India_James Arbat 2025

Family Development Services & our Building Blocks preschools are extremely thankful to

GCF for their annual Grant, which has strengthened our mission of eradicating hunger and providing education for our 665 preschool children in the slum localities of Bangalore. We wish to testify that without your Grant-encouragement, we would not be able to effectively impact the lives and health of our children and thus the lives of their families too, who live in constant poverty.

Our current strength of preschool children being served is 665 (lower than our anticipated number of 684 children). It is because of GCF Grant that we can provide these dear children with breakfast, lunch and purified water for 6 days every week (On Saturdays, our preschools function till noon and the children are taken home by their parents for lunch).

Each of our children is served 6 breakfasts & 5 lunches weekly (Monthly 24 breakfasts & 20 lunches). This results in our 555 children receiving 15,960 breakfasts + 13,300 lunches each month. The monthly serving of 29,260 meals is made possible only through the generosity and compassion of the GCF team! Thank you so much for sharing God’s blessings with our needy children. Currently, the average number of children in our eight kindergartens in Bangalore is 83 per school.

Your Grant helps make our preschool learning a joyous time as each child looks forward to the delicious & nutrition-filled meals they can have each school day. The food that GCF provides infuses our children with the mental energy to learn and the physical energy to play & engage in outdoor playtime & activities. Prayer & breakfast is the first. daily activity at each of our preschools. Because of the GCF Grant, our 665 children are not among the “list of hungry children” in Bangalore. That is a miracle of God via your kindness! Thank you so much for being God’s lnstrument of Love to our children!

The children’s parents, especially the mothers are very “emotionally thankful” that their small children can have such healthy & delicious food {which they themselves are not able to ever have). The parents leave house early in the day, to travel to their work places {most mothers work as house maids in 2 – 3 houses per day), and on their way out, drop off their children at our preschools. We believe that the GCF Grant not only benefits our children in a physical sense through the meals provided, but also bestows encouragement, solace and happiness to their helpless parents.

The GCF Grant has enabled us to move away from providing “only what we can afford food” towards “nutritious and filling meals” for our children. lt has greatly helped in closing the gaps in our food budget, making it possible for us to also serve special meals & tasty snacks during festivals or special occasions.

Water is provided 3 days a week through public taps on each lane, at designated timings.

The residents, mostly mothers and teenage girls, queue up ahead of time with their plastic water pots to collect water. Since the water is supplied only 2-3 days a week, each house store water in big drums or buckets to use on the days of no-water-supply. This is now gradually improving with the state government deciding to provide water directly to each household. But as usual in lndia, implementation takes a long time, especially projects to help the poor.