Small efforts add up: an illustration from KK Nagar

On Jeevanandam Street in West KK Nagar, a beneficiary of a social outreach being carried out by residents of KK Nagar and surrounding areas.
| Photo Credit: PRINCE FREDERICK

This is true of any group that has a sharply-etched mission and seeks to fulfill it with extravagant commitment. The group should be kept impervious to outside influences that could dilute the mission, and sufficiently ajar to let in those that can further its scope.

KK Nagar Friends Helping Group enrolled in this school of thought and seemed to have passed the tests with flying colours.

D. Sivakumar, founder and prime mover behind KK Nagar Friends Helping Group, notes only those that have a “helping hand” to show can be part of its WhatsApp group.

The prerequisite for membership is an effort in the past to have promoted an act of mercy.

Little wonder that its WhatsApp group is sparsely populated — 25 members, according to Sivakumar.

KK Nagar Friends Helping Group.
| Photo Credit:
SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

And the group has been in existence since the early part of the pandemic — in 2020 — formed essentially to address the problem of hunger.

“For one month, we provided lunch to 65 frontline workers, preparing the food ourselves,” says Sivakumar.

Members of the group — largely residents of KK Nagar and surrounding areas — pass the hat around and mobilise funds whenever an act of mercy needs to be performed. Besides the residents, Sivakumar notes, the group looks in other directions where help can arrive to activate a planned charitable act.

Sivakumar is a member of the Rotary Club of Alandur; and he observes that contribution from Rotarians is immense.

There are eight balwadi schools in and around KK Nagar, and the group has mobilised funds to provide amenities whenever a need for them arose.

“We have provided television sets to five of those Balwadi schools; water purifiers to four of them; and we have 20 chairs each to four balwadi schools and are is in the process of reaching the same number of chairs to other four,” explains Sivakumar.

Individuals with needs are also on this group’s radar.

Here are examples.

“In a single-parent family, where the lady has to take care of three children, one child had undergone heart surgery. There was no cot in the house for the child to lie down on. We collected money to buy a cot and a fan and also enable them to purchase medicine,” he says.

Two covered pushcarts, meant for ironwallahs to ply their trade — one in West KK Nagar (Jeevanandam Street) and the other in neighouring Virugambakkam — bear the name of this collective, “KK Nagar Friends Helping Group”. Sivakumar volunteers information about them: the pushcart in KK Nagar was repaired and returned to the ironwallah; and the one in Virugambakkam bought afresh for the ironwallah.