‘Knowledge shared is knowledge multiplied’. In the last few months, our peers from like-minded organizations were a goldmine of knowledge for us at Equal Community Foundation. In order to strengthen our team’s capacities we invited experts from community-based organizations to share their diverse expertise with our team.
ECF hosts a week-long Intensive Mentor Training to equip our team with skills and knowledge they need to create enabling environments for young men and their communities for preventing gender based violence and discrimination. We invited prominent Human Rights lawyer Advocate Rama Sarode to interact with our team about mechanism to protect women’s rights in the Indian Legal System. With her immense experience, she walked us through complex laws which protect women’s economic, social and political rights and discussed men’s role in gender justice. The session demystified intricate Indian laws and their enforcement. It helped strengthen our team’s capacities to discuss and initiate legal action in cases of violence and discrimination.
We were also fortunate to have Gauri Sunanda from Tathapi Trust for a dialogue about letstalksexuality.com, the first sexuality and body awareness portal in Marathi, launched by Tathapi.
Mr. Dharmendra Padalkar from Bapu Trust at the Intensive Mentor Training
We hosted a panel discussion on ‘How to Mobilize Communities for Gender Justice’. Bhaskar Kakad from SNEHA (Mumbai) and Dharmendra Padalkar from Bapu Trust (Pune) shared invaluable grassroots experience with the Action for Equality Team. Mr. Kakad stressed on how critical it is to be accessible to community members. “If you want to build sustainable community relations, it is essential that the community can rely on you in their times of crisis,” he said as he shared SNEHA’s initiatives for intervention in cases of domestic violence. Mr. Padalkar suggested initiating and strengthening partnerships with peer organizations which also work to protect the community’s rights.
Mr. Bobby Zachariah interacts with Programme Mentors Suhas and Mahesh
We also invited Bobby Zachariah who was previously a member of Connecting NGO‘s team, now consults independently for community mobilization, for a discussion on ‘Building Enabling Environments with Parent’s engagement’. Mr. Zachariah offered an innovative solution to understand your community’s aspirations and strengths better. ‘SALT’ approach for community mobilization focuses on creating local ownership through a process of community discussion, reflection, learning, and action.
We hope to leverage our learnings into more effective programme implementation that speeds up community level action.