“We always start with a question — that’s where everything begins,” says Himalini Varma, the director of AJWS grantee Thoughtshop Foundation. Her organization, co-led with her partner Santayan Sangupta in 1993, has transformed the lives of thousands of young women across West Bengal, India, by approaching change through this lens: opening up space to question the patriarchal structures that lock Indian families into cycles of violence, early marriage and gender discrimination.
Thoughtshop Foundation creates these spaces with a unique approach called ‘design thinking’ — using beautifully designed games, cards, illustrated books and others as tools to facilitate conversations about deeply taboo topics. “Play is the mind’s natural way to learn. So through playing games, we can explore new ideas,” says Santayan.
But without young people to play these world-expanding games, Thoughtshop’s work would remain in a vacuum. That’s where their Youth Resource Cells come in. With AJWS’s support, Thoughtshop Foundation has trained nearly 150 ‘youth mentors’ to lead their own hyper-local youth groups. Today, these Youth Resource Cells reach over 2,500 people — rippling out to affect parents, community leaders, husbands and families. Thoughtshop began by creating educational tools, and now they’re facilitating a network of leaders dedicated to making change. In West Bengal, Thoughtshop’s growing movement is critical; the state has among the highest rates of child marriage in the country.
The organization’s impact has been profound. Says Uma Singh, one of Thougthshop’s youth trainers, “I thought society was like this and I had no choice — but when I found Thoughtshop, I saw a future that for myself as a woman free of this discrimination, for the first time. My life changed that day. I realized: we are born for so much more than society believes.”
Below, meet three powerful young women who have grown up in the Thoughtshop Foundation network — overcoming incredible odds to become the builders of a new India where women control their own lives and shape their own destinies.
