Eco Femme secures a Rotary global grant
with the support of AVI USA
EcoFemme is one of the most successful Auroville projects to date, with global reach and impact on the lives of thousands of women and young girls. EcoFemme brings awareness to menstrual health and education. With 289 EcoFemme global ambassadors, EcoFemme has distributed close to 1.3 million pads since their beginnings in 2010. AVI USA is proud to have EcoFemme as an AVI USA Auroville partner.
Below is an account of founder Kathy Walkling’s work to secure a much needed Rotary Club grant with the help of AVI USA’s Binah Thillairajah.
Knowing that we have been actively seeking funds to help sustain our menstrual health education programmes with adolescent girls, Binah reached out to me back in March 2023, floating an idea to prepare a project for the Rotary Club. She had established a contact with the Denver Mile High Rotary Club who had shown an interest to potentially support a project focussing on women and girls in India, and wondered if this was something that I would be interested to pursue.
I absolutely was! We had an ambitious goal to reach 15,000 school girls a year from low income backgrounds across India and our reduced commercial income since covid made us far more dependant on donors to raise the needed funding of $100,000USD.
Thus began the 14 month journey to where we are now – with a project approved to provide menstrual health education and cloth pad kits to 5,300 girls in 46 governmental schools located between Auroville and Chennai – 1/3rd of our target for this year!
How did we do it? The first major step was to find a local Rotary partner in India who would become the host community under which the project would be executed. We knew that Joss in Pitchandikulum had undertaken a project with Rotary support in the past and he immediately connected us to his contacts at the Rotary Coromandel Club in Chennai. They readily agreed to support our application which I understood to mean that they felt confident to work with Auroville projects. Establishing this relationship and agreement so quickly was a great encouragement.
Then the real work began with 2 parallel processes taking place over the next 12 months. On the Rotary side – after they were convinced that the project had merit and was something they would like to get behind – the main task was fundraising. We had decided together to pursue a Global Grant instead of a District Grant because our project was of sufficient scale with sustainable goals that aligned with one of the Rotary focus areas – in our case water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). Another criteria was that the project budget must exceed $30,000USD. Fundraising was undertaken by Rotary to secure contributions from various Rotary clubs. In the USA, 3 clubs contributed including the Paramus club in New Jersey who mobilized to raise funds for this project after Wendy Lines got her nephew – a Rotarian of that club – interested in our cause! In India, 2 Chennai clubs, including the host sponsor club of Coromandel, contributed a total of $6,263. A Rotary district designated fund filled the balance to raise a total of $36,146USD by June 2024. It was deeply gratifying to see this level of collective support.
The other major task was the detailed work of project preparation and that took its time to really kick in. The first months seemed quite sluggish as – apart from me – no-one felt much urgency and then there were the usual challenges of convening calls between the Rotary folk in USA and India. Fundraising was already well underway on the basis of a fairly scant concept note but that all changed towards the end of last year. My Chennai Club point of contact delegated his Rotarian wife to be the main point of contact and then things really started to kick along. Shobana shared the project application forms which were substantial and there were at least 3 major reworks of the project to fulfill the due diligence requirements and assure them that the project was robust in terms of management, community impact, monitoring and evaluation processes and long term sustainability. In the end it was a very rigorous process that was challenging in a good way as it required deep critical thinking and building alignment between 3 of Eco Femme’s Chennai partners who we will be implementing the project with.
Undergoing this process also meant that we had to go deeper in terms of looking into ways we could ensure the project impact would be sustainable in the long run and we included some new innovations such as WASH checklists to evaluate whether the schools have adequate toilet facilities that would support the groundwork we lay during the menstrual education session and we decided to introduce a teacher sensitization module in Tamil to help build a healthy ecosystem within the schools so the classroom teachers will be better equipped to support girls and boys after the external educational facilitators have completed the programme.
Hear Hasini’s testimony about the impact of EcoFemme
Getting the news that the project had finally been granted on the 25th June was super exciting (although to be honest, slightly eclipsed by the fact that half an hour earlier I had been stung by a hornet that I was thoughtfully trying to remove from the house – very painful indeed!). We are ready to start on our end and look forward to achieving impact in our local bioregion and in Chennai through this project. We could not have done it without the patient and consistent support of AVI USA who have been instrumental in making this happen!
Kathy Walkling
Co-founder Eco Femme