Our Works

SOTCHO – Sola Tribal Children’s Home

SOTCHO is a boarding home for the Tribal children hailing from 61 villages of the hills. The home is established with the objective of providing accommodation, food and education to the poor tribal children hailing from the remotest of villages that lack the proper infrastructure for education, as they had to travel a long distance to attend school. Due to these factors, the dropout rates were high among the tribal children.

After School Coaching Centres

Tribal children most of them being first generation learners, are quite slow learners and take time to grasp and understand the concepts of conventional, mainstream education. They need additional attention, care and different pedagogy as to the conventional teaching methods. Also, most of the tribal households manage with basic electricity and children are mostly left in dark without anyone to teach. The tribal children are given, after-school coaching on difficult subjects such as Mathematics, Science and English. There are 300 children benefitting from the scheme.

Youth Development Programs

We undertake developmental activities in the weekends for the young people in the villages. They have established community youth groups called “Oratories”. Animations and Games/Sports competitions and animations are held to engage the tribal youth round the year. We are directly in contact with 800 young people.

Don Bosco Eco Clubs & Eco Villages

Don Bosco Eco Clubs is one of our community engagement programs, where we establish Eco Clubs among the children and eco villages in the villages.

Women Empowerment Programmes

• Organic Kitchen Garden (OKG) for Women Groups: We train 150 women from 9 panchayats of the hills in Organic Kitchen Garden and develop them as Self Help Groups creating awareness, training, empowerment and livelihood programmes. We are connected to over 1500 women from the hills. Our Women’s Day Celebrations attract more than 1000 tribal women
• Women Livelihood Programmes: We have set up women livelihood programmes through wig making. This gives opportunity for learning in short time and earning decent salary.
• Women Nursery Cooperative is our third venture in which women make nursery plats with our raw materials and bring to our nursery.

Disaster Response & Relief works

With increasing natural disasters, we have formed a youth group to respond immediately. The speedy responses during Gaja Cyclone in Tamil Nadu and Kerala Floods were highly laudable. The COVID19 pandemic lockdown relief works were carried out massively in the entire hill with the support of with 75 Youth volunteers who reached out to 51 villages with food and groceries kit to 1500 families. Our innovative programme during COVID19 of nursery training and income generation with stipend relieved mental stress and also addressed alternative livelihood means for forty women.

Retreat Estate Organics (REO)

REO is registered under FSSAI (Food Safety and Standards Authority of India). The social entrepreneurship venture is to support the women groups and small farmers in getting better price for their products. The nursery plants, millets, fruits, coffee, pepper, honey harvested by tribal community are marketed through this venture. There are several value added products. It benefits the community directly and the profits made by the institute is reinvested in the education and developmental projects and programmes of the community. The nursery is a spring board for several income generation and nature preservation interventions.