The Shelter at Dharavi is gaining greater momentum with its various creative activities and more and more new children flocking into the shelter to see what is going on and requesting drawing classes. The energy and enthusiasm is incredible making our work seem even more worthwhile and significant.

We have now already painted the new entrance to the shelter, which was a creative and collaborative mural painting produced by many of the children of Dharavi.

Now in the weeks to come we are hoping to keep on developing and improving the entire site so that the shelter grows and becomes a dynamic and multi-use space that is used by not only the children, but also the elders, youth and women. We want to see the space grow in a participatory manner, with people contributing by painting its walls, planting flowers and shrubs, building a fun play area with re-used materials and thus making the space entirely their own. Already we have seen how the children have self-organised themselves, taking charge of clearing out the space, organising the room, taking a register of all new children coming in and ensuring the doors are all locked when they leave.

Our dreams for the site now include building on what already exists and creating a vibrant space for creative social exchange, learning and interaction. We would like to have a library, a café, a play area for children and a garden and as Paul’s motivation of creating this space is a testimony to the willingness of Dharavi residents to improve their living standards, we would like this place to become a symbol of this in the way that it is created too. Using materials from Dharavi itself and using the skills and ideas from its residents we would like to assist by building a play area from disused car tyres, making a wall from glass bottles from Dharavi’s compound 13 recycling area, decorating the patio with pots made in neighbouring Khumbarwada and planting mangrove saplings in the garden as a symbol of the land where Dharavi originated.

Please take a look at our poster (below) with some of the ideas of the activities we would like to carry out at the Shelter and the costs for each activity. Your donations can make these dreams come true?

Click here to enlarge the flyer

The URBZ Team in Mumbai has embarked on a new project in Dharavi’s New Transit Camp nagar, where its office is located. Our landlord Paul Raphael has inherited a 200 m2 plot just down Dharavi’s MG Road. He built a simple structure to host activities for street children and elderly residents and asked us to help organizing activities there. URBZ is not a charity organization, but we believe in connecting deeply with people and neighbourhoods. We also see ourselves as natural connectors between local needs and global capacities.

URBZ teamsters Himanshu and Dipti started giving drawing classes to the kids every Sunday and we would like to expand our activities there. We have started meeting elderly residents and talking with them about the history of the neighbourhood. We want to archive these stories on our www.dharavi.org site. Our current projects for the Shelter include: getting drawing material, tables and chairs; providing lunch for 60 children every days; building a space to host a library and a tea shop on the site; and turning the empty space around the shelter into a clean patio for the children to play.

We have created a new section on the URBZ site dedicated to the activities of the Dharavi Shelter, where we explain what we are doing in more detail and request donations from anyone willing to support the Shelter and New Transit Camp’s residents. We are sending the link to this new page to all our friends and colleagues in the hope to raise enough to sustain the activities of the Shelter. It is amazing how much we can do with very little money. We calculate that with less than $1000 a month we could provide a simple lunch to up to 60 children every day!

Please visit our Dharavi Shelter page and if you are in Mumbai, come to visit the Shelter in person!

Toy Bazaar: Toys in exchange of memories in the old bazaar style

Team: Himanshu S, Monica Nanjunga,  Guru S., Varsha Deshikar, Yashmi  Kantak  and  Namita  Thakur.