Join forces and amplify your effort — EmpowHER2015

Two is always better than one. When it comes to making a powerful impact, one needs to learn to effectively coordinate and collaborate. In every session, our aspiring change makers meet and learn from like-minded individuals and get exposed to new avenues to foster collaboration, expand their ideas, and maximise their efforts. Currently, our participants are working with various organisations and communities to implement their ideas and reach out to the right people with the right solutions and right attitude.

Change maker #9:

Martina Gautam

Morning shows the day. Youngest amongst the 13 girls, Martina Gautam believes in giving her best in whatever she does. A recent high school graduate, she wants to pursue Biomedical engineering in her undergraduate studies. Head strong about her goals, she leaves no opportunities behind to achieve them.

When EmpowHER came around, she knew what she needed to do. The idea of sharing the same platform with other like-minded women and learning new things excited her. She joined EmpowHER with a hope to improve her leadership skills, and bring back her experience and understandings to her students.

She has been working as a teacher since the last three years at a women’s school in her neighbourhood. Many of her students work as domestic helpers in dif ferent houses in the community. In exchange for school fees, many young women from rural Nepal travel to the capital to work as domestic helpers. Despite mistreatment and abuse, these girls stay with their host families so that they can receive free schooling. But most of them do not even get to go to school, and even if they do they cannot concentrate and lag behind in their classes due to over workload. Therefore, through her EmpowHER ‘Impact Service Project’ Martina will provide free coaching classes to help these girls with their assignments and class works including sessions on ESL, mathematics, and computer courses. Based on their performance in the coaching classes, she will provide

scholarships to few students to support their tuition fees. She hopes her effort will

help at least few young women to pursue education without being forced into domestic labour.

For her, EmpowHER has exceeded her expectation. It has offered more than she had anticipated, helping her gain more clarity about her goals and herself.

Change maker #10:

Nisha Bhatt

Reap what you sow. Nisha Bhatt who is a second year Bachelor’s student of Social Science knows that to get good results you need to put in good effort. Passionate about

social change, she believes that a society can only be progressive when women are

given their basic rights without hesitance.

Through her ‘Impact Service Project’, she wants to create awareness about “Chaupadi”, an old tradition that banishes women during their menstruation forcing them to live in a sheds or outbuildings. They have limited food, poor sanitation, and are vulnerable to wild animal attacks and sexual harassments. Despite being

outlawed in 2005, many families in Western Nepal still practice this detrimental and life threatening tradition. She wants to pilot her project in Mashfal VDC in Dolpa, where many women have lost their lives to Chaupadi. With the help of her project, she will be providing awareness trainings in the community to help women overcome the social pressure to practice such traditions, and establish an understanding of menstruation as a biological process rather than a regressive social practice. She will also provide trainings on women health and how women can take care of themselves while they are menstruating. She hopes that her efforts will help the community gain a different perspective on women menstruation, leading to both behavioral and social change towards such practices.

She joined EmpowHER to empower herself so that she can enable other women in the community. Through EmpowHER she has been able to strengthen her interpersonal skills, better herself as a leader, and develop ever lasting sisterhood.

As the journey of EmpowHER progresses, we see the passion, focus, and the sense of responsibility towards the community brewing strongly in our participants. We are confident that these change makers will leave no stones unturned to make a powerful impact anywhere they go.

The author is a Founder/Executive Director at Ujyalo Foundation, a non-profit organisation, and a Life skills trainer at National Banking Institute. Reach Amuda @theamudamishra