Meet The SHEROES: Alisha Aranha, Scribble Foundation

It was sometime around high school that I knew I wanted to be an artist. Unfortunately, financial constraints and limited exposure led to me to believe that art was not a viable career. A part of my motivation behind starting the Scribble Foundation is to dispel this myth by engaging with full-time artists, and helping them share their stories with larger, and younger, audiences.

Somewhere between working a nine-to-five job with incredibly long hours, I asked myself the loaded question: What next? I gave myself the choice of either pursuing art myself, or bringing art into the lives of those who wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to engage with it. Well ... I chose the latter, and decided to dedicate a lot more time to art education and replaced my office commitments with freelance engagements in the academic editing industry.

So, today, I’m a 28-year-old who was born and raised in Mumbai, and is a part of an art movement called Scribble Foundation.We conducted our first workshop in January 2012, at an orphanage near my home. I began talking to my family and friends about what I wanted to do. An artist friend who was excited as I was about the idea agreed to conduct the first workshop. By the end of that day, when I saw the excitement and engagement levels of all the children, I knew I was on to something important. We have since gone on to conduct several workshops across various institutions.

A project I definitely consider an accomplishment is the Classroom Canvas Project.

The underlying objective is to help students at all ages realise that they can be creators, and not just consumers, of the world they live in, which is a lesson we hope they carry over into adult life. We started off by painting what we thought was best for the classrooms, but over time realised how much more important it is for the concepts and designs to come from the children themselves. After all, we are a temporary phase in their lives; it is the children who continue using these classrooms in the long run. So we began conducting orientations or introductory workshops, asking them what they would like to see on the walls or conducting activities that get them more physically involved, like making up a story and enacting it. Somewhere along the way, we also realised how important it is to fix classroom walls before we painted murals and so, in addition to artist travel and painting, we began raising funds to refurbish classrooms.

You’d be surprised how much of a difference just whitewashing old classrooms makes. We also conduct a summer edition of the project which is for a whole four weeks. We have art students intern with us. Last year we painted at four locations: Mumbai, Goa, Dharamsala, and Pune. This year, we spent a whole month in Kaliko village near Balasore, Orissa.

A day at Scribble has always been atypical, especially during the Classroom Canvas Project.

Scribble is really young and given my handicaps of not having worked in the social sector before or any formal management training/education, each day teaches me something new. I learn about new artists, how to deal with partners, how to raise funds, how to manage logistics better, etc. And this is all before the actual work begins!

At the Classroom Canvas Project, we work in a school for 15 days to a month. So every day we learn something new about the children, about the space we’re in, about the school and staff. We start off with shy, intimidated children and by the end of the project we’re the ones left intimidated with how incredibly talented they are, how much they care about us and each other, and our mutual attachment, even though we’ve been there for a short period of time.

It would not be a typical day if we haven’t spilled paint or come home with paint all over our clothes and hands, most times face and hair too. It would not be a typical day if one of the artists/volunteers did not play music with the whole classroom breaking out into dance. It would not be typical day if we did not see the children waiting for us every morning as we pulled up into the school or screaming “bye!” in chorus on each day as we left for home.

To be honest, our “most challenging aspects” change with each project.

When I started out, it was difficult to get the word out and find artists. As time passed, it was figuring out how can Scribble grow and achieve greater impact. The challenges tend to range from figuring out logistics, to donation, paints, and artists. But, if there is one thing that I can say confidently, it is this: I may have started Scribble Foundation, but it is the people I have met along the way who have brought it to where it is.

From conducting small workshops to now having spent an entire month in Orissa, with a team of 10, painting 8 classrooms in three schools, and being recognised by the local Lok Sabha MP (who visited all our classrooms) is a huge step for Scribble! I’d like to believe I have two families, the one that I was born into and one that we’ve created along the way, the Scribble family. There are people out there who believe in the cause as much as I do, or may be even more. From helping find donors to donating themselves and saying “Just tell us the time and place… We’ll be there!” I have met the most wonderful people. I think one of the biggest accomplishments is when they say “We” or “Us” or “Scribble is also ours.” That makes them family.

Personally, I see myself going where Scribble goes.

As for Scribble, I want to do a thousand things in the future, but I’ll talk about the two I consider a little important. I want to continue doing the Classroom Canvas Project. I think one of the things that it does brilliantly is bridge the gap between the urban and massive rural population in India. Thanks to Swaniti Initiative, with whom we partner for some of our projects, we’ve visited some of the most rural spaces in Jammu and Orissa. It is sad how disconnected we can be. In the near future, I want to start work on an art scholarship, where we don’t just fund the education of children who want to pursue art academically but also build a mentor program. The program would include regular check-ins to stay informed about the students’ progress.

The objective of Scribble Foundation is not to say art is more important. It is to say that art is equally important as science, math, or social sciences. Despite our country being so rich in culture, we’ve managed to maintain art as the most mundane and uninspiring aspect of education. Elementary and intermediary books being great the way they are, we haven’t revisited art education in our schools, and this is not just in low-income schools. I had a decent education and even I drew Diwali and bus stop scenes at least 25 times. The challenges, however, are much, much bigger. It starts from understanding what our children should be taught at various ages but transcends to training teachers who can do make optimum use of limited resources. We’ve been in schools that have five standards but two classrooms, and two teachers, with all five standards studying in the same space. We’ve been in schools where we believe the murals are secondary; what should come first is the infrastructure: getting walls fixed and refurbished, and this is something that we have consciously incorporated into the Classroom Canvas Project.

For those who are looking to make a change, consider giving children an inspiring and welcoming learning space.

Donate toward fixing classrooms walls, leaks, cracks, and repainting them with white paint, even changing the regular yellow bulbs with white LED or repainting blackboards with inexpensive blackboard paint. These are simple and small interventions that can have a huge impact.