Community Based Rehabilitation Programme (CBR)
Through our work with the Juvenile Justice System in the last seven years, we have been able to reach out to many children who have been brought before the system either because they allegedly committed an offence or because they had been exploited and were in need of care and protection. Introspection into the work that we do revealed that help to these children comes after they have been through an exploitative and traumatic experience. To really help these children we had to understand the milieu in which these children live and bring about a change in the various factors that contribute to this scenario. A community-based programme reaching out to children with an emphasis on building trust and relationships, linked to a ‘Contact Center’ in the vicinity of their stay, enabling access to services, is what we felt would be most effective. With this understanding, in early 2007 we decided to work with the communities from where these children came.
Community presence is now an integral component of our work with children. Presence in the community helps to develop and maintain regular relationships with the children and their families, so that in course of time they can be motivated to go to school or vocational training. Through this initiative, children who are on the street and out of school, are helped to get back into mainstream of society and are prevented from taking their place on the street.