OUTREACH & AWARENESS

Our approach to Outreach is two-pronged. We believe that creating awareness is critical to helping women confront their situations. Often, one is not cognizant of what constitutes abuse. Awareness about abuse and the help that is close at hand is very important to women being able to tackle their problems in the ‘here and the now’. Additionally, our programs are geared toward long-term strategies to prevent violence. For example, sensitizing children in schools to gender equality concepts.

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Since the early months of Bembala presence on the scene, we have been conducting awareness talks called ‘Bol Sakhi’, wherein volunteers go to communities or workplaces, and spend an hour talking to women about domestic violence and abuse and about reaching out for help . Bembala has also conducted health and nutrition camps in collaboration with other NGOs. Other programs include talking to school children about abuse and its prevention, running gender sensitization and listening skills training for police constables, and debate competitions. We even held a session with an Expressive Arts Counsellor at a community level.

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During the pandemic, when we could not physically reach out to people, our awareness and training modules went online. We conducted sessions to "train" the trainers of Vidya Foundation, where they work with women and children needing help. We set up sessions with teachers who needed training to identify children in trouble, story-telling sessions for young children, as well as support sessions for children who had contracted COVID 19 and were stuck without their family in COVID-care centers.