In a tiny, bright blue room tucked away from a chaotic market street in Kolkata, India, 24-year-old Munmun Das has created the neighborhood’s only safe space for girls to express themselves freely. Munmun is one of nearly 150 youth mentors trained by Thoughtshop Foundation to lead a Youth Resource Cell and guide conversations about taboo …
Read More
“As a child, I was awestruck by what nurses could do. And yet I knew that was an impossible dream for me,” says Ruksana Khatun. Ruksana saw her life spread out before her: She’d be forced to drop out of school to work in the fields and support her family, as her father had a …
Read More
On the edge of a field of banana trees outside the village of Linares, deep in the jungles of El Salvador, over a dozen disabled war survivors are scribbling down a recipe for organic, homemade fertilizer. Wilfredo Pena, the agricultural coordinator of AJWS grantee Asociación de Lisiados de Guerra de El Salvador (ALGES), is walking …
Read More
Like most Indians, Ritwik “Ritu” Chakravarty was raised with a strict notion of traditional gender roles. But for Ritu, who identifies as a trans woman, such rigidity never made sense. “My name, Ritu, means ‘weather’ or ‘season,’” she says today. “And my gender was fluid, changing like the weather.” This openness has allowed Ritu to …
Read More
Masafu Okwara is a lawyer and activist in Kenya who has devoted her life to standing up for queer people who are suffering at the hands of the country’s discriminatory legal system. She works as a program officer for longtime partner National Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission (NGLHRC) in Nairobi, offering free legal aid …
Read More
This month, Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader won his re-election campaign, making headlines around the world. But activists on the ground say much of his popularity draws from Abinader’s support of the Caribbean Island nation’s open secret: the Dominican Republic is now over 10 years into a crisis that has kept more than 100,000 Dominicans …
Read More
In Medabas village in rural Mewat, India, no girl had ever finished high school — until recently. Instead, girls were married off by the time they were teenagers, and locked into a life of housework, farming and raising children. But when AJWS grantee Alwar Mewat Institute of Education and Development (AMIED) entered Medabas and encouraged …
Read More
Thoughtshop Foundation — a longtime AJWS grantee based in Kolkata — uses a unique approach to expand what’s possible for girls and women within India’s deeply patriarchal, restrictive society. They call it “design thinking,” and for a growing collective of young people across the state of West Bengal, it has proven life-changing. Thoughtshop developed beautifully …
Read More