Football league in a rural MP non-profit school

The Riverside Natural School in the Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh has plans to engage with more children in the region by providing high quality education. Mohgaon is roughly 140 km from the nearest railway station and airport at Jabalpur.

The school is run by Mrida Education and Welfare Society (MEWS), an organization which wants to take holistic, concrete and scalable steps in the field of education to impact the education scenario in rural areas of the country that are growing both in aspirations and need. Apart from the school, MEWS also runs various programmes to contribute to the overall development of the children from the school and neighboring areas. These include programmes to teach English, skill development through entrepreneurship and extra-curricular activities.

MEWS is now kicking off a Sports League - the Riverside Leagues that will help catapult rural sport to the professional league. Most importantly, it will help channelize the energy of rural youth and instill in them the joy and involvement that comes through playing sports. They are starting with football and will extend to volleyball, cricket and archery soon. As part of this, rural youth will be trained and groomed every day so that they can train and play professionally. 

As part of the Leagues, MEWS organized a football tournament in the first week of May 2017 that saw matches being played in 3 age groups: under 12, under 14 and under 20. Winning teams were Pakki Maati, Mohgaon Superheroes and Jhanda Tolah respectively. Following this success, MEWS is now conducting a football camp in Bodasilli that is seeing incredible action as youth show up early morning for football practice. They organize a tournament every month and all of these players will participate in this month's tournament.  

Team behind MEWS and RNS:

Priya Nadkarni is the Founder of MEWS. She has 8 years of work experience across the development sector, investment banking and media. Most recently, she helped start and scale employability and vocational training program for youth at Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN), a large NGO working in 6 states of India. Earlier, she also worked on equity and debt mandates across microfinance, micro insurance and education at Unitus Capital. She holds an MBA in finance from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and is a graduate of St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai.  

Digvijay Singh is the Co-founder of MEWS and has extensive experience, managing large rural programs for PRADAN. He has worked on issues such as employability, gender, agriculture and livelihoods. Digvijay has been an avid sportsman throughout his life and has played cricket, football and basketball. Digvijay holds an MBA from the Xavier’s Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar and is a graduate of Hindu College, Delhi University.

The movement is gaining traction as youth from two other villages have come forward to request us to start a volleyball program in their villages.

Contribute:

People can contribute towards funding for footballs for 1 village or extension of the program in an additional village. Two villages have come forward to start a similar program for volleyball – the budget will be the same – people can contribute towards that as well.

You can contribute any amount towards our overall target of Rs.600,000 for the football leagues and tournament, or you can contribute towards any of the specific goals below. If you would like to know more about the programme or have queries about institutional/corporate contributions, please write to us at riversidenaturalschool@ gmail.com

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