Toy Library

Evolution

Children love to play with toys. Toys create a feeling of companionship for children, they help them improve their ability to interact, they evoke imagination, they enable pretension and over and above all they bring joy to the kids.

Watching children enjoy playing with toys is in itself a soul filling experience.

The toys that children play with takes various shapes and forms like stuffed toys (like a teddy bear, a most common toy for toddlers), with toy vehicles (trains, cars), toy machines, robots etc. The kinds of toys that children get to play with is dependent on the environments in which they live especially their economic backgrounds.

Children belonging to families from poor economic backgrounds do not get a chance to play with toys as we generally perceive. They use of stones, wood, clay, branches and leaves of trees etc as toys.

To enable children at chetana to derive the joy of playing with toys, the idea of a toy library has been evolved. Just like a library having books to be read or borrowed for being read and returned, a toy library for stocking toys for being used by the children at chetana was established on chetana premises.

Facility

Toys are housed in separate rooms having racks to arrange the toys.

As of now, we are able to arrange all the toys that we have, within the existing facility.

If the toys in the library outgrow our capacity to house them, we may develop a methodology to give away some toys to the children to be taken away to their homes.

Activity

Children studying at the school for child laborers get time to come to the toy library and play with toys all through out the week during specific timings on weekdays.

The library stays open for children at the orphanage on holidays also.

Sources

Toys at the library are collected through toy donations. Initially it started with the toys (both used and new ones) donated by the children and parents of the schools being run by our parent organisation. Later on, we started receiving toy donations from others who have come to know of the existence of this library by word of mouth or on visiting chetana.

Apart from toys in the library, the resources required to run this library are very much minimal which includes staff to manage and maintain the library. As such we manage the need for funds to run this entity through our internal accruals.

You can help

Toys form the largest resource of this entity. We receive toys, both used and new from donors. You may help the children at chetana by giving away the toys that you (if you are a child) or your kids (if you are elders taking care of children) do not need anymore.

By enabling giving away used toys, we hope to create utility and rejuvenate the value of used toys whose value has almost exhausted. We also hope to provide an avenue for children as well as elders get that joy of giving.

We do not find it prudent to collect donations and buy new toys as we doubt that our decisions as to which toys to buy would be biased towards toys having academic relevance. Moreover we believe that anyone donating a toy would be the best judge in this respect.

Old or New

Toy Library, Chetana Charity, Chowdavaram, Guntur District - 522 019, Andhra Pradesh, India.

Listen/Tell - We Will

You can also write to us asking us about anything you wish to know about this project, giving suggestions for improvising on our efforts, sending us a word of encouragement or just about anything you feel is relevant to chetana.