Nurturing Minds Charitable Trust (NMCT) is an organisation founded by Mrs. Bharti K Trivedi in 2016 with the vision of “Nurturing the Society”. The core objective of the Trust is to work towards the relief of the poor, education and medical relief and any other advancement in the nature of general public utility and service through activities that are not for profit.
KAVACH A Movement is working towards creating the right kind of sexuality and hygiene awareness among young adolescents and their immediate social group. We are a Project under Nurturing Minds Charitable Trust that wishes to undo all the stigma related to a woman’s most personal and important physical cycle, menstruation.
Story of KAVACH
The Managing Trustee, Mrs. Bharati Trivedi has been a sex educator for more than 13 years now and has been contributing in the field of socially for more than that. She is a graphologist, handwriting/logo analyst, counsellor, psychologist, overseas career counsellor and much more. Prior to one of her workshops on sexuality awareness, while the Principal of the school (name unspecified) and herself were having a dialogue, a 9th-grade girl walked in the cabin room and asked for permission to go home and sought leave for 4 days. On questioning what was wrong, she mentioned she was on her period and had to go home. The Principal ordered her to take a sanitary napkin from the class teacher and continue until the school hours were over.
She very shyly refused and told the Principal that she could not use the sanitary napkin because she was not wearing any underwear. Now, however much untrue it may sound, it was true. After finally speaking to the girls, Mrs. Trivedi found that most of the girls did not have their undergarments on them. The essential reason for the same being an economic one. Stunned with the information and the agony of the realization that 13 years of service was a task half complete, the genesis of KAVACH- A MOVEMENT began…
The need for Kavach
The reproductive health needs of adolescent girls and boys remains unrecognized and underserved.
This year the work was focused more on the issues regarding Sexuality. We have reached 10000+ children through 85 + schools and distributed over 50000 underwears over 1 lakh sanitary pads. We have reached out to deaf and mute schools students, young girls at government observation homes, and 6 communities through different NGO partners. In all these places, we have increased the beneficiaries’ knowledge on sexuality, body anatomy and menstrual hygiene.
This overwhelming response made us to reconstruct the team and increase the strength of the infrastructure. Our team going from school to school conducting these workshops in government schools which undeveloped with poor infrastructure and lack in facilities which sometimes is gapped by the response and feedback we receive upon conducting the workshop from the students as well as the school authorities. This overwhelming response made us to reconstruct the team and increase the strength of the infrastructure.
We took this opportunity to make the workshops more child-friendly, interactive and attractive. Also offering counseling for some girls if needed some support to deal with some of their experiences.This was the year where we started using social media more seriously to promote the Kavach movement innovatively.
We have reached many individuals and professionals and organizations across the state and they find this work useful and important. This work is benefiting especially the parents and teachers who directly influence the lives of the adolescents.
Being in the field made us realize how our boys too need this awareness of keeping themselves safe and how to be more comfortable with their own sexuality in turn creating a safe environment for our girls and thus creating a better and safe society to live in. This year we reached out to equal number of boys as girls through our sexuality awareness workshop. Our understanding the needof how much as a society as a whole this conversation needs to takes place thus weconducted workshops with women in different communities as they are the homemakers and show runners for majority households in India.The exposure till now we have got in the area is now enough for us to come out with some concrete tools and resources for the focused group in this work which will help them practically.With this learning, the year 2020 will be focusing more on training the trainers and teachers.
Bharati Trivedi
Nurturing Minds Charitable Trust (NMCT) is an organisation founded by Mrs. Bharti K Trivedi in 2016 with the vision of “Nurturing the Society”. The core objective of the Trust is to work towards the relief of the poor, education and medical relief and any other advancement in the nature of general public utility and service through activities that are not for profit.
KAVACH A Movement is working towards creating the right kind of sexuality and hygiene awareness among young adolescents and their immediate social group. We are a Project under Nurturing Minds Charitable Trust that wishes to undo all the stigma related to a woman’s most personal and important physical cycle, menstruation.
Story of KAVACH
The Managing Trustee, Mrs. Bharati Trivedi has been a sex educator for more than 13 years now and has been contributing in the field of socially for more than that. She is a graphologist, handwriting/logo analyst, counsellor, psychologist, overseas career counsellor and much more. Prior to one of her workshops on sexuality awareness, while the Principal of the school (name unspecified) and herself were having a dialogue, a 9th-grade girl walked in the cabin room and asked for permission to go home and sought leave for 4 days. On questioning what was wrong, she mentioned she was on her period and had to go home. The Principal ordered her to take a sanitary napkin from the class teacher and continue until the school hours were over.
She very shyly refused and told the Principal that she could not use the sanitary napkin because she was not wearing any underwear. Now, however much untrue it may sound, it was true. After finally speaking to the girls, Mrs. Trivedi found that most of the girls did not have their undergarments on them. The essential reason for the same being an economic one. Stunned with the information and the agony of the realization that 13 years of service was a task half complete, the genesis of KAVACH- A MOVEMENT began…
The need for Kavach
The reproductive health needs of adolescent girls and boys remains unrecognized and underserved.
This year the work was focused more on the issues regarding Sexuality. We have reached 10000+ children through 85 + schools and distributed over 50000 underwears over 1 lakh sanitary pads. We have reached out to deaf and mute schools students, young girls at government observation homes, and 6 communities through different NGO partners. In all these places, we have increased the beneficiaries’ knowledge on sexuality, body anatomy and menstrual hygiene.
This overwhelming response made us to reconstruct the team and increase the strength of the infrastructure. Our team going from school to school conducting these workshops in government schools which undeveloped with poor infrastructure and lack in facilities which sometimes is gapped by the response and feedback we receive upon conducting the workshop from the students as well as the school authorities. This overwhelming response made us to reconstruct the team and increase the strength of the infrastructure.
We took this opportunity to make the workshops more child-friendly, interactive and attractive. Also offering counseling for some girls if needed some support to deal with some of their experiences.This was the year where we started using social media more seriously to promote the Kavach movement innovatively.
We have reached many individuals and professionals and organizations across the state and they find this work useful and important. This work is benefiting especially the parents and teachers who directly influence the lives of the adolescents.
Being in the field made us realize how our boys too need this awareness of keeping themselves safe and how to be more comfortable with their own sexuality in turn creating a safe environment for our girls and thus creating a better and safe society to live in. This year we reached out to equal number of boys as girls through our sexuality awareness workshop. Our understanding the needof how much as a society as a whole this conversation needs to takes place thus weconducted workshops with women in different communities as they are the homemakers and show runners for majority households in India.The exposure till now we have got in the area is now enough for us to come out with some concrete tools and resources for the focused group in this work which will help them practically.With this learning, the year 2020 will be focusing more on training the trainers and teachers.
Mumbai
Maharashtra
NGOs
bharatiktrivedi@gmail.com
Founder
BA Psychology
Since the Covid 19 Crisis has suddenly hit the world, we have started a parallel project, “KAVACH PROTECTORS”. This aims at two things:
Keeping these two objectives in mind, we are slowly adopting different families from different slums of Mumbai and reaching out to them. We have also distributed personal hygiene equipment to BMC hospitals staff and distributed groceries to various families.
We are equally worried about the menstrual management of thousands of girls/women in slums, small towns or immigrant workers stuck in the cities and what they must be going through. We at Nurturing Minds Charitable Trust, working in the field of menstrual health, have undertaken distribution of sanitary napkins & underwear for the girls/women/immigrant women in the slums of Mumbai and other communities, having already distributed 5000 packets of sanitary napkins in the slums. We also have distributed basic groceries to over 500 families including adivasi belts, people working in graveyards and migrants.
