The journey of The NeoFusion Creative Foundation began 9 years ago through organizing a summer camp and since then the annual summer camps have been the most-awaited and exciting time of the year.
Our NGO has been a safe and welcoming place for underprivileged adolescents who have been struggling and going through a difficult time. Most of these youth come from communities and social backgrounds where dreams are not just limited but also seldom achieved and as a not-for-profit organization, we have always wanted to change that. Moreover, we feel that there is an urgent need to provide them with opportunities, personalized counseling, and mentorship that would help them to understand the various options they can avail themselves of in the future.
With this mission and passion in mind, our summer camps have been motivating adolescents to dream big. These summer camps, needless to say, involve a lot of fun games, and creative activities coupled with a focused assessment that helps in facilitating an understanding of each adolescent’s needs.
The adolescents engage in fun activities that teach teamwork and help develop social skills and self-esteem while encouraging creativity and physical exercise. They get opportunities to learn and try new things and discover the skills and potential that they didn’t know existed in them. Our incredible volunteers and staff team spend time with them encouraging them and serving as positive role models. Thanks to the generosity of donors and volunteers, we are able to provide these summer camp programs without any cost to the adolescents or their families.
We conducted our first summer camp in 2013 in Jaipur, where 100 students joined and it was a surprise for us that all students were present in the summer camp till the last day, and as a culminating day, we organized a 2-day exhibition and a day where these students had to perform. Organizing such summer camps annually, continued from 2013 to 2020, until the COVID pandemic hit India.
Once the pandemic struck India and everything went digital, we also thought to organize summer camps digitally that too not only in Jaipur and Delhi but all over India. This is how one of our most fruitful projects started – “Project Passion Hub”.
In April 2020, we launched the “Project Passion Hub – Taking mentors to villages through online classes”. This project has been a medium through which we have helped underprivileged adolescents pursue their passions. To date, we have worked with 3000+ students from 21 states as well as Nepal. Our goal through this project was to provide classes like charcoal painting, taekwondo, singing, dance, theatre, kathak, and English communication and help the adolescents in the age gap of 8-18 years to develop various skills that will help them make a living out of their chosen fields.
Our certified mentors take classes for various activities, one of which is taekwondo. To promote taekwondo as a passion in our students, we offer them belt exams for higher levels and many students have been facilitated with a blue belt as well.
During the lockdown, Passion Hub came into many adolescents’ lives as a ray of hope and one such example is Samran Joshi, who is from Orissa and has been learning painting from Sudipta. He has painted exceptional portraits of Virat Kohli, MS Dhoni, and others and wants to pursue painting as a career. Another example is Pampa, a brilliant student, and a passionate dancer who shifted to Asam from Jaipur due to which she could not complete her graduation. Her family wanted her to get married, but she convinced them and started her dance academy but because of the lack of guidance she couldn’t continue. Passion hub helped her fill the gap. She is currently learning taekwondo and will be able to fulfill her dream of teaching dance to children. She is now married and is expecting a baby next month post which she wishes to continue with her classes.
Bearing in mind the student’s likes, dislikes, strengths, and weaknesses, our summer camp’s focus is to primarily encourage them to dream without limits through various entertaining activities and motivational sessions. The main intention behind these summer camps is to provide a long-term career guidance support system that will help the children pursue their future course of action in a focused and well-planned manner and help them in realizing their dreams by staying committed to their future self-growth.
We personally love the energy and enthusiasm of the students during these summer camps and are looking forward eagerly to this much-awaited event happening every year. It’s not only the students that learn, but we too grow as individuals when we see these students work with passion, integrity, and hard work. The never-ending shine in their eyes inspires us daily to live our lives to the fullest and with honesty even when the circumstances are not on our side.