Educational outreach

BloomO! was launched during a warm and dynamically engaging event in Auroville as part of the Auroville week in February 2024, followed by a launch in Pondicherry.

Yuvabe team member Vigneshwaran writes about striving for personal growth despite challenges posed by a flawed education system.

Since the unit’s launch in 2010 with the large-scale Litter Free Auroville Campaign, WasteLess has featured several times in the pages of Auroville Today.

La Terrace coffee shop above the Solar Kitchen is a special place. Not only because of the quality of the food but also, perhaps especially, because of the warm welcome and excellent service offered by Sudhakar and Ramu.

On World Ocean Day in June, a dolphin washed up on to Sri Ma beach. “It was a young dolphin that had not died a natural death, possibly related to pollution, or to swallowed plastic,” says Satya Agrawal, a teacher in NESS school, who was catalysed by this event to start collecting waste on the beach.

The WasteLess team’s efforts to bring the issue of waste into our consciousness and inspire change in social behaviour through education have recently been taken up by the Tamil Nadu government.

We can learn quite a lot about a community by observing what its members consume; and even more telling is what they throw away! Whilst living in Europe, I was often quite astonished to find perfectly usable, sometimes even brand new, items discarded in rubbish bins and, on occasion, even felt compelled to rescue an object and find a good home for it!

Thamarai, which means 'lotus' in Tamil, is an Auroville educational and health project in the bioregion. There were challenges in 2016 when the Thamarai centre had to shut down in Edayanchavady.

Aurevan, Suryamayi and Kavitha are part of an enthusiastic team working on developing apprenticeship and internship programmes for Auroville youth.

The work of Sadhana Forest is well known. Yearly, more than 1,000 volunteers come for shorter or longer periods to learn about water conservation, rainwater harvesting, earth dam building, afforestation, alternative energies and many more ‘green’ practices.

Eco Femme, a manufacturer of reusable sanitary pads in Auroville, recently met with conservancy workers in Chennai and learnt about the devastating social impact of disposable pads.