Community acceptance, involvement and ownership of Hunar Ghar is fundamental to its sustainability, however we have made less progress than we would have hoped so far on this front. There are various reasons for this:

The community’s experience of schools and education are quite limited and restricted to children sitting quietly in classrooms, learning from books and taking exams at the end of each year. As Hunar Ghar adopts quite a different approach, many of the community members have the sense that the children do just come to Hunar Ghar to play. In fact this may be quite close to the truth, but we feel a lot of our play-based and activity-based methods are appropriate and useful for the children we work. The challenge is to improve these methods and make the benefits of them more clearly visible to the community, but with limited staff capacity this process may take a while.

We also envisage Hunar Ghar to be a place for the whole community, encouraging greater ownership by adults, as well as children. Some of the activities we’d like to engage adults with, include adult education, vocational skills training (we’re in the process of putting together a workshop), Self-help groups etc. Again, we’re still in the early stages of turning Hunar Ghar into a place that is a reflection of our vision and so as yet, don’t have the staff or systems established to really get going with this work.

Until recently we also gave very little individualised feedback to parents and the community about the progress of their children, with occasional village meetings giving general feedback about changes at Hunar Ghar. This was due to a combination of there being more pressing concerns at Hunar Ghar, in consideration of the staff available to us, and limited interest from parents about the progress of their children. This lack of interest and understanding of the value of education continues to be a challenge with the community we work with, but in consideration of the short-comings of the more formalised education system and the long-way Hunar Ghar has to go, this scepticism is probably justified.