Our Educate. Empower. Lead. campaign with Malala Fund is engaging with girls aged 13-17 at risk or the victims of Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC), to inspire them to stand up for their rights to their own education. We are also empowering them to challenge the barriers to equality in education and giving them the dais to advocate for it with key influencers and decision makers. Another way we are empowering them is through the recruitment and development of peer mentors, girls aged between 13 and 17 and older role models, who are the children of sex workers, living with HIV/AIDS and slum dwellers. As well involving them in the delivery of our our workshops and presentations
We are over half way through our Educate. Empower. Lead, campaign in partnership with Malala Fund and have already delivered 20 workshops with our own beneficiaries. As well as promoting girls’ education, women and child rights and laws and gender equality through these workshops and presentations we are also striving to give girls practical life skills and experiences that will help empower them. With this in mind we have been delivering a range of additional activities and events. Thank you to Ahmednagar Mid-Town Rotary Club for arranging for 130 girls from our Rehab Center and Balbhavan to watch Pad Man at our local cinema. The film is a fictionalized account of Arunachalam Muruganatham,
Snehalaya’s Yuva Nirman project works with youth volunteers to introduce them to social work. As part of their activities they conduct two youth camps each year. We launched our Educate. Empower. Lead. campaign with Malala Fund at our August 2017 camp and our January 2018 camp was fully dedicated to the campaign. Our campaign was inaugurated by Mr Ranjankumar Sharma Superintendent of Police, Ahmednagar who also signed our pledge offering his support for the campaign. We also conducted a signature campaign asking the 219 delegate and guests to pledge support for the campaign. Signees included the District Collector, Abhay Mahajan, and all of the youth volunteers made a pledge to support girls
March 8 is always a big event in our calendar as we celebrate all of the women connected to our organisation. This year we held two separate events. The first saw staff and beneficiaries from our women's shelter, farm, sex worker projects, rehabilitation center, slum projects, hospital and adoption center join the wives of our senior staff for a day of fun-filled and team-building activities. Watch the kho-kho, musical chairs, dancing, ping-pong, prizes and smiles and laughter above. At the same time we opened our new Nirmay Center in the red lights area of Shevgaon, providing an accommodation and vocational training space for the community living there. As part of the day we also distribute
Antaraa Anandan is a remarkable second-generation Indian high school student living in Illinois, USA. We were honoured when she contacted us to ask if she could use her #lettersforher campaign in partnership with us. Prompted by the barrage of stories of gender-based violence she felt she could no longer stand by and ignore the situation and wanted to do something to demand change for women in India. and show solidarity to our female survivors. #Lettersforher invited women and girls to write their own letters of support to share with our beneficiaries and let them know that others were thinking of them. We received literally hundreds of handwritten cards with heartfelt messages filed with l