Vidnyanvahini Uses FBB Support to Fund Mobile Science Lab

Fourth-quarter education beneficiary Vidnyanvahini gave us this report about how they will use the funds contributed by members of Foundation Beyond Belief. Foundation members donated $3,735 to Vidnyanvahini last quarter.

We are very grateful for the most generous donation from all the members of FBB that gives us additional stimulus for striving to improve on our own past performance. We have been visiting rural high schools in Maharashtra in India to give students a chance to learn science through experiments and video presentations. These schools usually lack basic infrastructure such as libraries and laboratories. Some of them don’t have a regular school building, and often there is no qualified teacher. We help dispel exploitative superstitions prevalent in villages. 

Over the past 16 years, we have served more than 200,000 boys and girls in about 2,000 school visits to 900 different schools. Our Mobile Science Lab has traveled more than 160,000 kilometers, an equivalent of four trips around the Earth! We make about 140 school trips per year. Our average expense per trip is $80, which includes the salary of the driver, fuel and maintenance for the vehicle, and an honorarium for the instructors. 

We expect to use the donation from FBB to cover 35 such trips until June 2011. We will use the remainder of the money for a student workshop and a few teachers’ workshops. We will also organize theme exhibits at our office, the first of which is almost ready on the theme of chemical bonding and valency. 

Madhukar Deshpande
Coordinator, Vidnyanvahini