The educational needs of Children at CHERISH are unique, in this sense that some of the children did not have any formal schooling while others dropped out of school at different levels. The dynamics of them are complex, especially with regard to provision of formal education. To address the specific educational challenges of them it is not based on an easy and quick solution. It will need a “well-planned, holistic and inter-sectorialapproach” in order to be effective.

We the CHERISH have full-time shelters both for boys and girls separately, a humble four-room live-play-study-eat space for girls and two-room live-play-study-eat space for boys in Rajendranagar and Langar house of Hyderabad city. All the children have different stories, but they all come from extremely impoverished backgrounds. Some have lived on the streets while others were born in cramped slums. Often, the family is too poor to take care of them and has to make the difficult decision to leave them at the shelter.

As the children on streets live in insanitary conditions and are prone to various infections and diseases. Therefore CHERISH, go with regular medical check-ups through the government and private hospitals for the children and are done at the full care residential centres and contact points. Individual health cards are maintained for each child.Wheneverrequired, pathological tests are conducted as per the recommendation of the doctors. We have full time volunteer doctors with us solely for this purpose. Apart from that we also invite external doctors or get our children treated by specialists at hospitals. In addition health camps are organised.

Cherish is committed to actively safeguard the children especially girl child from harm and ensuring children’s right to protection are fully realized. We take seriously our responsibilities to promote child safe practices and protect children from harm, abuse, neglect and exploitation in any form. In addition, we will take positive action and works to protect children from different kinds of harms.Our decisions and actions in response to child protection concerns will be guided by the principle of “the best interests of the child”.

The main role of counsellor in CHERISH is to create a confidential & safe platform for children to air their feelings & experiences. We actively runs the counselling part to all the childrenand it is considered as Child –friendly as it helps to solve the problems faced by children living at that place & creates a positive environment where a child can share his/her views or thoughts or feelings.

CHERISH emphasizes on activity based learning to make the kids independent. • Playing recreational and fun games with the children, while introducing them to new lessons. • Make them aware and imbibe some good habits in the children, such as, cleanliness, hygiene and greetings. • You can plan a trip with the children to a museum or zoo in Hyderabad. Such educational trips are very useful for the children where they love spending time and playing with the volunteers. • Participants should provide love, care, basic literacy, recreation and most importantly spend time and shower affection on them.