Project Rainshine, a collaboration between the ICHARS Support Foundation and the Healing Dove Foundation, that focuses on training and mentoring staff of NGOs with skills to provide mental health first aid to their beneficiaries and connect them to mental health practitioners (trained by ICHARS) to offer advanced mental health support where required.
Here are six ways how Project Rainshine is an asset to society:
Project Rainshine is essentially a capacity building and training initiative for NGOs that support marginalised and disadvantaged communities. The project’s main motive is to equip them with the necessary skills that they are required to conduct counselling and therapy sessions for their beneficiaries. It helps societies by ensuring that NGOs working with marginalised communities can provide round-the-clock mental health assistance to their beneficiaries, whose mental health is, otherwise, often reportedly neglected in the absence of available therapists and counsellors. Under the project, we will also be conducting programmes for life-skill and soft-skill training, career guidance, and counselling to help millions of beneficiaries become future-ready.
Project Rainshine is a sustainable, result-oriented, and inclusive model which does not discriminate; we believe everyone should have access to primary mental healthcare. In a country where there is an explicit inequity in how mental healthcare resources are distributed, with the elite having prior access to them, Project Rainshine aims to make these facilities reach a broader population who may be in dire need of them. The idea was to implement a sustainable model for our NGO partners, that allowed them to make mental health accessible and affordable at minimum cost.
An essential pillar of Project Rainshine is providing support groups for NGOs (and their respective beneficiaries). They work towards the welfare of oppressed, marginalised groups such as juvenile offenders, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with disabilities, young women, athletes, and other disadvantaged groups. Our support groups are known to make available a safe space for them to feel heard, understood, and empowered. Recently, we worked with the Siddarth Memorial Charity Trust and Snehasadan, conducting support groups with their in-house staff and beneficiaries with overly optimistic results.
Project Rainshine conducts live sessions, talk-it-out groups, and knowledge series to increase awareness about these diverse communities and reduce the stigma surrounding them by breaking myths and stereotypes. Additionally, these techniques decode the mental health issues experienced by individuals belonging to those communities and equip them with coping mechanisms and other strategies for their mental health concerns.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has ravaged India, has had a severe impact on the mental health of individuals, who are now more isolated than ever. Through virtual sessions, Project Rainshine aims to pave the way for better access to mental health resources, even in these dire circumstances, to serve those who may need more care now than ever before.
Project Rainshine connects trained practitioners with NGOs in order to provide advanced interventions and other relevant dimensions to their mental healthcare services. The training programs, support groups and one-on-one sessions support the NGOs’ in-house staff by helping them develop coping techniques to manage their mental wellbeing and work in a more efficient manner. These sessions also provide an opportunity to the staff, and their beneficiaries, to express and learn to handle their emotions.
