Youth & Community Engagement

Santi Trust has designed the program in a way to sensitize the habit amongst the localities and visitors at Santiniketan. At the implementation phase, Santi Trust has provided a spray-bottle full of alcohol based sanitizer bought from government aided SHG (Self Help Group) based out of Suri (District Headquarter of Birbhum) and a IEC material instructing readers to ‘Sanitize hands before having food’ to the local street food vendors in and around Santiniketan at free of cost.

In addition to this, we at Santi Trust have provided necessary education to the vendors to keep sanitizing their hands with every catering and transaction, and to ask all its customers to mandatorily sanitize their hands before having food and after the transaction. Since, the locality is not well equipped with digital or cashless mode of transactions, the focus was given more to the sanitization of hands. The IEC materials were made to hang on each stalls at a good vicinity. To advertise further collaboration opportunities, the IEC materials had phone number and email id imprinted. At the implementation phase, we have covered more than 50 street-food vendors around the targeted locality. To run this sustainably, the food vendors were requested to keep the sanitizer bottle filled after use. To refill the sanitizers after first use, the vendors were requested to pay a subsidize amount for the same sanitizer or they could also buy it on their own from local market. Santi Trust decided to refill the sanitizer bottles at a cost after the implementation phase to inculcate the importance and necessity of this practice amongst the vendors, for which we have received multiple accolades. Since, the place Santiniketan has been a great tourist attraction due to its reach ability, culture, nature and history there has been a great possibility of mass transmission through the street food vendors where the visitors and localities have greater possibility to conjunct. So, there has been a requirement of continuous follow up on this program, for which Santi Trust assigned three volunteers to visit and check up on the usages on a weekly basis. These volunteers are also responsible to refill sanitizers and have scout further implementation opportunities around the same locality.