A cozy library and intellectual nook was inaugurated in Nor Shen village of Martouni region of Artsakh. The project was sponsored by the Awesome Foundation Artsakh and is the brainchild of Milena Asryan, a local schoolgirl, and her teacher Ara Haroutyunyan.
Competing with a number of other applications, the project was named winner of the November 2018 Awesome Foundation Artsakh funding grant. Over the following months, thanks to the volunteering efforts of the schoolchildren and other village residents, the project has been translated into life, fostering conductive climate for the intellectual development of the kids and their recreation activities. In particular, provisions have been made in the room for reading, discussions, drawing and mind games.
Milena Asryan, the author of the project, mentioned that they had not previously had corresponding space for organising their extracurricular leisure. She was pleased to note that the library, stocked with modern literature specimen, would serve as an important incentive for their academic development and would expand their horizons.
Ara Haroutyunyan, the local school teacher, highlighted creating proper conditions for the intellectual recreation of the kids, expecially in rural residences, believing it was part and parcel of quality education.
Approaching two years of his teaching activity in Nor Shen, Ara has stood out as instigator of a number of innovative educational projects, chanelling practical knowledge and skills to the children and sowing the seeds of social entrepreneurship in them.
Armine Grigoryan, one of the trustees of the Awesome Foundation Artsakh, welcomed the measures undertaken in Artsakh to deliver new approaches in the sphere of education. She pointed out that the cozy environment of alternative education and development in Nor Shen embodied through the library, which the kids put into life with their own efforts, had strong public importance and would become an additional stimulus for instilling love in the children towards books, for socializing the image of the reader.
Armine Grigoryan also viewed it as an important step that the schoolchildren were not indifferent and had motivation to change their life, create a corresponding environment for themselves.
Artak Beglaryan, founding trustee of the Awesome Foundation Artsakh, underlined that their aim was to boost initiativeness, innovation, volunteering, and community life in Artsakh through diverse awesome and creative projects.
He commended the implementation of the Nor Shen library project, informing that it was the pioneering accomplished project sponsored by the Foundation and that three more are pending.
Artak Beglaryan voiced his confidence that the projects of the Foundation would become the making of social entrepreneurship and volunteering culture in Artsakh, advancing at the same time the shaping of a more comprehensive environment.
Awesome Foundation Artsakh was established in June 2018 as an autonomous chapter of global Awesome Foundation. We are an independent group of people (currently about 40 trustees from Artsakh, Armenia and the Diaspora) aiming to make our reality a little more awesome with some initiatives. Every two months the Foundation gives out micro-grants to the winning project, local equivalent of $1000, which come out of pockets of the chapter’s trustees and are given on a no-strings-attached basis.
To learn more about the Awesome Foundation Artsakh and the list of trustees, as well as to apply for a grant, you can visit the Foundation’s website or surfe its Facebook page.
