Safecity Monthly Updates : July 2018

Safecity is growing exponentially and we’re constantly working hard to translate our vision to reality. Because we don’t want you to miss out on our work, we’ve decided to put together a monthly column to tell you about what we’ve been up to. You can sign up for our newsletter here.

Youth Innovation Challenge

The Youth Innovation Challenge, part of the Urban Thinkers Campus, is a social incubator designed to engage the youth of Mumbai to work on hyper-local, community based solutions to address Gender inclusive City Planning and its intersection with Mobility, Environment and Governance through a 4-month programme.

Our Founder, Elsa D’Silva, had a conversation with two of our jury members – Harini Calamur and Francis Joseph live on Twitter, talking about the importance of encouraging innovations and involving the youth to bring about a change in society. You can watch their conversation here- https://www.pscp.tv/w/1jMKgEDvYPqJL

We received close to 100 entries from students excited and eager to be a part of the incubator. Our jury members helped us arrive at the top 11 finalists who will be attending their first experiential session on 4-5th August at the Magic Bus Centre, Karjat.

The final pitch competition will be held on 13 December at Dosti House at the US Consulate of Mumbai. This challenge is sponsored by Tata Capital, BMW Foundation, knowledge partner – US Consulate General, Mumbai and outreach partner – School Leaders Network India Foundation.

Aspen Ideas Festival- Making Communities Safe for Women

Our Founder, Elsa Dsilva, spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival– SpotlightHealth 2018 on Making Communities Safe for Women. “Not many girls are fortunate to be born, to be educated, to have a healthy existence, to be given a chance to exercise their choices in every part of their life. We need to change this,” says Elsa Dsilva

The panelists shared the work they did and how their personal experiences influence the work that they do. You can watch the entire panel discussion here.

#BeYourOwnSuperhero

12th July marked the celebration of Malala Day, in honour of the brave-heart Malala Yousafzai who raised her voice against the extremists who tried to break her. It also marked the launch of our campaign #BeYourOwnSuperhero – through which we bring to you our army of Superheroes who have been nothing short of valiant and courageous, determined to break the silence and voice their rage against any form of harassment. You can have a look at some of their stories here. This campaign was designed by Tata Pro-Engage volunteer Radhika Shankar.

You can share your story and picture here: https://goo.gl/forms/LnwFByYspFeoUWgf2

World Day against Trafficking in Persons

On July 30th, the World Day against Trafficking in Persons, Safecity partnered with The Sukhmanch Theatre Group in New Delhi, to organize a street play “Dastak” that talked about gender bias and sexual harassment, the exploitation of women and children at the hands of men conditioned by patriarchy. This event took place at Connaught Place.

Read more about it here.

Ending Street Harassment

Safecity collaborated with Equal Community Foundation (ECF) to work with the boys and men in 4 of their communities in Pune. The boys have been through an extensive programme with ECF. The boys from these communities chose “Ending street harassment” as their campaign. Tania Echaporia created awareness among the boys about sexual harassment and the laws pertaining to it through workshops. With the help of drawing and mapping exercises, she also helped them identify unsafe spaces where they live.

Updates from Patna

Naina Jha conducted an awareness workshop on the ‘Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences’ (POCSO) Act for about thirty students of Diksha Foundation on 4th of July, 2015 in Patna.

Look at these gleeful faces They learned about safe and unsafe touch, strategies to deal with abuse like No-Go-Tell, the proper names for their private parts and that sexual harassment in any form is NOT okay!

Updates from Delhi

Aviral Agarwal, a former volunteer at Safecity, continues to spread the message of safety and awareness wherever he goes. Now, working at Jindal Intelecom Ltd, he conducted an informal awareness session with 30 of his colleagues in Delhi.

Safecity Campus Ambassador Programme

On 24th of July, our Youth Outreach Officer in Delhi, Vanshika Siya Deswal conducted an orientation session with our new campus ambassadors increasing our outreach to new colleges and thus new spheres.

They spoke about their hobbies and passion for getting people to share stories of harassment and why they are aligned with our cause.

Safecity Emerging Leaders

Safecity is celebrating the journey of people who have emerged as leaders as our campaigns progressed in their communities through our blog series “Safecity Emerging Leaders”. Read the inspiring stories of these individuals who are passionate about making their neighbourhoods safer with Safecity and have taken action in their own special ways.

Read this month’s Emerging Leader Lizzie Braganza’s story on our blog here.

When we asked Lizzie about her experience doing an internship with Safecity, this is what she had to say –

“This internship has helped me learn and improvise my technical designing skills. I’ve also learnt about the various issues faced by women in today’s era especially India. Safecity has helped me grow, made me more inquisitive, helped me make better decisions. It has also taught me that personal safety is a right and no one has the right to snatch it away from you.”

We have several opportunities for you to volunteer and take action. Do check our website.

Updates from our DATA Analytics Team

This month was thrilling! From making additions to the newer version of Safecity’s app, completing the automation of Safecity’s dashboard, understanding the impact of Safecity’s Twitter curation program, to studying the scores of the Youth Innovation Challenge, it all added up to making this month very interesting for the data team. We expanded our borders by stepping into the foray of digital marketing which is opening more doors for Safecity’s outreach and tracking Safecity’s online presence. The team was involved in finding insights for the annual report which will soon be available on the website. We are also attempting to work on geospatial analytics to realize how city structures affect crimes.

Adeep Biswas from the Data Analytics Team shares his experiences being a part of the team:

“I have been interning with Safecity for almost three months. In my first project, I built a web scraper using Python which collected news articles related to gender-based crimes from the year 2000 to date. The idea behind this was to collect data that can be analysed to discover trends or gain insights into the issue of sexual crimes. In my second task, I worked on building an aggregator feature to be added to the Safecity app. I analysed all the reports available in any particular area and provided a combined conclusion to all these reports in order to generate an overview of the complete area. In my next project, we’ll be using natural language processing to classify tweets related to sexual harassment into suitable categories so that they can be used effectively for future purposes.

My motivation to be a part of Safecity is… that I’ve had the chance to learn and use many new powerful technologies which have limitless potential for the betterment of society. I’m excited being a part of this organisation which makes society safer through its innovative endeavours. It makes me feel like I’m part of something bigger.

In today’s world, I believe that knowledge truly is power and those of us who have been fortunate enough to gain this power have a moral responsibility of using it to help others in whatever capacity possible.”

The team is looking for an SEO profile to assist us with improving Safecity’s indexing on search engines. Please feel free to drop an email to vihang@safecity.in or mailme.vihang@gmail.com if you’re interested.

TweetChats

Through our tweetchats, we are trying to facilitate important conversations around various issues related to gender in general and women’s issues in particular.

Check out July’s storified tweetchats here – Sexist Language in Media, Women Creating a Sustainable Environment going Plastic Free, Youth Leadership for Gender Justice and Marital and Adultery Laws in India.

That’s all for this month. Keep watching this space and we’ll keep you updated on all our work and exciting activities every month!

What’s in store for Safecity?

4-5th August- 1stExperiential Session of the Youth Innovation Challenge (A social incubator) at the Magic Bus Centre, Karjat
Every Friday at 9 pm IST/ 1130 am EST join us on Twitter @pinthecreep