Mitti Ke Rang is a social venture dedicated to empowering widows and single women to overcome poverty and dependency, through skill-based training that provides employment in the field of Paper and Cloth Bag making.
Our eventual goal is to help these women achieve financial stability, self-sufficiency, accountability, and most importantly - to become a role model to their own children, as well as others.
It has been proven that extra income in the hands of women leads to significant and positive changes in human development, as it is largely spent on children’s education, health and nutrition, and is hence a catalyst for gendering growth and progress.
What is a Social Venture?
A social venture is an organization established by an entrepreneur that seeks to provide systemic solutions to achieve sustainable social objectives. A social business, therefore, is a business whose purpose is to solve social problems in a financially sustainable manner.
Social ventures support capacity building and sustainability, and prioritize social welfare along with a successful business.
The question that arises here is how we as a social venture support these ideals-
The sale of our products helps to cover operating costs, and allows the organisation to remain independent from the obstacles that arise as a non-profit organisation, or any philanthropic venture that relies solely on goodwill and donations.
We work toward sustainability through dual structure that comprises a social mission and a market model.
OUR OBJECTIVES
- To educate, rehabilitate, and empower widows and single women
- To provide skill based training to women with the aim of increasing their employment prospects
- To improve the literacy levels of these women, and their children, in the English language
OUR CURRENT STAND
Mitti Ke Rang currently provides employment to 19 women, and have 20 students undergoing our training course. One of our most significant tie-ups is with Orchid Hotels in Pune, to which we regularly provide cloth bags made by the women at our centre.
We recently opened up our first community working space and resource centre, an area for underprivileged women and their children to access various classes, workshops, and other material.
OUR PROJECTS
A) Project Women: Creating Employment
Mitti Ke Rang aims at creating equal opportunities for the beneficiaries working with us, including -but are not limited to- widows and single women. This project involves primarily training them on how to make bags out of cloth and paper. Once that is done, we get them to work with the production team.
We have contracts with several corporates, which place orders for these bags. Additionally, we regularly set up stalls at different exhibitions and events; all of which increases awareness about our brand, thereby creating a vast field of employment opportunities for our beneficiaries.
B) Project Reading & Generating Curiosity:
The core idea behind this project is to make the children and women at our community center be able to communicate in English. We have regular evening classes where our team members make participants read books in English aloud, to improve their vocabularies and pronunciations.
With this we realised that the students who come our learning center have ambitions to enter professions such as engineering and medicine. However, correct information and knowledge serve as obstacles. To cater to this, we invite an expert from each field every week to interact with and guide the students on possible career prospects.
C) Hi-tech Community Learning and Resource Centre:
We have recently opened a one of its kind community working space in a slum in Hadapsar. This is the first time any slum area has witnessed a working space that parallels corporate office spaces. By 2020, we aim to expand these centres to 15 more slums, and eventually look towards spreading across the globe.
D) Project MKR Academy
This is a skill based workshop for needlewomen; an open opportunity for trainees to join us, and for trainers to teach their respective styles. We provide a platform for all people who sew, to share and learn skills that will not only empower them, but also serve the greater cause of a healthier and plastic-free environment. Our mission is to impart skills to as many women as we can and serve as a platform from where they take off to greater heights!
