WHAT WE DO
Empowering Women
Educate a boy, and you educate an individual. Educate a girl, and you educate a community. - Adelaide Hoodless
Dalit women are considered three times cursed.
They are born poor,
born Dalit,
and born as a poor Dalit woman!
Their challenges are
Social
Over one million rural Dalit women are enslaved by caste and gender discrimination. Violence, sexual assault, rape, and naked parading are the social mechanisms by which men reinforce women’s subordinate position in society.
Psychological
Rural Dalit women experience sexual violence and abuse both at home and at work. They are socially alienated and stigmatized from birth as “untouchables.” Many become widows very early, losing their husbands to alcoholism, and are left to raise their children alone.
Health
Many rural Dalit women are physically stunted as a consequent of generational malnutrition. Due to poverty, most are married early to a relative and begin childbearing right away. Over 54% of pregnant women and new mothers never receive antenatal or postnatal care visits.
Educational
Public schools offer negligible education. 80% of rural Dalit girls drop out early to work or take care of their younger siblings. Most are married before they turn 17.
Professional
The only work rural Dalit women can access is seasonal and physically arduous in agriculture or construction.
When women do better economies do better.
- Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund
IMPACT Community has founded three programs that equip, empower, and employ Dalit women.
In addition to the acquisition of skills and sustainable income, program participants receive instruction in nutrition, healthy mothering, and best healthcare practices. At the center, they learn about their legal rights and how to seek protection and legal aid for themselves and others. Finally, we teach our trainees the importance of moral standards and how to hold each other accountable to them.
Violet Training & Sewing Center
Once they have completed the training, we offer participants the opportunity to set up their own small business utilizing the skills and knowledge they have gained or to work at the Violet Sewing Center until they know how they would like to use their new-found skills.
Women trained and employed at the center create over 300 beautiful fabric IMPACT bags each year. In receiving a fair wage, they are able to send their kids to English schools, the quality of their life and health improves, and they learn to take pride in their work and creation!
In 2007, we began researching safe, healthy, profitable, and easy-to-acquire skills as an alternative to the difficult and dangerous employment in agriculture or construction for poor rural Dalit women.
In a safe and clean environment, semi-literate women learn to make bags using designer fabrics. They learn to work with precision, buy fabric, work with patterns. They are also taught the basics of marketing and business.
Joyful Jewels
In 2017, IMPACT Community began teaching Dalit women how to make crystal and glass bead jewelry. Joyful Jewels provides a welcome and empowering skill for Dalit women, especially for widows and mothers with infants who are unable to leave home for work.
A Teaching Farm
There are many women who drop out of elementary school and do not have the education to work with measurements and specifications. We introduce these women to our innovative farming techniques and tools on our teaching farm. When they first come to us the only tool these women know and use is a sickle. At Impact Farm, they learn to use various handy tools and plant care.
Help us fight for Dalit girls who are subjected to abuse, child labor, sexual exploitation, and early marriage. Help these hard-working women become successful entrepreneurs.
