Our History
Will Muir and Rujuta Teredesai initially founded a venture called Solar Cinemas in 2009, which was intended to provide information on social and development issues to residents of low-income communities through cinema. They soon found that women and girls were unable to attend these cinema screenings in their communities due to a number of gender inequity issues – women and girls had limited leisure time and mobility due to an inequality in the division of housework, concerns about sexual harassment and safety, and familial restrictions. This awareness, along with the fact that women’s empowerment programmes generally focus on women and girls, gave Rujuta and Will the incentive to work on gender equity through focusing on the attitudes and behaviour of men and boys in the communities and they co-founded Equal Community Foundation.
Co-Founders
William Muir, Co-Founder
Will is an experienced professional having held senior management positions in corporate and social sector international organisations. In addition to supporting the team on core operations, he leads fundraising and partnerships.
Business administration and development of management and operations strategy are some of his core strengths.
He is extremely passionate about raising awareness and building leadership around the approach of engaging boys and men to ensure scaling of the approach.
Rujuta Teredesai, Co-Founder
Rujuta has more than 9 years of experience working and volunteering for non-profit organisations. She specializes in programme management, fundraising, and communications.
Having studied English Literature and Print Journalism, she is a trained journalist.
A woman who believes in getting things done, she joined Will Muir at ECF because she has tremendous faith in the concept of engaging boys and men as a part of the solution.
Rujuta loves that she gets to contribute real solutions for a grave problem that envelops India. She also enjoys the exposure ECF gives her to experts from different fields, enabling organisational, professional and personal growth.