Scaling Up To 2023!

2022 has been a remarkable year at Breakthrough in many senses. As we look back we have done a range of different kinds of work this year.

This was the first year when Covid didn’t disrupt our work. We had to make up for lost time and many of our programmes went into an overdrive mode to manage that. Along with that we introduced new strategies, new programmes and new areas of work. We consolidated our Team Change Leaders programme for young people who are over 18 by introducing new strategies and new staff to manage that. We have consistently shared change stories on our pages from this group of people. The #StandUp programme - a bystander intervention programme in collaboration with Right To Be (formerly HollaBack ), Breakthrough Trust and 欧莱雅 , reached its final stage in the month of December. In Lucknow and Delhi, over 4000 training sessions have been held, and over 100000 trainers have received training! Apart from training youth, in collaboration with Sukhmanch Theatre , we have been using theatre and more to talk about how bystander intervention can be effective in ending violence against women, especially through the 5Ds (Distract, Delegate, Document, Delay and Direct) across RWAs (Resident Welfare Associations) in Lucknow, Delhi, and Faridabad on reaching out to more than 5 RWAs and over 1500 people. We were supported by the Ministry of Women & Child Development , the Delhi Commission for Women , the Delhi and Lucknow Police, colleges and universities and more during this programme. We organised a Learning Mela, an event organised by the Breakthrough team to showcase the work we have done across 6 states and countless communities. Through the Learning Mela, different teams took us through the entire journey of change towards building a world where gender-based violence is unacceptable in all forms. From stories of change to puppet shows, the team used creative forms to talk about their work.

Our focus on narrative shift found expression in the “Fursat Mein Serious Baatein with Varun Grover”, a talk show about breaking down tough topics in cinema! What is a 'progressive' film? What does it mean to show violence on-screen? Do female-led films not get greenlit? This was our serious effort at starting a meaningful conversation about violence onscreen.

One and a half years after signing the MoU with the State Education Department of Punjab to create gender equity within 6500 government schools across the state, apply a gender lens into 3 subjects across the middle school and train 20,000 teachers on gender equitable behaviour, in August 2020 we signed the MoU with the Odisha State Education Programme Authority. Here we will apply the gender lens into the curriculum of classes 6-10 across 23,000 government schools and train 46,000 teachers. In partnership with J-PAL South Asia here we are with the extended team. We hope the leadership provided by these two states into making education gender transformative will inspire other states.

This year together with partners we also organised our first Pan Asian virtual summit - Reframe, to envision a world without gender-based violence. The 3-day event brought together over 1000 organisations from 16 countries and held meaningful and insightful conversations on gender based violence prevention work across Asia. Thank you to our partners Swayam, Men Engage Alliance South Asia, Asian-Pacific Resource & Research Centre for Women (ARROW) and UN Women and everyone who was part of this memorable event.

In addition to all that, we continued to provide leadership as the Action Coalition lead on GBV to the UN Women’s Generation Equality Forum SA and as the Voices lead to the Life Skills Collaborative . We also continue to lead the Asia hub at the Coalition for Good Schools network and be the knowledge partner for the What Works to Prevent Violence against Women 2 Consortium. At the SBCC Summit held recently in Morocco, Breakthrough played an instrumental role not just by participating in panels but we were also one of the South Asian organisations in the Secretariat and Planning committee.

As we close the year we stand on the edge of a very compelling systems change work by bringing gender transformative education approach to government schools across #Punjab and #Odisha and advocate with the government for bringing a balanced perspective for all genders and build a gender responsive environment within the education sector. We are ambitious!

Through all this, we continue to create a #safespace for all our employees and an organisation exploring #feministleadership in all our internal processes. We continue to be an open and warm organisation, looking out for each other and committed in our efforts to create a #gender equal world for everyone.

Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday season and a great new year 2023!