Cap Foundation (ex-Clothes Bank)

SPONSOR'S MESSAGE:

CAP Foundation began working with the Andhra Pradesh Police Department nine years ago to remove children-at-risk from hazardous conditions and rehabilitate them into mainstream education through the innovative bridge school concept; it has gone through a natural evolution over the years. One thing led to the other and before any conscious realization, CAP Foundation found itself working with adolescents and youth at risk working in hazardous conditions in general and girl child in particular, deprived of access to education or inability to continue high school education. That's when the idea of integrating adolescents into our programs took shape. Thus was born Teen Channel - an initiative that links learning and livelihood through community learning centers to address their academic, educational, social, life skills and work place readiness in addition to providing learning opportunities at their own pace. Today, thousands of children and youth have rebuilt their lives through Bridge Schools and Teen Channel programs.

When the issues of children and teens arise, can the families be left behind? CAP realized the need for providing economic sustenance to families that were dependant on their children's income. This need led to the genesis of micro credit finance program that offers loans to parents who need capital to set up a small-scale enterprise. The program has been a stupendous success with a 98% repayment record. The life altering stories of the beneficiaries of this program are truly inspirational.

While Asha Kiranalu, A CAP PLAN International partnership concentrates on basic rights, care and protection of children, CAP Teen Channel is dedicated to the fulfillment of educational and livelihood needs of the teens. For the families of the children, there are programs--self-sustainability program and micro credit program -- that focus on the financial independence of men and women belonging to the non-bankable sector, families of working children. CAP's livelihood resource program, with support from Pepsico Foundation reached out to the Tsunami affected youth and empowered them to regain sustainable livelihoods as an alternative to traditional fishing activities.

Ek Mouka provides access to market oriented livelihoods opportunities to the disadvantaged youth and women through Locally sustainable livelihood hubs.

The Post MFA employability skill-training program was implemented to reskill retrenched garment workers outside India, with support from ACILS/ USAID.

As it happened, CAP also made inroads into everyday lives of the underprivileged with new programs like Suraksha Dhara - The water project, aimed at providing safe drinking water to communities that were suffering from water borne diseases due to lack of municipal water supply.

From children, teens and adults -- education, employment and basic civic amenities - CAP touched the lives of people like always but on a much larger canvas. Today, CAP has made its strong presence felt not only in all parts of India but also Srilanka, Vietnam, Nepal and Bangladesh, with its education, employment and rehabilitation programs for the underprivileged of all ages.

The CAP Foundation initiated in 1997 has evolved into an innovative public private partnership to demonstrate a model to address poverty alleviation through linking learning and livelihood needs of working children and youth at risk to equitable and promising market oriented employability opportunities.

The Foundation has demonstrated a model of Public Private Partnership between corporate - NGO - government - citizen groups in the field of child labour and rehabilitation, quality education for both in school and out of school children as well as providing market oriented employability skill development training for older adults. The Foundation model has developed a very strong resource base not merely in terms of creatively mobilizing monetary resources but also series of other resources including successfully tested facilitation modules, training of trainer's modules, professional technical support for market oriented livelihood program development, volunteers, business mentor networks, police involvement in protection and rehabilitation, alumni and community goodwill.