Twenty-six year old Santosh, her husband and her son live with her husband’s parents in a slum community in Pune. Santosh’s parents-in-law help out in a small roadside shop, and her husband is a day laborer. Santosh had been spending her days taking care of her son and looking after the family’s small house when she heard about an opportunity to learn tailoring at the nearby AIC Community Center.

Soon after, she signed up for the Basic Tailoring course, and spent the next 6 months learning the fundamentals of tailoring. Recently, the Basic Tailoring course ended and Santosh signed up for the Intermediate Tailoring course. She loves being able to take a break from her household responsibilities to spend a few hours doing something that makes her feel productive and invigorated, and she is even exploring the possibility of starting her own in-house tailoring business so that she can earn supplementary income while tending to her house and watching her son.

Your donation, Billy, enabled AIC to offer the Intermediate Tailoring Course to Santosh. By the end of the Intermediate Tailoring course, Santosh will have a strong foundation in the necessary skills and techniques to be successful in such a venture, and her husband is supportive of this idea as his own income is only around 3,000 rupees ($65) per month. Santosh also enjoys the opportunity to spend time with other women in the class. With an 8th standard education, she is one of the most educated women in the class, and she helps the women’s literacy teacher work with her illiterate classmates during the women’s literacy component of the class, which also gives her a much-needed boost in confidence.

Thank you, Billy, for enabling Santosh to dream of becoming the highest earning member of her extended family.

After being married off at the age of 15, twenty year old Jyoti is the mother of a toddler son. Her husband works as a part-time caddy at a local golf course, while Jyoti, as is the custom in her community, stays home to tend to her son. Having never had the chance to receive an education while growing up, and now as a young mother with limited access to the outside world, Jyoti often felt overwhelmed by her responsibilities as a new mother. Last year, she convinced her husband to allow her to attend daily tailoring classes at the AIC Community Centre, which was her first major foray out into the world beyond her slum. After joining the class, she came to realize that many of the women in her tailoring class who had young children also participated in regular Mother-Baby classes at the AIC Community Centre, so she set about trying to convince her husband for permission to attend this additional program. Eventually, he gave in, and Jyoti was allowed to join the class.

The class meets every week, and mothers bring their babies, and spend an hour learning about dietary needs of their children, baby growth and development, birth spacing and family planning, communication and relationships within the family, good parenting practices and many other topics through structured discussions led by local professionals, specialists and health workers. As a result of this class, Jyoti feels significantly more confident raising her young son, and thoroughly enjoys her time at the Community Centre bonding with other women and their babies.

Thank you, Mike and Suzanne. Your generous donation has enabled AIC to provide a year of parenting classes for Jyoti.

Fourteen-year-old Varsha is considered lucky among her peers because her parents allow her to attend school. Varsha has two brothers and two sisters, all of whom are still living at home with Varsha and her parents in a small tin roof shack in the slums. Thankfully, Varsha’s parents believe in education, and all of her siblings are studying, while Varsha has just started the 10th standard. Varsha’s parents both sell cloth material on the road side, earning about 3,500 rupees per month ($75), and Varsha sees their daily struggle to keep food on the table for all of their children. Although Varsha’s parents have already started talking about arranging her marriage, as she will be finishing up high school (10th standard) this year, Varsha has vowed not to get married yet.

Instead, she has joined the AIC Basic Tailoring class, which provides girls and women from the slums with an opportunity to learn the fundamentals of tailoring so that they can earn supplemental income, or maybe even start their own small businesses. Varsha is a hardworking student, so she is able to balance her 10th standard studies with her daily tailoring class, and she loves spending time with her friends at the class. She has already picked up many valuable skills, and intends to start taking on small tailoring jobs to earn extra income to pay for her higher education.

Your donation, Billy, has enabled AIC to offer the Basic Tailoring Course to Varsha free of cost. Thank you for helping make her economically self-sufficient.

Six months ago, Rupa gave birth to her fifth child, a boy whose name has not yet been decided! Her other four children range in age from 4 to 10, and Rupa feeds them by begging for money on the streets every day. Her husband has chronic health problems and is unable to do much to provide for the family, so the burden of running the household largely falls on Rupa.

Although Rupa is by no means a new mother, she is eager to learn how she can improve her parenting skills. Your donation, Bill and Colleen, enabled AIC to offer Mother-Baby class to Rupa. The class meets every week, and mothers bring their babies, and spend an hour learning about dietary needs of their children, baby growth and development, birth spacing and family planning, communication and relationships within the family, good parenting practices and many other topics through structured discussions led by local professionals, specialists and health workers. Rupa knows that the things she is learning in the class will benefit her new son, as well as her older children and will help to ensure that her children have bright futures.

Thank you, Bill and Colleen, for ensuring that Rupa is able to give an early start to her children, despite being born into poverty and ignorance.

Sunanda is the only girl of her parents’ four children. Her parents are both roadside metalworkers, earning about 2,000 rupees ($65) per month to support the family, and her older brothers work as part-time caddies at a nearby golf course, contributing a small amount of money to household expenses whenever they can.

At 14, Sunanda should still be in school, however, in her community, most people do not believe in continuing a girl’s education once she reaches puberty. Therefore, Sunanda was taken out of school after the 6th grade. She had been depressed because of her bleak prospects for the future until she joined the AIC Basic Tailoring class last year. After spending 6 months learning the ins and outs of basic sewing, she has advanced to the Intermediate Tailoring class, to learn more difficult skills, and your donations of a month of training each, Jackson, Pooja, Cindy and Alice and Brad (x3), enabled AIC to give her training for six months.

Sunanda loves the excuse to leave the stresses of her home life behind for a bit and get out to do something that she finds enjoyable and challenging every afternoon. She is also developing close bonds with other young women her age from the surrounding community, and the girls have banded together to try to put collective pressure on their parents to allow them to rejoin school and delay their early marriages. In the meantime, she takes advantage of the opportunity to learn at the AIC Community centre when she goes for her tailoring class, and has many plans for her future!

Thank you, Jackson, Pooja, Cindy and Alice and Brad, for helping Sunanda stitch a bright future.

About two years ago, Varsha’s father abandoned his family following a domestic dispute. Last year, Varsha’s mother also decided to move in with her relatives, as she was not able to take care of her four children on her own. She took her oldest daughter and youngest son with her, and left 12-year old, Varsha, and Varsha’s 10-year old brother alone in the slums of Pune, ostensibly under the care of neighbors, so that they could continue to attend school.

For the last year, Varsha and her younger brother have been completely on their own, which is challenging for them to manage, particularly with regard to meals. Luckily for them, Varsha and her brother are both students of the Ashraya Initiative for Children Education Outreach Program, which means that, in addition to educational sponsorship, they both receive daily meals at the AIC Education Centre.

Your donations, Pamela, Pooja, Don, Dwayne and Terese (x2), George, Jeffery, Anil (x2), Tom, Thomas and Ted and Pam, will ensure that Varsha gets three healthy, fresh and nutritionally-balanced meals for an entire year. This is a lifeline for students like Varsha, who would otherwise go hungry on a regular basis.

Varsha successfully completed her 6th grade, and is now entering the 7th grade. With the nutritional support she is receiving through your support, she is well on her way to being the first person in her extended family to graduate from school!

Thank you for extending a hand of support to Varsha.