Grape Meets the Awesome Library Team of Akshara Foundation

For those of you who do not know about Grape, the yak, you may want to read a little about why a baby yak has travelled all the way from China and is currently spending time at the Pratham Books office. Grape is part of the Yak Around the World Campaign and is visiting changemakers around the world. Before we send her off to another changemaker, we decided to take her to meet the lovely people at the Akshara Foundation.

On 16th October, Grape was invited to attend a training being conducted for librarians at the Govt. Urdu Model Primary School on Tannery Road, Bangalore. With 45 enthusiastic librarians in the room and 4 eager teachers of the library team, the session started. The library team has planned two activities per month for all the libraries and will start this initiative with the Shivajinagar libraries. The librarians were asked to discard their roles of librarians and be children at this session and learn and participate like they would want the children at their libraries to participate. Arvind Venkatadri, head of the library team, let his other colleagues take over after announcing that magic does exist and that these activities would transform the libraries into magical places.

The session was a multilingual session where Urdu, Kannada, Hindi and English were spoken with equal ease. After the manuals were handed out in the preferred languages, Ramesh, Latha and Nirumpama (from the Akshara library team) did a fantastic job of explaining the entire process.

Grape watched on as….

“Oh, what fun it is to be a librarian”, said Grape!

But we shall stop talking and let the pictures do the talking. Read the captions beneath the pictures for a little more information.

So, when Grape asks us – “What did you do to change the world today?”, our answer would be – “help create magical libraries with the help of Akshara Foundation”.