The children’s programme consists of creative art and crafts, games, and learning activities conducted every Saturday morning for children aged 5 to 12 at Nagavalli village. Art and theatre camps with external resource persons are held in the summer months of April and May. Out-reach activities include an awareness drive about nutrition and child well-being for parents of the children who attend the programme and an annual children’s evening where they present the work from their summer camp. The children’s programmes have a strong focus on nature-based learning, and children are regularly engaged in Punarchith’s events/celebrations like World Environment Day and Soil Day. They are also engaging with work in the kitchen garden and seed conservation. Children are taken on visits/field trips to areas like the Mysore zoo, and Honnemathi (nature interpretation centre). An effort is being made to integrate healthy and local eating habits for the children by supplying snacks for their program through Honneru, our rural women’s livelihood collective.

Graam Sethu members (also alumni of ILP) Geetha and Yathish in Tumkuru, and Mahendra in Kullur village engage children in their respective areas as part of the Gram Sethu/Village Bridge effort. Geetha and Yathish (who work under the close supervision and support of Chitra and Prashanth) continue to do stellar work engaging children, and their group is called ‘Hakki Pakka Children’s Group’. They have motivated children, from ages 8 to 17, to participate in various activities that engage with environmental issues through hands-on activities such as tree planting, gardening, clearing garbage etc in their areas. In addition, the children have been taught to make short videos about various issues in their region and they have now started to upload these to YouTube channels. Mahendra has engaged and taught young children in his village about local governance, and has set up a WhatsApp group with youth to share issues and discuss local Panchayat matters.

A recent highlight of the children’s program was the Souharda/” Communal Harmony” play that was enacted on January 31, 2026. This engagement began on August 15, 2025,  and included children of all communities in the village visiting each other’s homes and places of worship (Mosque, Church, and Temple) to encourage understanding and fraternity, and combat the growing tide of communal tensions. The program succeeded in bringing children of different religions and backgrounds together, and learning things about each other they did not know before.

Response to COVID-19: Responding to the ‘learning loss’ that many children have experienced since the C-19 lockdown and school closure, we initiated a bridge program for teachers and our team members to be trained. Berty Olivera and Ritesh were the resource persons. Based on the ‘LSRW’ (listening, speaking, reading and writing) approach they trained the team to provide child-centric inputs to learning. Since then, the weekly Saturday classes at PUNARCHITH also provide inputs to enable the children to catch up with their school and formal learning needs.

Socio-Emotional Learning: In 2023, H. Suma and Sucheetra Srinivasan initiated ‘Socio-Emotional Learning’ (SEL) activities for the adolescents in the Aniketana program. Thirteen adolescents from Nagavalli and Kullur participate in this program and the impact has been remarkable; the adolescents are more communicative and confident, and their abilities to work collaboratively, and to undertake various responsibilities has improved. Along with the adolescents from Tumkur, a group of 14 youths have participated in the sports-based leadership training program at Honnemardu. Funds from the Endowments Funds are also used to provide scholarships to six deserving children so as to enable them to continue their high school or college education.