Activities of SAMAR

SAMAR has been working for youths for last 10 -12 years. It has been successful in developing its vision after long and complicated process that youths must be sensitized and engaged in social issues existing around them. We believe that youths are vehicles of social change, therefore they must be sensitive and come near to the mosaic of social issues.
For the last four years, we have understood and appreciated substantially the issue of quality education of underprivileged children. We encouraged our youths to contribute in this field through Voluntary Teaching Programme. Now this programme is running successfully in slum settlements of Patna.
Similarly, we have encouraged youths to culturally express themselves through various art forms and raise the awareness of society for social issues. In this process, youths have used various media like theatre, music, paintings, collage making, etc.
Now it is ripe time for detail planning of our activities, renew old ones, add new activities and get deeper and spread them to larger sections of society.

SAMAR Voluntary Teaching Programme
The organization currently runs a programme named SAMAR Voluntary Teaching programme in which we select an area which is socially, economically ignored and underserved due to heavily skewed process of development in post liberalization era in India. People are compelled to live in abject poverty in several pockets of urban and sub urban areas of our society.
In city of Patna there are 110 slums (notified by the Governmemnt : Slum Policy, 2011, Govt. of Bihar) and nos. are increasing. After regular interaction with inhabitants of the selected areas, we form a non formal teaching centre for regular and continuous educational and creative activities. The youths associated with SAMAR visit these centres 4-5 days in a week and interact with the children in their own language. Every evening, children huddle around the volunteers in pursuit of joyful learning. Along with this activity our relationship with the community is helping us to clearly understand the socio-political and economic reasons behind mushrooming growth of slums in Patna. We are trying our level best to engage ourselves in improving their quality of life. Currently there are six such centres in different localities of Patna. We hope as the no. of volunteers will increase in coming days the coverage of this programme will stretch to all the slums of Patna.

SAMAR Yuva Mohalla
As we all know that around first week of February, 2016 there was a burning debate on nationalism and nation. Everyone was involved in organizing protest march and candle march but SAMAR was the only organization which felt that it is the need of the hour that we initiate the debate among youths. It is the youth who needed to be aware about the situation more than anyone else. We were not in a process of proving anyone right or wrong but aware them what the situation is and try to know their opinion on such political issues. Our approach for YuvaMohalla was to visit mohalla to mohalla and interact with youths. The first mohalla meeting was organized on 27th February 2016 in suburban Muslim locality called Phulwarisharif.
Interestingly, these sessions are convened in anybody’s home who is committed to build social or political harmony in the locality. In this activity SAMAR invites people who have expertise to spread the message of harmony through various media of expressions. Sometimes they talk with youths, sometimes they recite poems and sometimes they play nukkad natak (Street Plays) for them.
Yuva Mohalla at Patliputra Colony, Patna

Youth Connect Programme
 This is the most basic work SAMAR has been involved into. Since inception we used various tools to reach to the whereabouts of youth. While engaging them in meaningful discussions we involved them in various creative activities. Summer Camp – We started with Summer camp in the year 2007 with students of Kamla Nehru Shishu Vihar, Patna. In the year 2009, students from many students of various schools participated in such camps. The objective was to interact with students and provide them a platform to learn about different things which is generally not included in the school curriculum. The students would participate in various activities like origami, mask making, essay writing, storytelling and painting etc. Study Circle, workshops, lecture series and seminars are other activities we have used and are using to connect with schools an college going youths.

Cultural Activities

Samar has always felt closer to this initiative since its very inception. We always believed that Art & Culture is not only the most expressive medium available to the mankind but it is also a tool to bring people closer and for exchange of thoughts.

Theatre – Stella Adler once said "The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation." So it is with SAMAR. The spirit, on one hand, was to revive theater culture among youths which lost its charm in favour of internet and television and on the other, to establish the importance of theater as tool of education. The effort was to create awareness about theater in government schools of Patna often left out by mainstream theater groups. SAMAR volunteers worked together to educate the importance of theater, trained the students to act and prepared them for performances on the celebrated stage of the city. The first theater festival, Tamseel, was organized, in Nov. 2009 which was an occasion for ten schools to showcase their dramatic skills at the floor of Kalidas Rangalay, Patna. Second edition of the festival was more bigger and successful event, held in 2010. SAMAR had its own street play titled ‘Ladli Beti’ enacted by the members. It was played in schools to send a message on gender equality Music – Few music enthusiasts from Samar group have recently formed a musical group called ‘Community Jamming’ as most of the songs are result of fusion of western and local music. The songs being composed have larger social message to convey by invoking local sentiment. These performances have huge popularity among youths. They draw large audiences when performed by the roadside or in busy markets. Youths have also used these tools to raise funds for relief in times natural disaster like Nepal Earthquake in 2015.

SAMAR Magazine
The foundation of SAMAR was laid on knowledge sharing. We believe in acquiring and sharing ideas and opinions that could bring about a small change in our society. This thought led a group of students to establish a study-circle for sharing their knowledge. Almost a year down the line, we decided to pen down our thoughts and circulate among our friends in hand-written format. Later after securing certain reader base, we started collecting donation by all means, small or big to get magazine in printed format. The small donations helped for a computerized print-out format. And the big ones helped us to print coated and coloured magazine and bring it to the market. Apart from admirable and informative articles on various subjects it also featured quizzes and riddles. With its gradual popularity students from secondary school to postgraduate started contributing their articles, stories and poems, both in Hindi and English. The print magazine continued almost for a year but afterwards there was financial crisis that forced stopped the printing. After sometime we made a fresh start and this time taking it to the next level. We chose web portal and started publishing articles on blog under the name mysamar.blogspot.com. Till date we are publishing articles on this blog.

SAMAR Environment Programme
The idea of SAMAR Environment Programme was to make the schools of Patna waste free. It was first implemented in Patna Muslim School as a pilot project. Our gratitude to Greenpeace, that assisted us in our aspiration. The bio-degradable and non-biodegradable waste were separated by the volunteers at schools. The Greenpeace created natural composting system within the campus of school. Though there was no huge mobilization of schools and no immediate success yet it had significant impact on students and created awareness among them about safeguarding environment. This programme has to be relaunched.

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April 2008

April  2008
Samar - a bimonthly and bilingual magazine