About Towards Future in 6 Dum Dum Park, Keshab Apartments, Kolkata

Universal education is a great slogan. The biggest challenges to it are however more widely rooted in social structure and economic conditions than the slogan may suggest. Education in India hardly glitters if one takes a long hard look in it. Apart from rampant commercialization and serious doubts about quality of educational services of the many mushrooming institutions, the one important problem that stares at the conscience of the society is stark economic realities for millions of our citizens. At the top end we have excellence defined in terms of professional success in socially respected careers and entrepreneurship. That is contrasted by huge scope of reaching the socio economically weaker section of society, large scale development in infrastructure, delivery and content of school education.
We, at Towards Future want to address this in our small way. We want to be partners in the current drive for Universal Education for those, who are deprived to have this due to their economic distress and actually make a difference in lives of children and their families below poverty line by bringing education to them. We have identified two areas to be centre of our immediate focus. We want to provide quality pre-school education for the very young and we want to run an educational resource centre for school children providing complementary educational support until they appear for the Public Examination at end of School i.e. Xth standard.
It is imperative that Universal Education cannot be achieved without solid advances in women empowerment. While issues of gender have always been at the centre of huge debates on questions of identity politics, it is hardly a matter of debate that empowerment of women at the grass root level has to be achieved for real changes in lives of children and the family. Towards Future has developed programs which changes lives of women by providing training for self employment and running awareness programs on domestic and community health.
The concept of Sustainable Development seems to finally have been accepted in the public domain through consistent awareness campaigns and high visibility environment debates. But the change seems to be more at policy level and is often in conflict with frenzy of development. The green voice may be a fashionable thing to be seen to listen to, but when it comes to direct field level work involving communities in areas with vulnerable natural resources. One also cannot ignore issues like rapid deforestation and the overall centrality of human needs instead of concerns for environment sustainability.
Towards Future wants to join those in the struggle for establishing prominence for Environmental issues and development of pragmatic real Environment friendly methods of economic activities for communities in regions in need of great efforts towards conservation of natural environments.