A 13-year-old girl in India should be enjoying being a child. For girls like Sudhaya*, she has been unable to have a normal childhood. Due to the community’s caste status, the people living here are unable to participate in traditional jobs. To survive, families marry off their daughters at puberty. Once married, women and girls are forced into sex work to sustain themselves and their families. Without education or options, these women spend their lives as prostitutes – even paying bride price to their own family.
The Perna community wants to change, but it’s difficult to evolve without knowing another way. Sewing New Futures, an initiative of Samarthya Trust works with women to provide paid training and mentorship as they learn about sewing, appliqué, textiles. With these skills, women gain a sustainable income while applying their creative talent and vision to artisanal work.
Sudhaya was one of our very first trainees in 2014 when she first left the sex trade. She is 24 years of age now and is able to support her two young child and husband by working with us. She has been promoted to train a new class of Perna women in our new sewing school in Kali Basti in Uttam Nagar.
Over the past two years, we started to have several women commute to our main production centre in Najafgarh from over 10 km away. We started doing more community visits and saw how large of a Perna community was in Uttam Nagar.
We have already enrolled 6 women in our skills development program with the goal train and hire more.

The 5 lakhs we are looking to raise will help us cover: