Overview
5.6 million people benefited by 165,000 free stress-relief camps
49,500 hygiene camps and 25,950 medical camps
5,418 toilets built in rural village and urban slums communities
Over the last 37 years, The Art of Living has uniquely addressed healthcare by combining traditional, holistic and modern intervention methods. We estimate that so far over 370 million people around the world have been benefited from The Art of Living techniques that have directly impacted their health and well-being.
With experience, we have developed strategies to improve healthcare at the individual, local and national level. For individuals, our focus is on promoting a healthy lifestyle and disease prevention. At the local and national level, the focus is on creating awareness and providing preventive care.
Executing healthcare and hygiene projects successfully requires deep technical skill and resources. For many of these initiatives, The Art of Living partners with government, national and international development agencies and corporates to overcome challenges and to multiply outcomes.
- Renuka, Ashwath Nagar, Bengaluru one of the beneficiaries of our health camps
Challenges:
Good health is an outcome and not an action by itself. In the multitude of projects that we have undertaken in this sector, we have observed that areas that have high health issues also suffer from a lack of basic amenities. These would include clean drinking water, proper toilets, basic education facilities and a lack of employment. It is very difficult to have a conversation with communities about washing hands when there is no water. People cannot be told not to defecate in the open when there are no toilets. Using soap for washing is hard when there is not even money to buy food.
There is little to no awareness of basic health and hygiene practices that can prevent some common diseases in the rural and semi-urban areas. It is among these challenges that The Art of Living tries to execute various health and hygiene-related programs. Wherever possible, we try to take an integrated development approach to create the basic building blocks that will promote good health. In other cases, we take a modular approach to create awareness and provide preventive care for individual issues.
“Health is not a mere absence of disease. To be well is to thrive physically, emotionally, and psychologically.”
Strategy
Our strategy to promote and execute healthcare initiatives is individually tailored for four different target audiences.
At an individual level: A holistic model has been designed to prevent diseases before they arise. This is done through lifestyle, diet and attitude changes brought about through creative intervention that ensures lasting impact.
At a community level: Our community-focused projects include design, plan, and monitoring of healthcare initiatives through diagnosis, personal care, advocacy, preventive health care and a sustainability plan.
At a national level: We undertake advocacy and awareness-building programs in collaboration with stakeholders including UN, government, faith leaders, and other developmental agencies to address national health concerns.
At a global level: We participate in global advocacy campaigns to support the Millennium Development Goals in its health-focused priorities.
Impact
Our efforts in preventive health care have been very successful and have helped us develop a strong framework that can be used to scale up our efforts. We have focused, both, on health and hygiene camps to improve general awareness and to run disease-specific intervention projects. As a result of these efforts, we have been able to:
- Organize 49,500 hygiene camps and 25,950 medical camps, benefiting over 2.5 million people
- Build 5,418 toilets in rural village and urban slum communities across India
- Hold 165,000 free stress relief camps, benefiting 5.6 million people in rural communities
- Diagnose and treat Diabetes and Hypertension patients in slums of Bengaluru
- Undertake advocacy programs in rural villages in UP and Assam to increase awareness about safe sanitation and hygiene
- Promote smokeless chulhas (stoves) to prevent lung diseases in rural Maharashtra as a part of an 18-month-long project
- Treat more than 1350 patients in The Art of Living Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Center in Kolkata
- Conduct 150 Living Well programs, benefiting over 7,000 people in India
Please reach out to us to know more about our projects in the healthcare and hygiene sector and to start a dialogue on how we can partner to bring a much-needed change.
