My Choices Foundation

Warangal Team Expansion

Warangal Team Expansion

Strategic Expansion: Find out why our Warangal team is growing!

If you have been following us on social media over the past year, you would have probably noticed how often we share updates on the work of our wonderful Warangal team.

Yet, we don’t share even a quarter of the news on the work that our team does in Telangana’s second largest city! The Warangal Team often educates hundreds of community members and schoolgirls, week after week, through Basti Meetings and the Schools Programme. The team has managed this with only* three PeaceMakers and one Senior Counsellor.

Warangal city is Telangana state’s second largest city, and strategically one of the most important areas of the work of the My Choices Foundation. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have some of the worst statistics in the country for domestic violence (increasing by 10 per cent every year) and trafficking of young girls. The violence at home acts as a propellant for girls, by making home seem unstable and opportunities to leave more attractive. Warangal district, in particular, reports a high number of girls being “exported” for exploitation. There are a few areas where our work to create safe, peaceful families and societies could be as important.

With just over a year of high-impact awareness initiatives, which work to educate communities and schoolgirls on identifying, speaking up, and ending abuse, we were receiving a higher volume of cases than a small team of three PeaceMakers could handle. Expansion of the Warangal team was urgent.

On August 13, we graduated 20 incredible women from PeaceMaker training and they began a two-month internship of in-field testing of their new skills. 15 of these women have now been hired to work as full-fledged PeaceMakers, providing counselling, rights education and support to victims of abuse and their families.

These 15 PeaceMakers are those whose work will be directly funded by the contribution you made to our GlobalGiving campaign! (Haven’t yet? Then do it now!) In the next year, these PeaceMakers will provide direct support to at least 150 families, and reach out to a conservative estimate of 2,000 women and schoolgirls providing education on rights and protections from abuse and exploitation.

The new batch of Warangal PeaceMakers is a particularly capable and passionate group of women, and we cannot wait to see what they achieve. We look forward to introducing each woman to you and letting you get to know how her story has shaped her journey to becoming a PeaceMaker. Throughout the remainder of 2015 and 2016 we will share one PeaceMaker story per month, so you can follow the PeaceMaker journey starting with the impact of training through their experiences as in their first year as PeaceMakers impacting Warangal.

My Choices Foundation

This post was authored by the My Choices Foundation communications team. Our mission is to keep you informed on the cause, and hopeful that transformation is possible one story at a time.

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Announcing our rebranding: My Choices Foundation

Announcing our rebranding: My Choices Foundation

We’ve re-branded. We’re still doing the same, amazing work. Just with different names and cooler logos.

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. – Walt Disney

Anything new is always exciting and it leads us to paths undiscovered. Today, we too have something new and exciting to share with you all. You’ve seen the sneak peeks, but this is the official announcement! Yes – we’ve rebranded!

The original My Choices logo. 2012 – 2015.

The name ‘My Choices’ has been our identity for over 3 years now, and we LOVE this name too much to let go of it. Therefore, ‘My Choices’ has become our mother brand of two distinct operations and become the My Choices Foundation. We have a new look to our visual identity and have honed in on what the true ethos of My Choices is. You might be wondering why we need a mother brand?

We have been thinking about the organisational efficiencies of two separate NGOs, My Choices working in the area of ‘Anti Domestic Violence’ and Red Alert working in the area of ‘Anti Human Trafficking’ for some time now. While the two NGOs always had a significant amount of overlap of teams, resources, and messaging, they have up until now been marketed to supporters, partners and clients as distinct entities. The close association and common objectives become increasingly difficult to communicate to our key stake holders. Connecting the two took far too much elaborating. So why not let our branding speak for itself – that’s the point isn’t it?

Today, we want to re-introduce you to the two NGOs you have been following and supporting, not as two NGOs, but as one Foundation with two distinct but complimentary set of Operations.

The Mission

The My Choices Foundation started as a response to an issue that is so prevalent that it affects every household in India in some form. Violence against women and girls. While not every household experiences or witnesses violence within it’s own walls, at least one member of that family is certain to be exposed to it in some form whether first hand or through the experience of another person. Yet at around 60% of Indian homes do face violence at home.

The first response to this violence was to develop a program that would address the type of violence that is perhaps the most intractable, yet sits at the root of every other category of violence against women and girls: Domestic violence. By targeting the household, Operation PeaceMaker aims to access the very home of the mindsets that perpetuate violence and discrimination against women and girls. The home, just like the mindsets they house, is one of the most difficult spaces to access and difficult to affect change from within. PeaceMaking, getting families to work together to end violence against women and girls, is tremendously focussed work, and our efforts have stayed local in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana for the last 3+ years. Yet, we have long known of and been stirred by another massive dearth in education allowing families to be fooled and the lives of young girls and women destroyed.

The second response has been to address one of the most harrowing forms of violence: trafficking of young girls for sexual exploitation. Focussed on pre-empting girls and their families from falling off the cliff so to speak into exploitation, Operation Red Alert has worked for over one year on research, ground work, and networking to take shape into three major pillars of action.

Both Operation PeaceMaker and Operation Red Alert have been born from the desire to see families to become the focus of prevention and transformation of the most pervasive and intractable forms of violence against women and girls. Over three years into PeaceMaking and over one year into building Red Alert, there is much impact accomplished and a phenomenal amount more to come. There is no better time for every one of the supporters, friends, partners, and clients of both Operation PeaceMaker and Operation Red Alert to understand the common values and missions of both operations and how our teams work independently as well as together across these.

To help make our story and work clear, we have rebranded our logos and positioned them under a single Foundation, The My Choices Foundation. We believe that while both missions or operations are distinct, their success commonly relies on the choices of educated and empowered men, women, boys, and girls.

Our work is all about giving women and girls choices to live a life free from abuse, violence and exploitation. That has, and will continue to be, our guiding principle, and our new brand will reflect that. It’s a reflection of the journey we’ve been on for the last 3 years.

The Logos

The My Choices Foundation has been built on the vision of restoring the spice of life into the lives of women, girls and families, and making sure that this spice is never diminished by discrimination, exploitation, or violence. The most powerful spice in the Indian arsenal of vibrant flavors is mirchi (red chili powder), and red is the traditional color of many Indian festivals and celebrations. The My Choices Foundation logo is a heaping, circle of red powder. It is vibrant, it is Indian, it is bold, it is versatile, and it is a beacon of a life lived with zest and fullness.

The DNA of Operation PeaceMaker, once called “My Choices”, is bravery, compassion, and truthfulness. The turmeric yellow embodies the ideals of health and happiness that we hope can be the trophies of transformation in the lives of our clients. The heart is symbolic of both the goal of internal transformation in the lives of our clients and their families, and of our PeaceMakers who, choosing everyday to love a difficult world, are the bravest hearts you can find. The Operation PeaceMaker invites us all to join the story of peace-in-the-making.

Operation Red Alert as the name suggests aims to get people on alert for human trafficking.The red powder in the logo reflects the spice of life. Red colour is energizing, it excites the emotions, inspires urgency, and motivates us to take action. Similarly, the exclamation mark expresses strong emotion, urgency and action. The Red Alert logo aims to affect this kind of response in each person in India. It aims to trigger the emotion within us to take action and STOP this injustice! If we are alert, she will be safe! #BEONREDALERT

My Choices Foundation

This post was authored by the My Choices Foundation communications team. Our mission is to keep you informed on the cause, and hopeful that transformation is possible one story at a time.

Share this story

Support Our Work

Your donations make it possible for us to give women and girls the choice to live a life free from violence and exploitation.

or sign up to our newsletter