June 13th, 2009 - IBM Pune employees donate toys to kids from Gyanankur!

Toybank Pune kicked off it's 2nd toy collection drive with IBM. We had a great toy collection drive in IBM's offices in Pune and the 350+ toys received were segregated according to age groups of children and wrapped by IBM volunteers on Saturday, 30th May. Click here for some pics.

The wrapped toys were donated to around 330 children from Gyanankur School from Kesnand Village, Pune on the 13th of June in a distribution event.

Venue: Gyanankur School, Kesnand, Pune.
Duration: 13th June, 2009
Tentative Timing: 8 AM -1 PM

We had an amazing toy distribution event with the kids from Gyanankur School!

All the volunteers met at Panchshil Tech Park One where the cartons of toys collected from IBM were kept. We started at around 9 15 AM and reached Gyanankur. Each volunteer took over a classroom along with the teachers. There were 8 classrooms in Gyanankur School.

It was the first day at school for all kids after the vacation but for the pre nursery kids it was the first day ever at school! So many of them kept crying for their mom and dad. The nursery teachers took the best care of them while we started distributing the samosas to all kids in the school.

There were 200 kids present from pre nursery till 4th Std and close to 100 more were absent as the school doesn't usually have Saturday as a working day. The school had specially let us organize this event on Saturday and called all the kids to come in.

We entertained the kids in all classrooms with rhymes, pictionary games, singing etc from 10 - 11 30 AM. We even managed to play kho-kho in class I where the students dodged their teachers :) It was great fun to watch!

The kids from class I - IV were very smart and all geared up for this event. All the children were excited and they were involved in various activities through the next 1.5 hrs. At around 11 30 AM we started to distribute biscuits to the children followed by the toys which were given according to the age groups.

We donated around 350 toys which also includes toys to kids who were absent and also toys donated to the toy library of Gyanankur.We were also joined by Shweta Chari who's the founder of Toybank and Vikram Nerurkar who's part of the core Toybank Team from Mumbai.

After the kids left the school we had an informal meet with volunteers, teachers, Melinda Parker- Hon Director of Gyanankur and Shweta Chari. It was amazing to see the 'happy teachers'. We applauded their efforts for taking care of the children on their first day at school!

Few comments about the event from the teachers at Gyanankur
"It was a very good event. You are doing a great deed"
"You guys were very organized"


We are grateful to -

(1) Melinda and Gyanankur for giving us an opportunity to start our first toy distribution event in Pune with them and also for providing transport to the cartons and our volunteers to Gyanankur.

(2) The teachers at Gyanankur for guiding our volunteers through the event and involving themselves in all the fun activities.

(3) Volunteers Parag Agrawal, Vibhuti Agrawal, Surendra Nishad, Aradhna Sharma, Lakshmi Vedula, Akshay Girhotra, Imtiyaz Hussain, Abhishek Chouhan and his 4 year old son Reyansh (who is now the youngest volunteer on board Toybank!) without whom this event would have not been possible. Their time, enthusiasm and energy was all that we banked on for this distribution event! Thanks Guys!

(4) Neeran Karnik who has volunteered to donate Rs 1750 for the samosas, Namita Kapoor(Rs 500) and Nargis Pharate(Rs 100) who donated for the biscuits. We are sure the kids had fun having them! Thanks Melinda for arranging the samosas!

(5) The On Demand Community, its volunteers, Facilities Management and Security at IBM Pune for letting us organize this drive and collect 350+ toys for this event and also for wrapping all the toys!

(6) Abhishek and Vikram for helping us with the snaps for the event!

Here's the link to the pics taken at the event!

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