Rujuta Teredesai

Co-founder

Co-founder of Equal Community Foundation

Rujuta Teredesai is the co-founder of Equal Community Foundation [1], an Indian non-profit working on human rights, women & children and education from Pune.

Rujuta Teredesai, who also uses the name Rujuta Teredesai-Heron, is an Indian development practitioner and a co-founder of the Equal Community Foundation, a Pune-based organisation that works with adolescent boys and men on gender equity and the prevention of violence against women.

She founded the organisation in 2009 with Will Muir and has served as its executive director. Trained as a journalist, she has worked in the non-profit sector for over a decade, mainly in programme design and management and in communications.

Career

Teredesai and Muir first set up Solar Cinemas in 2009, a venture that screened films on social and development issues in low-income neighbourhoods in Pune. They found that women and girls were largely unable to attend the screenings because of restrictions on their time, mobility and safety, and because of the unequal division of household work.

That experience led the two to found the Equal Community Foundation, choosing to address gender inequity by working on the attitudes and behaviour of men and boys rather than solely on programmes for women and girls. The organisation states its aim as raising every boy in India to be gender-equitable.

Its main programme, Action for Equality, works with adolescent boys in communities in and around Pune over an extended curriculum on gender, consent and violence. The organisation has also run Project Raise, which shares its curriculum and methods with other non-governmental organisations across India, and conducts research on working with boys and men.

Teredesai has written on the subject for India Development Review, including an article on working with boys to reduce violence against women.[2][3][4][5]

Equal Community Foundation

Equal Community Foundation works to raise every boy in India to be gender equitable. Its Action for Equality programme takes boys aged 13 to 17 through a year of behaviour-change work that builds the knowledge, skills, peer support and leadership to challenge gender norms in their own lives and communities, while Project Raise is a national collaborative helping other organisations adopt the same approach.

Equal Community Foundation reports the following, on its own site:

12,599 boys across India have participated in ECF programmes
6,701 boys engaged in gender transformative programmes by Project Raise partners
199 collective actions taken by participants each year to challenge gender norms