Dubai: Students of a top business school in Dubai have launched an ambitious campaign to write letters of love to refugee children all over the world.
Part of a “Project Giving” exercise at SP Jain School for Global Management, the campaign is targeting to send over 1,000 such letters in time for the New Year, school senior vice-president, institutional development and head of campus Christopher Abraham told XPRESS.
He said, “The students are writing letters along with collages that will be sent to NGOs to spread love among refugee children and show them that we care. The students realise that through this very act of giving, they are not only making someone happy, but also doing good for themselves. We aim at taking the initiative across borders, and to start with, all our campuses in Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, along with Dubai will participate in the initiative.”
Larger building
Bijal Oza, director (cross campus), counselling & coaching, who is spearheading the campaign, said, “By the end of the year, we wish to gather the letters of love by reaching out to a larger community, including schools, universities and individuals. We are all hard-wired to ease pain and suffering among others, which is either psychological, physiological or both. When students put themselves out there and offer assistance, it makes them feel better. A little act of helping others would go a long way in making us feel selfless and happy.”
Abraham said S.P. Jain is set to launch a first-of-its-kind Centre of Excellence for Happiness very shortly. “With a vision to create a happy work environment, we declared 2016 as the Year of Happiness. Following the principles of positive psychology and the science of happiness, we led year-long initiatives to facilitate employee well-being and happiness. We then decided to take this initiative forward in order to reach out to the community and launch the Centre.”
He said the centre is a reimagining of how individuals can best work and live together. “The concept of income-based well-being is limited in the sense that it neglects overall wellbeing and happiness. The science of happiness embodies the notion that a developed society is one where its citizens have overall satisfaction with their lives.
He said the centre will have a special course “Happiness by Choice”, inspired by UC Berkeley’s programme on the Science of Happiness. “The course is based on the ground- breaking science of positive psychology, which explores the roots of a happy and meaningful life. The science encompasses the latest findings from the fields of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, as well as behavioural economics. Students will engage with relevant and provocative practical lessons from this science and learn how to apply those key principles to their own lives.”
