Kathmandu, July 13, 2018: The seventh session of EmpowHer 2018 took place on Saturday, June 7 which focused on ‘Understanding Feminism.’ The morning was joyful and happy as usual when all the sisters and Ujyalo team met each other looking forward for a productive day.
Sabitri Poudel, rapportuer of our previous session reflected back on what we learned and the major learnings of the last session. As the ritual goes, there was a morning energizer followed by session responsibility handover for the day.
Ms. Amuda Mishra, founder of Ujyalo Foundation gave a short reflection on what the changemakers have been upto and what they have achieved so far. She also highlighted how we can improve ourselves and achieve the best of what we do.
The session continued as we had Mr. Deepak Raj Sapkota, Executive Director at Karuna Foundation, who spoke on career growth and personal development. He enlightened us by sharing how our personal development and career development depends on the environment we live in, our commitment, and how we are brought up. He summed up the session by saying how big we grow in our respective careers is determined by our need of presence in the work and society we are indulged in. Lastly, he shared a quote he lives by, which is indeed a very thoughtful one to make one’s life more happier, ‘Make everything happen by 50, Celebrate life to the fullest’.
We had another session on Feasibility by Ms. Amuda Mishra. She talked about what factors constitute feasibility test such as market competition, demand side survey, supply chain, SOP(Standard Operating Protocols) and our sustainability model. She helped us work more effectively to conduct feasibility test and create our minimum viable product for our project. This session made the changemakers more organized and provide more clarity on our project ideas.
After lunch, sessions became more interesting because of the topics that were gender and sexuality, understanding feminism and making the project gender inclusive. The session of Gender and Sexuality was given by Paridhi Acharya, one of the board of directors of Ujyalo Foundation. The session was full of enlightenment regarding the terms we use in our daily life to define gender. She makes us familiar to the terms like cisgender, transgender, sexual orientation and so on. We learnt about gender fluidity which means at any stage of life we might find ourselves with different sexual orientation and gender and that one person can have different sexual orientation at one time.
After the Gender and Sexuality session, we got an understanding of what feminism is. The session of understanding feminism was given by Kripa Basnyat, co-founder of South Asia Foundation. Session started with a question, how many of you are feminist and which feminism school of thought you follow. There were few people who were confused about the concept of feminism and after this session all of them were able to call themselves a feminist because the session was very informative. She cleared out the concept of feminism, it’s types, principles, waves of feminism and history of feminism in Nepal. The session went very smoothly and was a productive session.
The last session of the day was taken by Yajaswi Rai, the Program Lead of EmpowHER. Session was about making our project gender inclusive and we reflected on whether our project covers all genders in our society. She made us fill a few questions in order to reflect upon how we can make our projects more gender inclusive.
At last, we did our evaluation of the day and as usual this Saturday was also very productive with different enthusiastic people.
By: Sambridhi Rayamajhi and Sindhu Karki
Sambridhi Rayamajhi and Sindhu Karki are changemakers of EmpowHER 2018.
