Youth Initiative

Target Group:  Youth living on the street, 16 - 25 years old.

Program: Beghar Yuva Pehel (Youth Initiative Program) works with homeless youth supporting their efforts to move off the streets through their empowerment. Saathi endeavors to facilitate them in solving their basic issues of lack of affordable shelters, identity, livelihood options, and denial of access to basic citizenship rights like access to health facilities.

The experience of working with them has brought before us the realization that the youth living on the streets is an urban social unit at the very bottom of the urban economic pyramid. The problems faced by the individuals are macro issues of this group and therefore to have any lasting impact the solutions need to be addressed at the macro level.

The strategies of work include mobilization and empowerment of groups on the streets to effectively help them address their own concerns; at the same time providing direct support to individuals seeking Saathi's direct help. The project takes a micro cum macro approach, working with the individual youth as well as at public policy levels and agressively addresses negative stereotypes and their impact on the homeless youth group.

Services & Supports Offered: Alternative housing, income generation activities, savings, nonformal and formal (distance) education, life skills, vocational training, counseling and therapeutic processes.

Issues being Addressed:  
Identity:
a) Individual - in terms of need for documents and self identity as an individual
b) Group identity in terms of having a positive collective identity as homeless youth breaking the negative stereotype with which they are viewed today.

Shelters: Creating and advocating for affordable housing

Livelihood: Expanding livelihood options through networking with corporates, teaching entrepreneurial skills, seeking job placements, overcoming barriers of access (especially in regards to identification).

Alternative housing - creating and advocating for affordable housing via alternative models.

Employment opportunities - teaching entrepreneurial skills, seeking job placements, overcoming barriers of access (esp in regards to identification).

Long Term Goals:  The Youth Initiative Program is building its awareness raising and advocacy efforts to ensure government systems begin to fill in the identified gaps and youth groups are empowered to pursue their own solutions. 

Complementary Areas of Engagement: Youth Initiative works towards rehabilitation of youth inmates at the Beggars' Home who have ben mistakenly or intentionally picked up on the assumption of being beggars unde the Bombay Prevention of Beggar Act (BPBA). This is often used to "clean up" the streets by removing the homeless people, even if they are not begging and may even be employed but are unable to afford housing. These youths are supported in getting their discharge and invited to participate in the Initiative's larger project and rehabilitative programs.

For a more in-depth look at issues being addressed by this project including: common perceptions of homeless youth, the complexity of the challenges being faced, and long term suggestions in resolving some of these issues, download this pdf document.