The Village Project

About This Project

The recently developed Village Project epitomises our values here at The Youth Project. We knew how much we valued community, teamwork and opportunity and this idea encapsulated everything. The concept is simple – create a community centre in an impoverished area that is easy to build and maintain consisting of different tent based pods. These pods would each be allocated for a specific purpose and to develop a particular skill. The idea is to give young people a space where they can be creative, learn and do the things that they love most whilst working to achieve their ambitions in life.

Examples of tents would be a dance tent, a computer tent, a cooking tent, a music studio tent, a library tent etc. Ideally these would all be provided along with a teacher at certain times so the community could learn how to use any equipment or work on developing basic skills. In the long run we see large companies adopting tents appropriate to their craft, for example a music record label could adopt the music studio tent and a dance company could adopt the dance tent where they would maintain the tent, provide the equipment and perhaps event provide part time teachers where possible.

For the moment we have realised that even a simple idea like this has to start somewhere, and that is why we have begun our venture by building a community centre in Ahmedabad, where our partners Manav Sadhna will be able to maintain it regularly and provide staff. This community centre is not in the style of the Village concept but it also acts as a school during the day and provides two meals a day to the pupils. This particular project has been funded by the fundraising events of TYP UK and TYP USA, with help from Manav Sadhna and the school was opened on October 2016 with a visit from Bollywood Star and TYP Goodwill Ambassador Ankit Tiwari. See our blog post for more information on the opening of our school.