TARA Foundation envisions bridging the gap in access to equal opportunities and treatment in a space that is fraught with Gender disjuncture. We adapt an experiential approach through arts, movement, music and reflective sessions to spur a critical thought process aimed at understanding and challenging innate sexism. Gender is a wide vibrant spectrum that ought to be celebrated. We are building an egalitarian world that recognizes and respects everyone as humans. Beyond the burden of gendered roles and societal expectations exists an abundance of untapped potential.
Living up to one’s identity as idealized by society is arduous. TARA Foundation is an approach to shed these inflicted identities and break the dichotomous stereotypes of men-women, masculine-feminine, soft-hard and all such cages which prevent social beings from making their own identity as individuals. Through this approach, we encourage everyone to thrive by acknowledging and actualizing their potential. We foster behavioral change by offering different perspectives to communities that stimulate critical thinking and change in practices from thereon. We achieve our goals of critically analyzing inherent biases, recognizing limitations of gendered upbringing through a multi-pronged approach.
Workshops
Carefully collated and customised workshops form one of our significant means to engage with each target community. Our workshops are designed to be reflective and experiential for maximized impact with an arts based process that includes music, poetry, storytelling and theatre.
Curriculum Development
Our mission is massive but attainable. Generative collaborations that include sharing ideas and building open-resources can take closer to our goal. We engage with organizations as Gender Resource partners to devise curriculums and bring a gender lens to programmes. Our engagements on this front include:
In partnership with SwaTaleem Foundation to disseminate technical know-how through Gender-neutral approaches for students from grades 6-8 of Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya in Haryana.
With Ultimate Players Association of India (UPAI) is a one-year program driven by the vision of sports being an equal playfield for women. It aims at enhancing confidence, finding comfort in owning a space and expanding one’s boundaries of potential to breakdown the restraining notions of gender which bounds them
The density of issues around Gender needs us to join hands and collectively uproot long-lived systems of discrimination and patriarchy.
We develop literature resources that are accessible, comprehensible and engaging to any group of adolescents, parents, teachers or youth who want to raise Gender-neutral children and bring Gender and sex education to the forefront in everyday conversations. We are building a repository of our case studies, modules, interventions with varied groups, manuals assembled from our on-ground interventions to create reference materials that could be further used for building templates, research studies and impact assessments.
During our Workshops and other on-ground interventions, we identify people (adolescents/men/women) affected by any forms of Gender-based violence or boxed due to Gender-based social constructs. These individuals are then connected to our group of psychologists, psychotherapists or drama therapists to receive counseling, mentorship and other redressal approaches based on what they need to ensure institutional and emotional support. Through this component we are building support structures to propel the idea of sustainable change.
Our pursuit of consistent refinement drives our focus on evidence-based approach for maximized impact. Impact Assessment constitutes an important part of our organizational process to ensure enhanced effectiveness of program endeavors. We track the progress and behavioral shifts within different cohorts by conducting assessments through the course of engagement. Our assessment templates are developed through on-ground facilitation and testing of tools that can track attitude shifts. Each program is assessed through rigorous data collection to monitor, evaluate and thus ensure the attainment of intended outcomes.