on Monday and Tuesday, as well as one half day of self-discovery through play. Next year, she will offer an activity named “rock and water” which she was trained in. Altogether, she will offer 3 to 4 sessions per week. Marianne offers half a day of relaxing shiatsu massage for children who need it. Next year, she plans to offer more time and possibilities (see above point).
Emanuele, artist and cartoonist, offers half a day of presence in Lilaloka. During this time, he illustrates Savitri for and with children. Children who are interested join him, in a very spontaneous way. Emanuele is not a facilitator per se but offers his skills, presence and passion for/knowledge about Savitri.
Sarah, who is a pre-newcomer living in Sadhana Forest, has started to offer volunteering work and will keep on doing so next year for 2 mornings a week. She will be a helper especially taking care of individual children who have a need for special attention, during times of collective activities.
Ishta, who has been offering Land Art in various outreach schools and centres, will start to offer half day of Land Art at Lilaloka from July 2018 onward.

3. Fundraising and communication

We kept our Facebook page up-to-date with events and pictures, as well as our program of activities on the website.
We started to send out regular newsletters (October 2017, February 2018) online through MailChimp.
We created a page for Nature’s Theater activity under AVYA website, as we find it is a practical tool for Auroville children to know what activities are available.
Introducing and sharing the vision and aims of Lilaloka with various individuals has been ongoing.
We submitted a project to SAIIER (Rs. 74,400) in order to receive help to run Nature’s Theatre and we received Rs. 31,100. We were very grateful and happy about this. This request for funds led us to meet with the School Board, with Mary from Transition School, and with the SAIIER Board, which acknowledged the need for a project like Lilaloka in Auroville.
One individual has started to donate to Lilaloka regularly around Rs. 2,000 per month.
We received a few small donations from parents of long-term guest children.
We were donated a printer by Shona which greatly helps the administrative work.
Total amount raised in 2017–2018: Rs. 85,000.

What we still need to fundraise:

- To complete the building: 50 Lakhs Rs.

- For educational equipment: 20 Lakhs Rs.

- For running costs: 4 Lakhs Rs. per year ideally including maintenance of Marianne.

4. Working with children and making contacts with the education community in Auroville

We regularly received mixed-aged groups of children (from 3 to 12 children per session) comprised of home-schooled children, children needing a few months break from school, long-term guests' children (25% approx.), and a few children from Kindergarten in the afternoon.
We started to offer sessions for children from Transition School in need of special attention. We are working on increasing our capacity to receive these children in terms of facilitators, and in collaboration with Marion from the supportive learning group.
Transformation Kindergarten sent a group to Lilaloka every Wednesday morning for Nature’s Theater and discovering medicinal plants.
Anna offered 4 sessions of training in Nature’s Theater for teachers of Oli School.
We had parents as participants who came from a very academic backround and have very creative children. They asked to stay to open their creative channel and fill themselves with ideas, techniques and material to be able to enjoy creating at home.
We re-introduced ourselves to the School Board, as well as SAIIER Board, in order to clarify the roles and objectives of Lilaloka.
We had 2 meetings with parents of the children who came to Lilaloka.

Outcomes and objectives for the coming year:

We have been able to offer regularly 5 half days of activities to around 20 children (some came to all the programs, some only to 1 or 2). We now have a better overview of the needs and possibilities, and we will be able to offer 12 sessions of the various activities per week for regular groups. We constituted a team of facilitators for next year, and prepared the program so that we can start in July and announce it in time.

We wish to continue to build on the collaboration with the schools and Marion in regards to children who need special attention. There are several requests of facilitators who would like to join next school year; we will continue adding new activities and new facilitators. This year we dedicated time and effort to find ways of collaborating with schools and SAIIER, and we are happy about the direction it is taking.