What we do

We offer children from socially weaker families the possibility to visit our pre-school clubs. Photo: Rishabh Kaul

We help students and teachers at more than 4,000 schools. We work where government support is missing. We teach teachers to work with talented and handicapped children. We want students not only to remember facts, but, most importantly, to develop their abilities and to understand the interconnectedness of the world we live in. We talk to students about modern history. We tutor children from socially weaker families, in order for them not to end up in a specialized school for mentally handicapped children – which often happens in the Czech education system – and, as a result, have few prospects for the future. We inspire students to find solutions to local problems. We teach young people about respect, openness and responsibility. And we do much, much more.

The educational programs are created and run by People in Need from four different sections of the organization: One World in Schools, Varianty, Social Integration Programmes and One World film festival.

How do we help?

We work with more than 4,000 schools around the Czech Republic

We work with 4,000 schools around the Czech Republic

People in Need has partnerships with almost three quarters of all Czech schools. We help to make school a place that develops children’s potential and individual abilities and where students learn to orient themselves in the modern world through modern methodology. And we also want today’s schools to be able to raise active, respectable and self-confident citizens, who can change our society for the better.

To achieve these goals, we strive to bring important topics into schools with the use of audiovisual teaching materials, experiential learning, discussions with eyewitnesses of historical events and documentary films. We cover a wide range of topics, including human rights, global problems, modern Czech and Czechoslovak history, social issues, equal opportunities in education, stereotypes and negative social biases.

During the pandemic, we moved our activities to online environment. Last year we were able to go back to the real world, but we kept the good practice we learned online – we offer online tutoring for those who live in harder accessible locations or where we do not have enough volunteers.

We help poor, disadvantaged kids achieve their dreams through a better education

Foto: Iva Zímová

Last year, 360 children attended our 12 pre-school clubs. It’s where we prepare children from underprivileged families, who have no access to a normal pre-school and little family support in their education, to enter normal primary schools. These clubs are incredibly important in order to give young children, who are discriminated, a chance at a good start in school.

In addition to helping with classwork, our volunteers work with the parents of every student who turns to us for help, to make sure the child has a home environment that is conducive to learning – that she or he has a desk to work at and enough time to do school work. Parents from poorer, less educated backgrounds are often unaware that this is necessary for their children.

Almost 15 510 pedagogues and teaching staff have participated in our workshops, seminars and debates in the last 21 years

We offer unique courses and methodology for schools and teachers. We support teachers in trying to fulfill the individual needs of every child. We organize seminars, provide training and consultation, offer innovative teaching materials and documentary films. In cooperation with teachers and experts we create courses accredited by the Education Ministry. During the last 19 years, over 15,5 thousand Czech teachers have taken part in our courses.

1 045 student projects nominated for Gratias Tibi prize

We encourage students to be actively involved in the world that surrounds them. Groups of students, led by their teachers, investigate important topics or problems in their communities. They then create their own small projects with which they bring public attention to the topic, and sometimes implement solutions to the problem. In order to support the positive examples of such work, we have created a special prize called Gratias Tibi, which is presented to young people for their civic involvement.

In eight years 1 045 projects created by youngsters have been nominated for the prize, helping improving their communities and society.

We also organize debates with politicians, historians and journalists specifically for students. We organize mock elections in high schools, through which young people learn about basic democratic principles and the election system in the Czech Republic.

We provide 295 audiovisual courses on our educational website

More than 3 800 primary and secondary schools have joined this program and the website is serving as a testament to the usefulness of this approach. The site provides tested, quality films, which were selected as the best Czech and international documentaries focusing on human rights, development topics, social problems, the environment, modern Czechoslovak history and others. During the quarantine, we have opened the jsns.cz site to broad public so parents could use the educational materials with their children.

In the past 15 years, more than 386,000 students took part in the biggest nationwide project on modern Czechoslovak history – Stories of Injustice

Czech society has lived under dictatorships for decades, nevertheless most people seem to be blissfully unaware that today’s freedoms should not be taken for granted and need to be protected. In order for the younger generation, who were born after the fall of Communism, to be mindful of this, we created the Stories of Injustice project.

The project offers schools documentary and feature films as well as other materials that can be used for history courses. We organize film screenings and discussions with eyewitnesses of historical events, historians and filmmakers at hundreds of schools around the Czech Republic. Some of the historical events and topics that students are exposed to are the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, persecution of Jews during the Second World War, defectors from Communist Czechoslovakia, and many others.

More than 4,905 future teachers attended our courses, seminars and workshops

We would like Czech teachers to be able to work effectively with the most pertinent topics of the day. We know that in order to do that, they need to be determined and well prepared. That is exactly what we aim to achieve in the seminars People in Need offers. We prepared a range of practical short-term and long-terms courses and seminars for university students in education-related fields.

We organize Human Rights Film Festival „One World“ for the last 22 years

We provide teachers with information and new methodologies in dozens of our courses

With the help of teachers and experts, we have prepared dozens of courses that have been accredited by the Education Ministry, which introduce multicultural and global education to teachers. Our Varianty educational program organizes seminars, courses, workshops or project days in schools and creates various teaching materials that can be utilized by teachers and university students preparing to become teachers. The teachers use these courses and other activities and materials that People in Needs offers them to make their teaching more effective, but also to make their jobs more fun and satisfying.

Together with 8 faculties of pedagogy we’ll help children to keep up at school

After the closure of Czech schools in March 2020, all lessons have been moved online. Unfortunately, according to the statistics around 10 000 pupils have not been able to join the online classes. It would be very hard for these children to keep up with the new curriculum in the beggining of the new school year.

Therefore, we have started an iniative, with help from universities and ministry of education, to support these children. Students from faculties of education will provide tutoring to the pupils while gaining valuable experience.

Stories