By Ravi S Kumar | CEO & Managing Trustee
Our Non-profit Freedom For You Foundation (Freedom4U) has received encouraging response from poor women for its project "Train 100 poor women in Entrepreneurship". We have already received over 18 enquiries from poor women in the last few months at our only skill centre at Digha Navi Mumbai for imparting Basic tailoring, ladies Dress Making, House-hold Linen & Jute Bag making skills.
On International Womens Day on March 8, 2016, Freedom4U has started a skill development centre at Ramnagar, Digha, one of the biggest slums in Navi Mumbai for imparting sustainable and livelihood skills to Girls and Women. This centre shall have stremlined courses like Mehendi Art Design (Henna design), Basic & Advanced Beautician, Artificial Jewelry, Basic knowledge on Computers including MS-windows Appliations, Tally Accounting on PCs, DTP etc, Tailoring (Basic and advanced), dress designing & Bag making.
Thanks to the support of our Donors in the GlobalGiving’s International Crowd-Funding Winter Challenge-2015, we could mobilise over USD 4400 till date. On the last day of the competition, ie., Dec 21, 2015 we were ranked 10 for number of donors and 17 for quantum of donations received. It was a thrilling crowd-funding competition, first ever for our Non-profit.
We are happy to inform you that our Non-profit has been awarded “PLATINUM” rating for year 2015-16, by GuideStar India, a third party professional organization and a unit of GuideStar USA, for highest level of Transparency, Public Accountability and compliance of applicable statutory laws of the country. We had also received this highest rating for the year 2014-15 too.
Besides, recently in March 2016, we have been declared Champion Level Winner for GuideStar India Platinum-2016, by GuideStar India, this award is valid till Dec 2016. Our Non-profit name is displayed at: http://www.guidestarindia.org/NGOTransparencyAwards.aspx#'LeaderBoard'
Such recognitions from leading institutions only re-imposes our faith in our focus on the developmental sector where lots needs to be done at the bottom-of-the-pyramid by Non-profits like that of ours.
We could get adequate funds from this Winter Challenge for our cause "Entrepreneurship Development for under-privileged women" specifically for designing ladies dresses, house-hold Linen, Bag-making skills etc.
Our project launch got delayed because of our bankers who had held-back the credit of GlobalGiving remittance received by us in feb 2016, due to stricter rules under Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) of Govt of India, without knowing the liberalized reporting mechanism announced by Govt of India on Dec 14, 2015. Unfortunately, we had to educate these bankers on the recent guidelines of Govt of India. We had to undergo lots of trouble, lots of answering to our target segment eagerly awaiting the project launch, and this unexpected delay in timely crediting our designated FCRA Account has delayed our project by over 1.5 months. We have reported and lodged our complaint with higher-ups in the bank besides initiating action through Banking Ombudsman.
For want of timely credit of these funds, we could not purchase the equipment and raw material needed for starting this project. As on date we have placed orders for initial requirement of a few equipment for our Digha centre and as we progress in our training schedule, we shall be ordering the costly equipment too.
In this specific project, we could not use our domestic funds too. As per FCRA rules, we cannot mix the funds in our ‘domestic bank account’ and ‘FCRA designated Bank account’. Once we spend from our domestic funds, we cannot reimburse these expenditure from FCRA funds. Hence we had no choice but to wait for the credit of GlobalGiving remittance in our FCRA designated account, thus delaying launch of our project by over 45-50 days.
In the meantime, we engaged our registered participants in basic tailoring and other skills to keep them interested in our skill development program. We acquired basic tailoring machines, second-hand PCs, etc and started enrolling girls and women in other skill development courses like basic tailoring, Artificial Jewelry, Beautician, Basic Computer operations, etc.
Looking at the over-whelming response for enrolment, our Board of Trustees have, during last week, decided to launch a couple of more centers in other nodes of Navi Mumbai, in the next few months, so as to increase the geographical reach to help other under-privileged poor women to enroll for our program: “Train 100 poor women in entrepreneurship", without commuting a long distance to our existing Digha Centre.
We shall keep you posted on all the developments in this project, regularly. We regret the delay in posting this report due to unexpected problems from our bank.
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