Philanthropy for Equitable Justice and Peace

Tewa has always aimed to support the initiatives of women's organizations. The grassroots level women identify their needs to which Tewa financially supports with micro funds. One of our grantee partners from Lalitpur, Siddhipur Mahila Sashaktikaran Samaj has been working towards women's empowerment by engaging them in income-generating training and awareness-raising programs. One of the projects proposed by this organization is related to environmental justice. The activities included in this are to create awareness about plastic pollution and its impact on the environment and advocate for reducing the use of plastics. The other activity is to develop the skill of recycling waste plastic for handicraft production. Both these activities have benefitted women from that community. This organization has initiated the reuse of single-use plastics by providing training to 20 women. These women learned about the traditional handicrafts making from these plastics. The participants also learned about the management of plastics and shared with others in the community regarding the proper plastic proposals. Out of 20 women who learned to make traditional handicrafts, two of them have become trainers and ten of them have already started selling the products to support their income. Another training on making cloth bags was taken by 15 women. Of which 4 have become trainers. This has supported the livelihood of the women and supported them to become economically empowered.

With the ongoing pandemic and necessary precautions that are mandatory to take, personal as well as professional lives of ours have been affected. One of our core programs, the Volunteers program had also been impacted. Since the coronavirus cases started increasing from March 2020 to date, the programs to run in-person have been near to impossible. During the lockdown, the program officer was in close communication with as many volunteers as possible through various social media chatting platforms. To date, Tewa has more than 900 trained volunteers and 30% of them are still actively engaged in Tewa. Volunteers of Tewa used to participate in different local fundraising events, discussion programs focused on the volunteers, and refreshers programs. During the lockdown, Tewa came up with the idea to start weekly sessions via zoom. The weekly session is focused on all the volunteers. This session was focused solely on volunteers and was about skill sharing. Any interested volunteer with any skill, can lead the session and share about their skill with other interested volunteers. The session was conducted every Sunday via Zoom. Through this skill-sharing session, 117 volunteers have learned different skills. Like, learning how to make chayote pickle, making compost and liquid fertilizer, waste management skill, and making handbags. Also, our volunteers learned about basic skills in poem writing and making liquid hand wash. Apart from this training, Tewa also focused on the well-being of the volunteers. During ongoing pandemic and lockdown, the mental health of people has been affected due to an increase in stress and only staying indoors. So, we had also organized Psycho counseling and well-being session for our volunteers. The facilitators for all the sessions were our volunteers. These sessions had helped our volunteers interact with each other during this chaotic time, distracting themselves and giving them space to share, learn, and be carefree.