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Dear Donor,
I hope this email finds you and your loved ones safe and healthy. I am writing with an update from our communities in Chennai. As you may be aware, the lockdown in India had been extended to May 31st (today). Yesterday, the government announced that the lockdown has been extended by another month (to June 30th). Chennai remains a red district within Tamil Nadu and restrictions are tight.
On May 20th 2020, we distributed our third round of emergency relief packages to 352 families (approximately 2300 individuals). Since our second round of distributions, we have received a lot of calls from community members asking Pudiyador to increase our relief efforts within each community. We have devised strategies to assess the need of families within each community. We look at a variety of criteria including disabilities within a family, unemployment, single mothers, number of family members etc. to determine the need of each household. With this data, we curated lists for each community from which we then cross-verified with community leaders.
We are happy that we have been able to double our reach with this third round of distributions.
Here are the families we supported in each community (most families have 5-8 people per home):
PR1: Ramapuram - Giri Nagar: 127 families
PR2: Ramapuram - Gangai Amman Kovil: 60 families
PUK: Urur -Olcott Kuppam: 60 families
PKA: Kakkan colony, Irular tribe & Vannandurai: 105 families
Total: 352 families.
Total cost (incl. transportation): Rs.2,52,965 (~$3,300 USD).
In addition to Pudiyador’s own community efforts, we have also partnered with Feed Chennai. This initiative is a coalition of NGOs working together to provide much needed food relief for daily wage earners, stranded migrant workers and homeless persons within the city, with Pudiyador acting as the financial backbone of all operations. The Feed Chennai initiative has greatly scaled over the past month to provide much needed food relief for daily wage earners, stranded migrant workers and homeless individuals within the city. You can find more information here.
We recognize we are in this for the long haul and that our communities will continue to require immediate support from Pudiyador in the months ahead. We are working on slowly and safely restarting our programming within each community, and we hope that our programs will play a key role in allowing communities to regain a sense of normalcy when permitted to do so.
Thank you for all that you do, especially in these troubling times. I will leave you with some powerful lockdown stories from the women and children of our communities. Do stay safe!
Much love from Chennai,
Swapnaa
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