Taking lead for social responsibility

Social responsibility from the community based institutions alongside corporate organizations is a key factor for many development initiatives, especially for mass awareness building in regard to an issue that brings common welfare of the society. Even initiatives, which might seem to be smaller in substance, can achieve greater heights and capture the best of results. Sylhet Art & Autistic School, a cultural institution, proved that through their efforts with a self-driven initiative of their own.
Sylhet Art & Autistic School started its journey back in January 2012 and since then on it has been providing children tuitions on basic primary education, art, cultural activities and computer. But the two aspects that make this institution stand apart from other like-minded institutions are its inclusive approach for autistic children and risk reduction education for all children.
As Sylhet is considered the most vulnerable city in the country to earthquake due to its geographical location and unplanned urbanization, Sylhet Art & Autistic School has been prioritizing awareness on earthquake preparedness. As part of the process, they recently organized a large scale awareness campaign across the Sylhet Division. It was a divisional art competition on the theme of earthquake preparedness that involved 1500 students from 30 schools in Sylhet city (18 schools), Moulvibazar (4 schools), Habiganj (4 schools) and Sunamganj (4 schools). The art competition was titled "Bhumikomper Bhoy, Korte Hobe Joy" which means 'We must learn to conquer the fear of earthquake'. Divisional Commissioner Mr Ziaul Alam inaugurated the campaign during an opening ceremony arranged at Kazi Jalaluddin Girls' High School in Sylhet on October 5, 2013.
A research of Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics (BANBAIS) indicates that if risk reduction education can be incorporated with mainstream education, each year around 25 million students will become aware on disaster risk reduction issues. We can easily multiply this number to an average family size and see how millions of community members across different parts of the country can become more aware and prepare for future disasters. Basically this is the approach that worked as the encouragement for Sylhet Art & Autistic School to include risk reduction education into their education system and also during designing this mass awareness campaign. Their goal is to spread risk reduction messages across the communities through activities at the heart of which there will be children because they are one of the best means of sharing and message dissemination.
For arranging the campaign, Sylhet Art & Autistic School coordinated with Islamic Relief Bangladesh which has been working in Sylhet City Corporation for over half a decade now on community based disaster preparedness through enhancing resilience at community and institutional levels; and a crucial part of their entire programme revolves around schools and children. Alongside Islamic Relief, Oxfam, the other NARRI Consortium partner working in Sylhet and their implementing partner organization VARD contributed as equal partners in the campaign as the campaign covered all the 11 schools where the NARRI partner organizations are implementing their programme.
Under the campaign, representatives of Sylhet Art & Autistic School visited all these 30 schools and organized sessions on earthquake preparedness for the participating children in the art competition. The 105 best paintings among all 30 schools were selected for a month long art exhibition which has started in a local art gallery starting from 9th February which is also open for all and it is surely going to help the visiting children and their parents to learn more about earthquake preparedness. During his speech Md Shahidul Islam, the Deputy Commissioner of Sylhet who inaugurated the opening ceremony of the art exhibition as the chief guest, said "The District Administration is always appreciative of such laudable endeavors and will continue to ensure their support to local institutions in such initiatives."
Sylhet Art & Autistic School also developed a 2D animation cartoon on earthquake preparedness for this campaign and telecasted it through local cable channel Sylhet Cable Systems on daily basis for three months. Islamic Relief and Oxfam sponsored for the animation cartoon. At the same time, Sylhet Art & Autistic School partnered with local daily Dainik Uttar-Purba which will publish the best paintings from the campaign for the ninety days. All these activities were well-planned to reach out wider communities to spread the word on earthquake preparedness at the family level.
Sylhet Art & Autistic School intends to carry forward their learning from this campaign and organize more such events for their own community; and this commitment is summed up in the statement of the Member Secretary of the institution Mr Ismail Goni Himon, "For us this campaign is just the beginning of our long journey. We all know how vulnerable children are during any disaster situation; but they are also one of the best means of message sharing. That is why we designed this campaign around the children. Our purpose has been served as the children participating in the campaign successfully portrayed the preparedness and response measures against earthquake through their colorful drawings. Now we want to move forward and stretch our programme even further as our next plan is to arrange mobile exhibition in 100 schools across Sylhet Division and arrange more such diversified mass awareness campaigns."
Sylhet Art & Autistic School is on its way to become a model educational institution through its efforts on raising mass awareness in regard to disaster preparedness. They are already a model for other such institutions including the schools regarding how to incorporate risk reduction education within mainstream educational system. If especially the schools adopt the learning from the campaign of Sylhet Art & Autistics School and incorporate such child centered interventions into their educational extra-curricular activities, the schoolchildren will be able to learn and take the messages to their family level and grow up as aware citizens to work and contribute to national level disaster resilience.
The writer is Programme Coordinator, Climate Change & Disaster Resilience Department, Islamic Relief Bangladesh.
Email: s_r575@yahoo.com