Jeroo Billimoria is involved in the National Child Protection Service. She was not satisfied with the amount of kids left on the streets of India and wanted to do something to change this. There are millions of children that live on the streets. Some have run away, others have been abandoned by their families.
Jeroo originally grew up with the mindset of becoming an accountant, following in the footsteps of her parents. When finding out about the side work her father did for the people living on the streets, Jeroo switched her major to social work and enrolled in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). She was involved with many organizations for the homeless, like the Coalition for he Homeless in New York City. Once she was back in India, she traveled around to the shelters in Bombay, being drawn especially to the kids there. She would visit these shelters often and eventually started giving out her home phone number to these kids if they found themselves in an emergency and needed help.
The system that Jeroo was involved in, protecting children around India, was poorly developed. There were many children's agencies, but there was no way to work between these agencies or the government in a smooth way. To help this area, Jeroo had proposed the idea of coordinating services for these kids to different organizations, but there was little enthusiasm for it.
Jeroo attempted many ideas to try to change the understanding of the situation. In 1991, Jeroo founded an organization called Meljol (Coming Together) to bring children together from different backgrounds to work on projects with social benefits. She said the goal of this organization was to "create an alternative mindset for children to give them a sense of their own power." Although this was a good way to start helping these children on the streets, Jeroo was still getting phone calls from kids all the time. In 1993, she decided to go to the government telecommunications department (DOT) and propose the idea of creating a toll-free number for children's assistance. They were not convinced by Jeroo at first to immediately establish this line, but Jeroo provided evidence that showed the children would use this line if it was made available. While the DOT was processing Jeroo's request, she gathered together a team of students from TISS to compile a directory of child service organizations located in Bombay.
Gathering everything together so far, Jeroo set out to gain attention for her new network: Childline. This organizations is a "twenty-four hour helpline and emergency response system for children in distress," as stated in Chapter 7 of How to Change the World. Childline works towards getting the millions of kids off of the streets and into homes, giving them the right care they deserve. A budget was put together and in May of 1996, DOT granted Childline use of the telephone number 1098. One month later, after fourteen organizations signed on, Childline was officially launched. The organizations that signed on housed the telephones for the 24-hour Childline service, one including Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA).
At first, the organization was not ready for what they set out to do. The people working for Childline were receiving thousands of calls. During the first year, Childline fielded 6,618 calls. In the beginning, the calls were from the kids on the streets, but as the year progressed, there were more and more calls from concerned adults and children from the middle-class. Jeroo had thought she wanted to focus Childline on the street level, but as she realized that these concerned people calling were trying to help the kids on the street as well, Jeroo saw that it was necessary to create awareness about this service amongst larger sections of the population in India. Another problem Childline ran into was locating where the call had come from. Team members set up a system of standard questions that were to be asked during each call to establish the were-abouts of the child, the time of the call, and the clothes the child was wearing. To make sure the team members could deal with any sort of situation, they began receiving training from social workers in telephone interaction. Open houses were conducted with so that people could suggest improvements for Childline, to correct the problems they were facing. A big learning experience for the workers at Childline was interacting with the police and hospital officials. They began making sure that these different groups of people or organizations could also benefit from the use or intervention of Childline in a situation. With the police, Jeroo set up a conference for these officers to realize that Childline would simplify their jobs. Eventually Childline and the police established a partnership, issuing special identification cars to the team members of Childline. With the hospital staff, workshops were set up to "sensitize" them.
The network grew as word about this 1098 number spread. More money was brought in through newspaper articles and colleges. At the end of 1997, Jeroo decided to devote herself to Childline. Shortly after this she was elected an Ashoka fellow. Ashoka is an organization that finds and invests in social entrepreneurs around the world to try and make our world a better place to live in. Jeroo went on to try to extend Childline into other cities. In June of 1998, a gathering of people from twenty-nine other cities was organized to explore the potential for spreading the service. One colleague agreed to spread this service and within a month it was declared that she wanted to see Childline in every Indian city with a population above 1 million (twenty-three cities) by 2002.
When the service was spread nationally, there was a plan for its operation. Childline would operate like a franchise, with a "decentralized management, but with a uniform brand, operating procedures, and standards." The service would remain free and open twenty-four hours a day. The word "Childline" would always be written in both English and translated, but the logo and the phone number would remain the same everywhere. Each city would select organizations based on local need but conform to a uniform structure: A "nodal" organization, a noted academic institution, would facilitate operations, traning, documentation, and advocacy. "Collaborating" organizations would respond directly to the calls while "support" organization would handle the follow up, and "resource" organizations would help with the long-term needs. Each city would have one Childline coordinator. The government would make grants to Childline partners to pay salaries for the people placed on each team. Childline would not begin working in a city until the police commissioner and senior healthcare officials had come together with a written commitments of cooperations. Each city would be required to establish a Childline Advisory Board (CAB). Any business that wanted to publicly associate themselves with Childline at the national level would have to commit to a full partnership. The central office of Childline would be stationed in Bombay.
Within the next six months after the gathering in June of 1998, Childline had already spread to four more cities. Not everything went smoothly when Childline spread to other cities. One Childline office had to be shut down because of corruption. Another was dropped off from the network because they refused shelter to disabled children. Still others did not meet Childline's standards of care. By 2000, Childline was operating in fifteen cities and preparatory work was being done in another fifteen. Once 2002 rolled around, not only had Childline reached their goal of spreading to the cities in India with a population over 1 million, they had spread to over forty-two cities with preparatory work under way in another twelve. The network had more than 120 organizations directly implementing the Childline service and over 2,000 organizations providing assistance. By Octoboer 2002, Childline had fielded 2.7 million calls.
At first, the government opposed this system. They were not giving Childline any money. The government became a supporter of Childline only after they realized it could help them. There reason was very specific. The service Childline was doing many of the things the government had committed to when they ratified the United Nations Convention Rights of the Child in 1992. Also, Childline "was the hallmarks of a twenty-first-century organization," integrated and decentralized, blending technology with human services. Childline was low cost as well. Another supporter of Childline were the child service organizations. Jeroo said "'We survived because we chose solid organizations." There were several wealthy individuals who greatly helped Childline. Jeroo had turned to them in times of financial trouble, to avert collapse. Although there were many groups of people who had pledged their cooperation, Childline found that these people, the police, health, and railway officials, were still very ignorant and indifferent to them. So, in 2000, with the help of the government's National Institute of Social Defense and 78 partner organizations, Childline launched a National Initiative for Child Protection. The goal of this was to make police stations, hospitals, schools and train stations more "child friendly." The underlying factor to this training was "empathy begins with understanding."
The ChildNet database system was started, which was an unusual computer program that was designed for users who were easily distracted and semiliterate. This program proved to be very useful for analyzing call patterns. They could track specific "hot points" within cities and set up medical help if a high number of calls were coming from a specific area. As Childline spread, the program also became an important source of child protection information. ChildNet could be used as a resource for bringing back missing children. With the combination of technology and human management, today's telephone calls can be greatly analyzed.
In 2001, Jeroo had received international recognition for her work from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Later that year, she decided to step down as Childline's executive director. She believed that a founder should leave after five to seven years. Her new plan is to build an international consortium of child help lines. Jeroo is looking to link existing lines to set up a global "help desk" for these services and to establish global standards. Recently, Jeroo launched a new organizations called Child Helpline International (CHI).
In summing up Jeroo's success with Childline, she was asked to give a one liner about her experience. She said "Learning to let go." Also, she added "Everything will not be exactly the way you want it. You have to let people take charge. The best thing is not to have a picture of what you want, but to have basic principles."
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