Chiragh - A Ray of Hope

“To raise awareness about mental health issues and bring attention of the people to one of the leading causes of it i.e. education related issues.”

Problem

“Due to a lack of career counselling about their careers, the school and college students end up getting depressed leading to talent loss, unemployment, illiteracy and other mental health issues.”

The school and college students in Pakistan suffer a lot when it comes to choosing their careers either by themselves or their parents and exploring higher education opportunities. This problem is general in Pakistan especially in underprivileged students because of poverty and lack of awareness and literacy of their parents. Consequently, students end up quitting their education or move into the wrong careers leading to anxiety, loss of opportunities, illiteracy which in turn are the other big problems.

This problem can be reduced or eliminated, if we provide a platform responsible for conducting career counselling and mental health awareness sessions and webinars by interacting closely with students, their parents or other related stakeholders i.e. teachers and school/college administrations.

The audience being targeted in this project will be students of class 9 to 12. Parents of these students will also be involved in these sessions. This project will be covering people from all the classes as the cause behind this project is a general cause. This will not be gender specific or location specific. Initially there will be webinars which will later be taken to physical sessions mostly covering Lahore and nearby areas.

Proposed Solution

The solution that we will be providing for this issue is that we will try to raise awareness about the mental health issues. Along with this, we will be providing guidance about the many opportunities that students can avail may they be related to studying on scholarships or different options they can opt for. The targeted audience in this issue will be students ranging from 14 years to 20 years. This is the main audience but people related to them will also take part in it such as the siblings of students, or their parents or mentors. The first challenge that we might face will be attracting the audience but we will hopefully try our best to tackle it. We may also face issues related to asking counsellors or professionals to attend and guide our audience. If this project becomes successful, then it will be able to affect a huge number of students and raise awareness about the mental health issues and one of the main reasons that lead to this issue. This project can be sustainable as more volunteers can donate and participate in it There can be paid one to one or special sessions with an affordable fee. Courses can also be constructed related to these issues which can also become a source of revenue.

Approach

The process to achieve our aim is to make use of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and many others in creating awareness about mental health issues and career counselling in students and promote our pages through links of every member. We will conduct online webinars and counselling sessions for students. We will all as a part of this project share our experiences to the audience. We will hire some professionals for the webinars and counselling sessions to make it more productive. We will also conduct online parenting sessions in which we will highlight their role for being responsible parents. We will also prepare the physical sessions in schools in near future when the Covid-19 situation goes well. The risk we face in pursuing this project are the minimum number of people. In order to conduct a webinar, we have to convince a significant number of students to attend the sessions. We have to communicate with professionals to give free sessions without charging any fee. We will try our best to make our targeted audience to realize the importance of mental health illness and career counselling in students. It is the need of the hour to identify and resolve the issue by being a part of it. The resources we use in promoting our campaign by the social networks of each member in the group. We will contact the professionals through the sources of our team members and friends. We will use our university contacts as well. We are not specifying any amount but the cost and budget are arranged by funding. We will also charge session fees and get sponsorships in future. We can manage the costs and budgets by the above mentioned ways.