10to19 COVID Response

Last year, the 10to19 Dasra Adolescents Collaborative, through the ‘Lost in Lockdown’ report, studied the ways in which the lockdown and pandemic affected the various essential and developmental aspects of the lives and well-being of young people. This report explored themes of education, livelihoods, social isolation, mental health, exposure to violence, reproductive health and child marriage, as well as access to food and health services. The study surveyed 110+ non-profit organizations serving vulnerable adolescents across the country and served as a collation of their insights and experiences- and the accounts we heard only further validated that the pandemic has severely affected adolescents and young people.

We appreciate that each organization that we work with or have worked with is working intentionally and tirelessly in this time of adversity. We commend organizations for staying on the path of impact and still finding ways to support employees and communities and also take on relief work where needed. As the 10to19 Dasra Adolescents Collaborative, we find ourselves in a position to be able to bring together some of these campaigns and efforts, collate learnings from across stakeholders, and create spaces to convene partners to continue discussions and work on each of our visions and goals for the communities we serve. At a time when most of us are grappling to devise and deploy solutions to this crisis, we believe that coming together and learning from each other is critical and valuable.

In this spirit, we are sharing below some early movement and updates, which we hope are just the beginning of a longer, sustained series of collaborative and supportive efforts –

• #BackTheFrontLine Initiative: Through this initiative, Dasra is working to mobilize support for 100 locally-led NGOs that are leveraging their deep experience on the ground and bold, community-centric and nimble approaches to drive impact at the very frontlines of India’s COVID-19 response. We have already mobilized USD 6.3M. In the coming weeks, we will scale this initiative up towards achieving that 100 NGO target.
• Amplifying community and on-ground needs: Continuing the ‘Voices from the Ground’ series from last year, we will keep up the practice of convening and consulting with NGOs, Government stakeholders, experts and adolescent girls to hear from them about the need of the hour. As part of this series, we have already initiated conversations with the Central and Jharkhand state governments to best understand where we could support and identify gaps to bring in support from our partners. We aim to keep our approach participatory and collaborative and will continue to engage 500+ Community of practice organizations and multiple funders and young people as we try and respond to emerging needs.
• Systems Change through learning & Collaborative Solutioning: To ensure we continue to centre the voices of our NGO partners working on the frontlines, we have begun to meet with a small group of partners to listen, learn and share from each other’s experience of grappling with the situation. As next steps, we will send across a survey to this group, and will also meet with a larger group of partners in the first week of June. Please do let us know by replying to us if you would be interested to be a part of these discussions. We hope these meetings will become a space for candid, real-time ideation and peer learning so that we can collectively serve our communities in the most relevant and effective ways possible.

We hope this information was helpful, and please reach out to us at 10to19community@dasra.org with questions or interest in any of the above. Take care and stay safe!