Michelle Harrison

Founder

Michelle Harrison is the founder of Shishur Sevay [1], an Indian non-profit working on orphans & child care and disability from Kolkata.

Michelle Harrison is an American physician and psychiatrist who founded Childlife Preserve Shishur Sevay in Kolkata in 2006. Shishur Sevay is a small inclusive home for orphaned and abandoned girls, including girls with severe disabilities, who live together in a family-style household rather than in a conventional institution.

Harrison lives at the home with the children and serves as its executive director and government-appointed superintendent on an unsalaried basis.

Early life and education

Harrison trained in medicine in the United States and practised across obstetrics and gynaecology, family medicine and psychiatry over a career of some forty-five years. She held faculty positions at Harvard University, Rutgers University and the University of Pittsburgh.

In corporate practice she was worldwide director of medical affairs in the consumer division of Johnson & Johnson and later executive director of the Johnson & Johnson Institute for Children.

Career

Harrison's connection with Kolkata began when she adopted an infant daughter from an orphanage in the city in 1984. She moved to Kolkata in 1999.

In 2006 she established Childlife Preserve Shishur Sevay. The home takes in girls who have been abandoned, trafficked or found lost, and in particular girls with disabilities who are generally passed over for adoption. Children with and without disabilities are raised together in one household; the home has used assistive communication technology, including eye-tracking devices, for girls with speech impairments, and offers vocational activity in art, yoga, tailoring and jewellery-making.

Shishur Sevay also runs an inclusive free play centre for younger children from the surrounding neighbourhood.[2][3][4][5]

Shishur Sevay

Shishur Sevay runs a residential home in Kolkata for orphaned and abandoned girls, deliberately housing children with and without disabilities together rather than segregating them. Founded in 2006, it provides schooling, therapy and long-term family-style care for girls who have nowhere else to go.

Shishur Sevay reports the following, on its own site: