Breakthrough Trust

Breakthrough Trust is an organisation working to create a cultural shift and make discrimination and violence against girls and women unacceptable. It inspires people to fight for the rights of women and girls by catalysing leadership in communities and building a larger movement to change deep-rooted cultural norms that perpetuate gender based discrimination and violence. The focus has been on opening doors, breaking barriers, and starting honest conversations about gender, violence and discrimination, with women, men, adolescents, youth, families and communities as units, frontline health workers, government officials, influencers etc.

Major Interventions:

Team Change Leader: Social Change Actors are individuals, government bodies, Corporations, community-based institutions and religious bodies that act for change from within and beyond their own spheres of influence to help create a more gender-equitable society. Breakthrough calls them Team Change! The members create Facebook pages and groups, and kick start meaningful campaigns to engage and involve the community, and often help with the crowdfunding efforts. Through knowledge and skill development, the NGO empowers them to raise a voice against gender-based discrimination and violence in schools, colleges, workplaces, homes and communities by conducting internships. Community youth programme enables them to identify, analyse, critically question and dismantle gender stereotypes. As a part of the College Youth Engagement, it drives gender sensitization campaigns, led by students to help start and sustain conversations about safe spaces, free of sexual harassment.

Bystander Movement: Unlike prevention strategies directed mainly toward survivors or perpetrators, bystander intervention strategies emphasises the importance of a wider social ecology approach that involves active participation of people representing a variety of populations. The research contributes to enhancing the understanding of the impetus for responding/not responding to violence as it occurs which shows experiences of violence are mediated by caste, class and gender orientations. The NGO collaborates with government bodies, national and international partners, social platforms, students, parents and communities, to collectively upturn the social structure that fosters an environment of oppression and exploitation for certain groups, entities, people and ideas.

Adolescent Empowerment: It is built on a life-cycle approach wherein the NGO reach out to boys and girls from the ages of 11 to 14 through a two-year school-based programme, designed to help them tackle harmful social and gender norms. It works with girls in the crucial age group of 15-18 years to help them have better control of their lives and bodies. It also identifies and train young youth leaders (Aged 19+) to become our advocates, our voice in their communities.

The NGO is engaged in partnerships with several governments and other organisations to focus in the areas of domestic abuse, women in workforce, sexual harassment at public places, gender-based violence and early marriage.