Siya foundation is a nonprofit organization and their goal is to overcome stigma related to women. I always wanted to be a part of such a society where there are no stigma, prejudice, discrimintaion against any kind of gender, race or religion. By taking this initiative with the organization I wish to spread awareness on the same. This campaign solely focused on overcoming the stigma faced by women. The aim was to spread awareness on the stigmas related to menstruation. The plan of the campaign was to spread awareness through social media and go to villages and explain them and try to change their mindset. We also asked a few of our peers to paint anything that resembles this and helps convey our message and we demonstrated those paintings at an art exhibition to let more people know of our aim.
LO 3- It was me, my colleagues and the organization who planned the entire campaign and how we would make it effective. From the start to end we planned what the campaign will be about, what we will focus on and what we want to achieve. To start with this first we had to make a plan.Planning the campaign was more difficult than initiating it as already the organization was ready to launch such a campaign. The plan would include what actions we will take to achieve our goal, how we will share our thoughts and how we will convince people to stop with such stigmas. I usually am not great with planning out things so that was a little rough part for me. We had to make sure the plan was organized. During the planning process there were some topics on which all of us did not agree. On such topics we had to think about what would be best for the campaign and also sometimes we had to take votes to make a final decision. During this time I realized that to plan anything you need to have some skills and one of that is being organized. It helps you stay focused and use your time, energy, and mind effectively. After this experience I think that it won’t be this hard for me to plan anything in the future as I know what I need to keep in mind and this will surely help me in my future career.
LO 6-It is important that everyone stops the prejudice and discrimintation against women. Everyone needs to understand how the stigmas that are stuck with women are wrong. This campaign has a huge significance to today’s society. Through the campaign we are trying to tell people how the word menstruation should not be taboo and normalize talking about menstruation in public. The main issue is that young women are too scared to talk about this with their parents or elders which should not be the case. This is important because every woman should have the freedom and privilege to talk about this with anyone she wants to. The other issue is how there is a lack of importance given to this in villages. They should have access to clean sanitary pads and they should be taught about this in school. My work and the initiative we did makes me feel proud and I feel if everyone understand and starts normalizing this then we won’t have to call it an “issue” anymore.
LO 7- For the campaign, we had a lot of planning to do. While planning we decided to keep this campaign in a slum area so that we can reach more people. But while deciding this one of the ethical issues that we came over was that is it ethical to go to a slum area during a pandemic when there will be around 50-75 people and most of them won’t be wearing masks or sanitized. This issue did affect us and made us rethink if we should continue with the campaign or not. It was important to look after our own safety, the people around us, and theirs. After giving it a thought we decided that we should continue without campaign but with necessary precautions. All of us wore masks and gloves and with that we all carried sanitizers. We made sure to spread awareness keeping a safe distance and while distributing sanitary pads we sanitized ourselves the package of the pads and the other people’s hands as well. After the campaign we all got ourselves tested and everyone was negative.
During this experience, I learned a lot. Looking at the faces of the small women in villages when they receive clean sanitary pads made me realize how important it is that every woman has access to them and every woman has someone to talk to about this. Instead of this the campaign also helped me develop skills required to initiate something and how to be organized in order to get your work done efficiently.
