Life skills are fundamentals for the development of child and youth to enable success in their life. Proper building of these skills helps in protection of children from getting abused. The earlier the children get exposed to these skills, the sooner they reflect a healthy, well-adjusted life and embrace positive life skills. As per WHO ‘it is the abilities for adoptive and positive behavior that enables individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life’. Life Skills are psychological skills that help in developing cognitive, personal and interpersonal abilities to better deal with risk circumstances. It is one of the best approaches to keep the children away from vulnerabilities and risk circumstances.

Children are vulnerable and often faces difficulties all across even at home. Due to this children often manifest various behavioral, emotional and conduct issues. This also affects the self esteem of the child and results in the child poor adjustment and lack of motivations to come up in their life’s.

TLearning of ‘Life skill’ develops their self esteem, confidence, independence and competencies to deal with challenging situations. We organize sessions for the target children who are exposed to risk situations. These sessions are normally context and geographic specific. We use tools from Art Therapy, Play Therapy, Song & meditation in these sessions.

Safety & self Defense (SSD) tools are used to build confidence and skills in the children. At present we are focusing on the children in the issue affected communities of Odisha. We through our Child Support Centers (CSC) provide martial art training and techniques to survive risk situations. These trainings help to develop skills among the survivors and exposed children to face unpredicted situations. We conduct simulation exercises in order make them spontaneous in using these techniques to protect themselves from the predators. We as a pioneer institute in Odisha focusing in the risk prevailing urban slum clusters of Puri and Bhubaneswar city. We have developed gender and age specific modules for this./p>