Give your time
Give a few hours; a child keeps the reading habit for life.
24 places open across 7 roles right now.
Why volunteer
You do not need a teaching degree, a car or a free weekend every week. You need to turn up when you said you would.
We do not run volunteer photo opportunities. Every role exists because something would not happen without it.
Volunteers spend their time with children, teachers and parents — in classrooms and school grounds.
What volunteers actually do
In village schools, on distribution days, or entirely from home.
Sit with a small group of Class 3–5 students for two hours a week and read with them. Patience and Telugu matter more than a teaching qualification.
Load, count, hand over and tally. A distribution for 400 children needs about fifteen pairs of hands for one long morning, roughly once a month.
How it works
Four steps, and usually about two weeks.
Skills, languages, the district you can reach and when you are free. It takes about five minutes.
Our volunteer coordinator rings within three working days to talk through where you would fit.
A short online orientation on child protection and government schools. Roles with unsupervised contact with children also need a background check.
You join a rota with a named point of contact. Log your hours and we issue a certificate whenever you need one.
Open right now
Each one is a real gap on a real rota. If nothing fits, apply anyway — most volunteers are matched to something that was never listed.
Sit with parents and guardians to explain the photo and story consent form in Telugu, record the consent properly, and follow up on withdrawals and expiries. This is delicate work. A parent signing a form in a school verandah while an outsider with a camera waits is not in a strong position to refuse, and the volunteer’s job is to make refusing genuinely easy.
From our volunteers
I went for one distribution because a colleague asked me to. Eighteen months later I still go on Saturdays, and I can tell you which children have finished which books.
What surprised me was how much they let you do. On my second visit I was running the counter, and by the fourth I was training the next batch of volunteers.
Join us
Five minutes now, and a phone call from our coordinator within three working days.
Prefer to talk first? Write to the volunteer coordinator.
Questions
Short on time this year?
A monthly gift, a box of books or a CSR partnership keeps the same schools going.
7 roles open right now
One morning of your time can put books into forty children’s hands. That is why people come back.
Get a donated computer lab actually used — typing, internet safety and a spreadsheet or two for students and their teachers.
Document a day with dignity, always within our consent rules. Your images become the record a village keeps.
Turn English material into Telugu a Class 6 student can read, or write up a school visit so more people hear about it.
Enter attendance sheets, reconcile stock, tidy the school database. Unglamorous, entirely remote, and the reason our reporting holds up.
Deliver blocks of the forty-eight hour digital literacy curriculum in one of our four school labs — typing in Telugu and English, spreadsheets, safe internet use, and the final project. Sessions can be delivered on site or over video call to a lab supervised by a teacher, which is how most of our Hyderabad-based volunteers do it during the week.
Run the Saturday reading hour at one of our Warangal district schools. You will read aloud, run paired reading with Classes 3 to 5, and keep the simple record of who is reading what. This is the most consistent commitment we ask for and the one that moves reading levels. One school, one Saturday morning, for at least six months.
Clean, analyse and visualise the termly ASER-style reading assessment data — around 800 assessments a term across 27 schools — and produce the school-level tables that go into the annual report. Fully remote. The analysis has to be honest about the schools where the number went down, because that is what we publish.
Document distributions, camps and school visits — on our equipment, against consent forms already signed, and under our media policy. Most of what you will shoot is bookshelves, classrooms and adults. That is deliberate, and if you would find it frustrating this is not the placement for you.
Staff a screening station at a school health camp — vision, haemoglobin, deworming or dental. Medical and nursing students welcome under supervision.
Load, count, transport and hand over book consignments from the district store to the schools. This is the physical, unglamorous half of the programme and nothing happens without it.
I work full-time in Bengaluru and still volunteer — I translate lesson material into Telugu on Sunday mornings. You do not have to be in the village to be useful.
