Mudita Foundation

In keeping with our conviction toward's evidence-based interventions and impact measures, research is an approach and a tool being used within and across all our interventions. The attempt is to initiate small and large-scale studies in collaboration with partner communities to identify good practices, emerging new risks, and gaps in tackling these risks.

One of our initiatives to build collective consensus, effort and impact is Baatcheet Live - a platform for practitioners and organizations to come together to create a space for learning, share knowledge and experience and build collective responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of women and children in communities. It is currently a virtual monthly interaction conducted over Zoom, attended by staff members of community-based organizations, teachers, or educators from schools and learning spaces, across India.

In our Pahal sessions, we help participants in diverse contexts become aware of the risks that women, youth and children face everyday and the magnitude of these in and around us. Whether in a corporate office, a school conference room, a park, a community centre or a virtual space; each Pahal awareness session explores notions of safety helping participants receive relevant information, share their concerns and fears with clarity and growing confidence using simple tools of expression. It is critical to create awareness for prevention of abuse and exploitation. The more schools, organisations and communities we reach out to, the more we realise that sexual abuse and exploitation still seem like a distant and hidden problem to most people. The fact that there are predators in the physical and virtual world is an unknown fact for most people. This not knowing comes from not having the relevant knowledge and oftentimes the right and context specific vocabulary and narrative on how to identify and recognise these silent and hidden crimes.

Positioning and profiling the problem to diverse stakeholders to as many as possible is the beginning. Articulating and acknowledging the problem is the first step. This inspires further thought and action amongst individuals, organisations and society towards tackling the issue. Our sessions also end with a call to action because we at Mudita Foundation believe that awareness will motivate every individual to acknowledge our collective responsibility and initiate action.

At Mudita Foundation, we partner with community-based organizations, schools and universities working on various issues and educational institutions to educate and build their capacity to recognize, record and respond to instances of child abuse and human trafficking and other forms of gender-based violence and exploitation within their communities. Leher is a structured programme using appropriate and context-specific tools for reflection, interaction and action to create safe spaces, protect survivors of violence and make safeguarding a mandate within all NGOs, schools and other civil society organisations. Apart from awareness and capacity-building, the commitment to creating safer spaces by organizations, schools and educational institutions needs policies for safeguarding and protection, systems and processes for implementing the policy and structured and consistent initiatives for awareness and prevention. The Leher programme continues to provide guidance and support for organizations through all these steps to help create and establish a holistic response to safeguarding and protection of children and women across education, health, livelihoods and overall agency is critical. This begins with awareness and capacity building to be able to detect and respond to situations of abuse, violence, and exploitation and works towards establishing active and effective prevention and response mechanisms across communities.

The Safe Spaces project envisions a structured place where women and children’s physical and emotional safety is respected and where women and children are supported through processes of empowerment to seek, share, and obtain information, access services, express themselves, enhance their psychosocial wellbeing, and more fully realise their rights. It is a space that empowers women and children individually and collectively. The space also initiates a process of building and nurturing collective responsibility in the community towards safety by initiating conversations with diverse stakeholders with the larger vision of building an active and effective community based response mechanism. At the core of the programme are the adolescents or women who evolve into safety champions through the safe space and become the voice for safety in the community. The project works with a community-based partner organisation and builds their capacity at every step through training, exposure visits and networking. It often emerges from a Leher intervention.