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| Sandhiyan |
AWARE, or Awareness
for Wo+Men to Advocate their Rights through Equality, is an initiative to
spread Awareness on Human Laws, Rights and Gender Equality. AWARE creates awareness
on women’s rights and legal provisions that they can advocate. It brings real
life instances of empowered women in all disciplines for inspiration and
motivation. Founded by Sandhiyan and carried forward on the able shoulders of
both, Sandhiyan and Janani, the project is making significant difference on
ground. Here’s our interview with the both of them.
Tell us a bit about yourselves, your growing years,
education and work?
Sandhiyan, Founder, AWARE - I was born and
brought up in Chennai, so a pucca Chennaite. Did my BE Mechanical Engineering
at Sri Sairam Engineering College, the college well known Gender Discrimination
and bias - one of the very reasons why gender parity interested me. In 2012, I
got placed with TCS, worked as a software developer for initial 2.5 years and
changed my role to CSR Volunteer Engagement Consultant for entire TCS Chennai
for 2 years. I found volunteering and my role provide me with a sense contentment
and satisfaction. I quit my job last May '17 with a hope to find a better
opportunity that would fulfill my career aspirations in social work along with
growing and expanding AWARE.
Janani, Project coordinator, NoMoreNirbhaya - I
grew up in Chennai most of my life. I got my
engineering degree in
Biotechnology from Rajalakshmi Engineering College. I moved to US in 2012 for
my Masters and during that time I got involved in the local south Asian
domestic violence organization and was very hurt to see the number of women
going through DV in a foreign country. And I felt I wanted to do more. In 2016,
I had created a fundraiser encouraging all our wedding guests to donate to help
300 children get education instead of wedding gifts. That caught Sandhiyan's
eye and he reached out asking if I would interested to lead this initiative. I
took a break in 2017 and worked on establishing NoMoreNirbhaya along with
Sandhiyan. I am currently an Environmental Consultant for a firm in San
Francisco.
What is the story of AWARE? How did it come about?
Sandhiyan: It was
Delhi Nirbhaya incident and series of gender based crimes aftermath of that
incident had triggered me to understand how it perpetuates and its influence at
all strata of life. As someone who was raised hearing the stories of GBV from
my mother and sisters, I really wanted to do something about that. This Delhi
incident has been a driving force towards it. I went ahead and started a
Facebook page AWARE - Awareness for Wo+Men to Advocate their Rights and
Equality and started sharing articles, created online campaigns to
create awareness on how women can fight back GBV. The page was a huge hit and I
started getting a lot of messages and response to my posts. Following that,
along with some friends we adopted a fisherman community in Chemmenchery and
have been working with the children and women for three years now.
What are some of the key work areas / activities at
AWARE?
AWARE focuses on three main initiatives in
addition to our online awareness page.
Chemmenchery Holistic Community Development
We are running a 5 year committed, sustainable project with
a mission of removing all societal issues by empowering the children and women
to transform their own community. We have yearly missions to create an
alleviating change marching towards our end goal.
Aug 2015 - Initiated CHCD
2017 - Child Friendly Chemmenchery
2018 - Assure Our Girls Future
2019 - Women Safer Chemmenchery
2020 - Gender Empowered Chemmenchery
SaveTheSmiles Movement
Save The Smiles (STS) addresses awareness of Child Sexual
Abuse: its prevalence, prevention and processing/handling. We conduct
awareness workshop on child sexual abuse and its impact on a child's well being
in Govt schools, orphanages and communities in an attempt to create child
friendly/safe zones. Our vision is to create child friendly/safe Chennai and to
save as many smiles as possible.
NoMoreNirbhaya Movement
We are working in a holistic way to approach various
stakeholders and create a Safer and Gender Empowered Chennai. Under NMN,
EMPOWER - teaching free
self-defense for girls and women
GEMs- working on creating a Gender
Equity Movement curriculum for schools
NMN Clubs - Establish NMN
clubs in colleges which will be a safe space for students to discuss about GBV,
learn legal rights and serve as a root to establish a Gender Empowered Campus
Safer Transportation - we are
working with the transportation authorities on how public transportation can be
made safer for women.
We also have plans to work with the police
department in providing them Gender Sensitization and Child Safety Workshops
and seek their support in our sessions and initiatives.
You work in the domain of shifting mindsets towards a
violence free society, which means you work to address some rather deeply
ingrained views and issues. Could you take us through some insights on any
challenges you've encountered and how you address them?
As you have rightly pointed out, the challenge has been the
deeply ingrained views and the resistance to accept the efforts that we take to
change it. It's been baby steps to get our target groups to accept the facts on
patriarchy or gender based violence or how the culmination of various societal
expectations has affected women and children. We address them by trying to
understand their lives and their stories. For example: in many communities women
have resigned to the fact that they can change nothing about their lives even
if they want to, but they would say they wish for better lives for their
children, so we go by their needs. And we have seen how happy they feel when
they see their children empowered and confident.
As a movement, what do you feel India needs in its
efforts towards gender equality? What is preventing that from happening
or being available?
We strongly feel we need to start from the roots-
"catch them young". We hope changes happen in the way we raise boys
and girls and how gender roles are defined at home and in school. We need long
term solutions which needs major revamping (evolution) of a lot of our systems.
Being an active bystander or being gender sensitive should be a part of growing
up just like how we learn math or science. At the same time, we also need short
term measures that would curb GBV from various stakeholders across the society
- parents, teachers, police, transport authorities, law makers etc.
People, norms, laws that pulls us or hold us back each time
we progress. We need more stronger voices speaking out and working against GBV
from all walks of life. As we know well, there is no one size fits all in our
country. Every part of our country have their own unique challenges. So to
reach different corners of the country we need more movements like ourselves in
all states run by representatives of that specific group who can identify and
who can, as insiders, steer others towards change.
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| Samson |
Can you share any anecdotes and success stories from your
work so far?
Honestly, we still feel we have a long way to go to say we
have been successful. During our recent conference, we had Samson, an 8 yr
old boy from Chemmenchery who was there as a participant. We had been giving
out badges for all participants - the badges have a superman/superwoman picture
with the words No More Nirbhaya. Samson was wearing the one with the superwoman
and we asked him if he would like superman. He responded back saying he doesn't
care, he likes wearing the superwoman badge. He got on stage with pride,
wearing his badge and gave a speech on gender equality. That was a moment of
pride and reflection on how we would like to create more Samsons in our
society. We also feel proud to see those shy/hesitant volunteers who
attended our EMPOWER sessions now being transformed as powerful
leaders/trainers.