Wilshire Skyline – Touching the sky
Wilshire Skyline – Touching the sky
Paper Boat is a UK based Charity working in some of the poorest communities in India and Thailand, voyaging towards a world that unlocks the infinite potential of every child. Their purpose is to listen to young people – inspiring and enabling them to change their world. They achieve this by helping to shape playful and creative learning spaces (called Children’s Hubs) at the heart of marginalised communities through innovative partnerships such as this collaboration with Wilshire Skyline.
Wilshire Skyline is a service-forward property management company committed to quality in all things with all people. At the core of Paper Boat’s partnership with Wilshire Skyline lies a shared ambition to unlock the creative potential of children by giving them a platform that will help to strengthen and amplify their voice – voices that have all too often been silenced.
Read more about the spirit of the partnership here.
Information for tenants
Your place to live is giving children a space to grow
At no cost to yourself your landlord has committed to use 5% of your monthly rent to support vulnerable children by donating your technical fees to Paper Boat charity.
This would enable 150 children to access fortnightly photography workshops equipping them with essential creative learning skills whilst encouraging them to look at their world ‘through a fresh lens’. Watch ‘through the lens’ to find out more.
Double the impact – match your landlord’s contribution
Match your landlord’s contribution to Paper Boat and you could help us to open a new Children’s Hub in a community where young people experience extreme discrimination and educational inequality. Your donation would allow us to meet vital set up costs such as training a local facilitator to run the hub. Watch ‘we make our space’ to find out more.
*assuming a rent of $2000/month – 5% contribution from Wilshire Skyline at $100/month (donation of technical fees) at no cost to yourself. Matched contributions of 5% from tenants would result in a $200/month donation to Paper Boat at half the cost to yourself.
$1600 is all that it costs to completely digitise a Children’s Hub. Watch ‘sailing across the digital divide’ to find out more.
Wilshire Skyline and Paper Boat we are passionate about shaping creative learning spaces at the heart of the hardest to reach communities and have been piloting educational technology in our Children’s Hubs because we understand just how important educational innovation is in the face of unprecedented challenges like the global pandemic.
This short video shows how we are supporting children at the margins with blended online/offline learning whilst schools remain closed during the global coronavirus pandemic.
Thank you...
Match your landlord’s contribution and you’ll receive a framed photograph taken by one of the children, along with a description in their own words of what the photograph means to them.
See more...
Watch the short video above for a glimpse of a photography workshop with children from rural villages in Kovilpatti.
“Before they just looked at the world but behind a lens they think about what they see…Before giving them a camera they just had an idea of surrounding from the stories they were already told and after they are thinking about it in new ways with their own view on what story a photo can tell.” – Ponkundram, Children’s Programme Co-ordinator and Creative Photography Lead at CEDAR
Wilshire Skyline are bringing more creative opportunities, such as photography workshops, to children at the margins at no cost to tenants by donating their technical fees to Paper Boat.
Watch the short video above to see how children can be involved in the creation of a space that belongs to them.
‘Children are given a chance to do something which is forbidden otherwise. They have been taught how to convert their art of scribbling into a painting, creatively. They feel proud to express that they have created their own space’. – Ms. Dhivya, Facilitator in Meenambalpuram
Tenants matching their landlords contribution can help reach more children in vulnerable communities to unlock their imagination in a place where they feel safe as they are invited to make their space.
Watch the short video to see how Paper Boat has been experimenting with digital technology to create community-based online learning spaces for children from some of the hardest to reach communities.
“The education gap may also expand in developing countries, compounding inequalities…This [digital divide] will now be amplified as more people come or are forced online due to the coronavirus crisis… Those that do not have access are at risk of being left further behind as digital transformation accelerates, especially those in least developed countries.” – Shamika Sirimanne and Torbjörn Fredriksson, UNCTAD
Tenants matching their landlord’s contribution could help to digitise a hub within 8 months of starting their donation. Since the technology is mobile it can be used in more than one hub and provide access to digital learning opportunities for more than 600 children.
Through their eyes...
Rabindranath Togore’s poem Paper Boats starts with these lines
“Day by day I float my paper boats one by one down the running
stream.
In big black letters I write my name on them and the name of
the village where I live.
I hope that someone in some strange land will find them and
know who I am.”
Pushing a paper boat down-stream or launching it on a vast ocean is an act of hope, of faith, of daring to dream…the journey that the little paper boat can take is one of infinite possibility.
We invite you to share your own pictures of children’s photographs on display as evidence of how far that little Paper Boat, launched on a vast ocean has traveled.
Just a plain piece of paper takes shape and is re-imagined as a vessel that can cross oceans, transform that hope into a reality so they can see for themselves that someone from across the oceans does indeed know who they are.
