Pathways (Padhaigal) is a non-governmental, secular, not-for-profit service committed to promoting emotional health and well being in children, youth and families. It has been established to improve the quality of life for all children and youth, especially those with, or at risk of special needs and their families. We endeavor to do this by empowering existing community resources to provide appropriate physical, psychological and social therapies. Pathways’ main focus is to improve emotional well being and development in children and youth.
Child and youth mental health is an extremely underdeveloped area in India with only a few centers providing services and training in the field. There are very few trained professionals in the country. This combined with increasing problems in the community needs creative solutions to address this huge gap in access to help. One of the main reasons for this gap is the lack of affordable primary sources of support for families, schools and health care services.
We will be providing these services by many ways. To start with we plan to empower ordinary people and community health care and social workers, to deliver mental healthcare with appropriate training and supervision from experts. We believe that our children and youth need multi-disciplinary input, which includes a mix of social, psychological and medical interventions. Collaborating with other academic, healthcare and social disciplines can provide this. We will take utmost care in making sure that our work is based on the best evidence available and we will ensure that our work is evaluated regularly for effectiveness.