Faithkeepers: A project by Muskaan NGO, in Response to Impending Emotional Health Crisis due to COVID-19.
Are you feeling anxious, stressed, fatigued or hopeless? You are not alone and Muskaan’s volunteers have been trained to talk to you on phone and teach you simple anxiety management tools.
Project Summary: Four months, five volunteers, reached 18000+ people with two or more neuroscience based skills to manage anxiety. This ends emergency response phase of the project Faithkeepers. We are now reviewing our achievements, failures and learnings to design next phase of this work. Many people found it valuable and even invited to do it exclusively for their office teams. I am grateful to my team of volunteers (Jasnoor, Priti, Gireeja, Chandeep, Vrindaa and Suhani) for giving their best, despite navigating through many personal challenges. Grateful to all those who joined the online sessions, shared their updates and feedback and recommended it to their friends and family.
Purpose of Project FaithKeepers
- To mitigate impending emotional health crisis.
- To address it at the household level, so that we do not increase patient load (stress related illnesses like cardiac problems, etc.) in an over-burdened health system.
Context : As the COVID-19 crisis unfolds, an atmosphere of fear is building up, creating risks for emotional health. This epidemic of fear could cause much more damage to well-being of nations than the pandemic itself. It is posing emotional health challenges due to reasons given below:
- People who are used to being at workplaces, especially those employed in sales/marketing and other types of field jobs, are feeling quite restless sitting at home. Many are generally are glued to TV news most of the time, which is perpetuating fears.
- Slowing down of economy is a causing the youth to worry about their job prospects.
- Seniors citizens are living in constant fear and anxiety, particularly while dealing with their routine health related challenges.
- Parents are worried about their grown-up children who are stuck in different cities/countries.
- Young children are witnessing varied emotions of adults and have lots of pent up emotions.
- People suspected of COVID are being put in quarantine, they themselves and their loved ones at home are very anxious.
- Essential services’ providers, especially from the medical fraternity, are going through stress & grief everyday.
If this feeling of fear and anxiety persists, it can turn into depression, leading to mental health challenges at family, health system and societal levels.
Project Strategy (Phase one April-July 2020): Learn and teach others skills to manage anxiety and maintain calm in day to day life. The training by Vibha being offered pay as you wish mode, in the ‘Currency of Trust’, i.e., no price tag and the volunteers are free to offer what their heart suggests, to Muskaan directly.
Having completed phase one, now we are offering it to groups and office teams. Do connect, if this interests you.
