Stop Wasting Food Start Feeding Hungry

Stop Wasting Food & Start Feeding hungry is an initiative taken by Hidayah Foundation to tackle the problem of wasteful consumption. The focus of the campaign has primarily been to educate the urban population about the staggering figures associated with food wastage in the urban setting. The campaign aims to eradicate food wastage by redirecting the distribution of consumables to the most deserving within the urban and rural setting, through active involvement of governing bodies and common man.

Hidayah Share and Care Colony

It is evident that basic facilities (Food, shelter, clothing, Medicine) are the most essential things needed for the upliftment of downtrodden. Realizing this fact through surveys, Hidayah foundation laid its efforts in finding most deserving from the region and Alhamdulillah succeeded in identifying more than 1000 families.

After providing basic facilities for these families in the places where they were living, last year (2011) we came up with the idea of Hidayah Care & share colony where such families can be gathered and can be supervised for their overall development.

This contains;

• 100 houses.
• community development center.
• self reliance center.
• Hospital for Mentally challenged.
• Madrasas etc..

Initially 40 single bedroom houses were planned and delivered in the first stage. A center for children with special needs is also in the planning.

Monthly Ration Distribution

Food is the basic necessity for a human being. Everything else comes as a secondary. There are many families who cannot afford a single meal for days. To start with any upliftment, this basic necessity should be taken care of.

The ration distribution for BPL families was started in 2007 by the Hidayah Women’s wing; they started this with 10 families, by providing a Monthly Ration kit of INR 600. The families selected for monthly ration were most deserving. The need for increase in the number of ration kits was noticed as there were many such families .

This project was taken up by Riyadh Unit and since then we are slowly increasing the monthly ration distribution to more number of families.

HF Sholarship Drive

Through one of the outcomes of Education Conference conducted by Hidayah Foundation in 2011 and additional research, it was evident that a large percentage of schools in rural parts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts are government run schools with extremely poor ratings. Children in rural areas continue to be deprived of quality education owing to factors like lack of competent and committed teachers, lack of textbooks or teaching-learning materials, and so on.

There is a trend of children in rural areas moving into private schools to have access to better education. However the burden of fees and other amenities doesn’t allow a child belonging to the BPL family to have that luxury.

Arabic | The Language

ARABIC ranks sixth in the world's league table of languages. It is spoken by more than 200 million people as a first language, most of whom live in the Middle East and North Africa. As the language of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, it is also widely used throughout the Muslim world.

Normally all other languages are being taught at an early stage but Arabic has been ignored or being taught at later stages. The earlier the child has regular exposure to a language, the higher are the chances of the child understanding and talking the language fluently and with the accent of a native speaker.

Citing the need of Arabic language, Hidayah foundation initially brought 2 trained teachers from MESCO Hyderabad and conducted classes for nearly 45 students in Mangalore.

Hidayah Medical camps

Let us prevent diseases along with cure

There are many families in Rural Areas who suffer from deseases and cannot afford to get treated. Hidayah Foundation conducts medical camps in the remotest villages with the help of Medical Institutions whom we have tied up. The doctors come to the camps and treat the patients. If there are cases which require followup treatment in hospitals, then Hidayah foundation takes this task of treating the patient free of charge in hospitals. For cases related to Optalmology, free spectacles are provided to patients.

Unlike other medical camps, we make sure that the report of the cases prevailing in the area are documented so that preventive steps can be taken with the help of this data.

Sponsor-A-Child

This project is an initiative to bring the concept of connecting abled individuals/families with needy children in a community/area and or region within the HF’s region of concentration. The primary focus of the initiative being to support the child in acquiring quality education in both religious & main-stream English/Kannada medium thereby providing an overall growth of the child to culminate in success in his/her life endeavours.

Our approach should focus on three factors that improve children’s learning:

• Increasing children’s access to equitable and quality early-childhood education and primary education, with special attention for girls
• Strengthening community involvement in education to improve learning
• Fostering an environment that enables learning through partnerships and advocacy with communities, governments, universities, donors, and other non-profits

Health Awareness Camps

Healthcare has been a priority after basic needs among the projects undertaken by Hidayah Foundation.

During the last five years HF has carried out health related programmes in various rural areas that benefitted BPL families as follows:

• Conducted approximately 15 Free Medical Camps treating more than three thousand patients, in association with leading hospitals in rural areas of Dakshina Kannada. These camps enabled to do the follow-up treatment in designated hospitals as in/out patients.
• Healthcare Insurance for more than two hundred BPL families.
• Emergency financial support to patients admitted in various hospitals.
• Treatment through health cards whereby patient gets total treatment free of cost including medicines from HF account.

Self Reliance Programs

Various projects are undertaken to empower the deprived women and make them economically self reliant. Many experiments were made in this area such as

• Home Industry,
• Tailoring Classes,
• Self help Group,
• Serving Women During Marriages etc.

In the current project, Hidayah Share and Care Colony, taken up by Hidayah Foundation more progress can be achieved in this area as the provisions will be made to empower the women.

Rehabilitation & Toilets

Reconstruction of houses for the families started in the beginning. There were many cases where there ware no toilet facilities. HF Women's Wing initiated the project on an upliftment basis, however, the scale of the need and the complexities of ownership led to re-evaluating the approach towards the issue.

An out-of-the-box thinking process led to some ground breaking ideas on a more sustainable approach. The reconstruction of houses was stopped and a new project, Hidayah Share and Care Colony started aiming at overall development. Toilets construction is going on as per the requirement.

Parenting & Teen Councelling

It is evident that today’s parents struggle a lot to raise their present generation kids, right from childhood through adolescence. Hidayah Foundation, after identifying this crucial problem, conducted several surveys in the region of Mangalore, of institutions, parents, students & particularly adolescents and gathered in lots of inputs regarding parenting.

It was evident that Muslim mothers are not trained to raise children, in the absence of fathers, which is the case in many homes where fathers are working abroad. In many cases children are spoiled with the availability of mobile and other facilities provided by parents which is not required at a younger age. Mothers struggle a lot not knowing the solutions.

Career Guidance Program

During the month of December , January & February in all the schools in Urban areas get exposure to many career guidance programs which help them to decide their choice. Students of rural areas are deprived of this opportunity. The need for this was noted and it was decided to conduct a massive campaign under the leadership of Brother Umer U.H, in the entire region.

This program includes the support material for the students to face exams, “What next after SSLC” and various skills to prepare children's mindset to cope up with pressure of the present educational system.

Nearly 40 schools are covered in this project which is conducted every year in the months of December, January & February.

Ramadhan Kit Distribition

Let us make them feel they are reached

The Main idea behind Distribution is to collect Data of BPL families residing in the remotest areas of some worst affected district, where welfare activities have hardly reached. It is very pathetic that our community & organizations hardly process the data of such families, which is very essential in planning a strategy for uplifting them, be it education, social or economy.

During the month of Ramadhan, Alhamdulillah many of us are blessed with plenty of food for Ifthar and sahari and Eid ul Fitr is celebrated with new clothes and food. On the other hand in many of the surrounding villages we find many orphans and families abandoned by father. We can solve entire communities problem, If all the organizations and individuals collect the statistics of these families & Coordinate with each other. Above steps can avoid duplication and will definitely make us reach out more deserving who are eligible for Zakat. This process of our approach to them can easily reduce begging during Ramadan and can stop manipulation of less deserving.