William Muir

Co-founder

Co-founder of Equal Community Foundation

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

William Muir, known as Will Muir, is a co-founder of the Equal Community Foundation (ECF), a Pune-based non-profit organisation that works with adolescent boys and men to prevent violence against women and girls. He founded the organisation with Rujuta Teredesai; the organisation's own history names the two of them as its co-founders.

Career

Muir, who is from Scotland, worked in consulting before moving to India. In 2009 he and Rujuta Teredesai started a venture called Solar Cinemas, which used cinema screenings to bring information on social and development issues to residents of low-income communities in Pune. They found that women and girls were often unable to attend the screenings because of limited leisure time and mobility, concerns about harassment and safety, and restrictions imposed within families.

That experience led the two to establish the Equal Community Foundation, which works on gender equity by addressing the attitudes and behaviour of men and boys rather than focusing programmes solely on women and girls. ECF's principal programme, Action for Equality, runs with boys over the course of about a year, giving them knowledge, skills and support to question existing gender norms and to act against discrimination in their own communities.

At ECF Muir has led fundraising and partnerships alongside core operations, and has worked on building awareness and leadership around the approach of engaging boys and men so that it can be taken up more widely.[2][3][4]

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