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Meet Elca Grobler, Founder and Director of My Choices Foundation who is helping end violence, abuse and sexual exploitation against women and girls in India.
The Short Story:
In 2011 Elca left a career in Investment banking and fnance to follow the call she felt to serve women and girls in India by working for their empowerment. In 2012 she founded My Choices Foundation. Since then, My Choices Foundation has grown to become a national leader in addressing domestic violence and sex trafficking in India, and recognised internationally for the ingenuity and impact of its work.
Under her leadership, My Choices Foundation has helped peacefully resolve over 8,828 cases of domestic violence and has equipped over 2,3 million individuals living in high-risk areas across 8 states, to stay safe from sex trafficking. Through its anti-trafficking initiative, My Choices Foundation has established the frst national helpline exclusively for trafficking, and is leading the coalition effort to prevent sex trafficking, our impact as at 2019 can be viewed in our latest Impact Report.
Elca has been awarded the 50 Most Impactful Social Innovators award and AGSM Alumni Award for Social Impact and Public Policy for her work in India. The Red Alert Research Paper, which she co-authored with behavioral architects of Final Mile, won the 2016 ESOMAR award for excellence in market research and has become a seminal document for anti-trafficking program development.
Under her leadership, My Choices Foundation has won several awards for its creative campaigns addressing gender based violence. In 2017, My Choices Foundation was awarded the VR For Good project by Oculus and Facebook and created the world’s frst VR documentary on sex trafficking. The flm, titled Notes To My Father, was showcased at Sundance Film Festival and made its world premier as an Official Selection at SXSW Film Festival, March 2017.
Also in 2017 of 17, 000 alumni over the last 40 years at the AGSM Business School, Elca Grobler was chosen to be profled and recognised in a short video directed in India. Not long after that, Elca was honoured by UNSW for social Impact and Public Policy out of 290,000 graduates in 146 countries, Elca was honoured by UNSW for Social Impact and Public. Since then for three consecutive years in a row 2018, 2019 and 2020, Elca was recognised as one of the 100 most impactful CSR Leaders, by World CSR and World sustainability congress and World federation of CSR Professionals.
Experience - Summary:
Education
Full Bio:
Elca Grobler holds a honours in Econometrics and Mathematical Statistics, she holds a CFA and received her MBA at the Australian Graduate School of Management. An expert in fnance and banking, Elca made the decision to leave the Financial Services after seven years and use her skills and experience to empower developing communities, joining Opportunity International Australia - a world leader in micro-fnance in the developing world.
Elca moved to India in 2011 with her husband and three young children following a call she felt to serve women in India by working for their education and empowerment. Elca knew that to really serve the women in India, she needed to start by listening to them, and letting them tell her what issues were most urgent to them.
To her surprise, the women, women’s groups and NGOs Elca met with kept reiterating that they needed help solving one issue that few were acknowledging, let alone addressing: Domestic violence. Financial empowerment or education is not effective if women are subject to violence at home. Elca met with women almost everywhere she went who asked for help for themselves or someone close to them who needed help fnding peace in their own home.
It was out of this need that Operation PeaceMaker, the frst initiative of My Choices Foundation, was born. Elca worked with local women, passionate about their own communities to develop a program that would meet the challenge of domestic violence in a way that would not disrupt family, cultural and religious values. One thing was sure; To create a solution that would work for women, it would have to work for their families too. Operation PeaceMaker focusses its efforts on counselling, and solving violence through mediation and including every member of the family - including the perpetrator - in the process of establishing peace.
Operation Peacemaker is a grass roots initiative providing 100% free counselling, rights education and legal aid to victims of domestic violence and their families in the state of Telangana. The work is done t h r o u g h l o c a l w o m e n , c a l l e d PeaceMakers, who are trained and paid to work within their own communities. PeaceMakers are supported by a team of professional Counsellors, Legal Aids and Admin staff who contribute to the ser vices provided to clients and continually up-skill our PeaceMakers to improve the quality of their impact.
Operation PeaceMaker now has over 232 PeaceMakers in the feld, for most of whom this is the frst skills training and j o b , a n d a h u g e s t e p o f s e l f - empowerment. Through our PeaceMakers and Counsellors, Operation PeaceMaker has successfully handled over 8,828 cases of domestic violence, and educated over 140,225 community members and school girls on how to stay safe from abuse. Just eight years into PeaceMaking, our work has expanded tremendously. We currently have Counselling Centres in 5 strategic areas in the state, with more planned to open shortly. The full PeaceMaker training program and curriculum was designed and developed by Elca and her team to equip and empower local women to become the change agents in their communities.
In addition to the above, it has always been a long-held dream to open a safe home for survivors of domestic violence to provide a loving, peaceful and safe environment for women and children. It was in 2018, that My Choices Foundation opened the doors to the Lotus Safe Home and serves as a temporary shelter that offers women much needed services such as counselling, assistance with their children, legal aid and vocational training to help them get back on their feet-while residing in a safe space with their children. The Lotus Safe home can accommodate up to 12 survivors of domestic violence, along with their minor children. As at the end of 2019, 21 women have found shelter in our safe home and 23 children have enjoyed safety form abuse.
Following Elca’s vision to see men be included as at least 50% of the solution, Operation PeaceMaker also ran India’s frst ever viral online campaign against domestic violence garnering unprecedented support from men around the country to take a stand against violence that is perpetuated and bred at home. The Respect2Protect campaign featured India’s most popular cricketers (MS Dhoni, Virat Kohli and other) and the world’s #1 batsman, South African cricketer AB de Villiers to take a stand and make individual pledges against gender based violence, discrimination and exploitation. The Respect2Protect campaign garnered 700+ thousand video views, 64+ million hashtag impressions, over 1,000 original social media posts, YouTube tribute videos and on the ground action from volunteers. The campaign also helped My Choices Foundation win the Special Mention Award at the eNGO South Asia Awards in 2015 and awarded the Grand Jury Winner Award at the Social Media for Empowerment Awards in 2016.
As the team’s work expanded, more and more cases of sex trafficking came to the organisation. The response was to create Operation Red Alert. My Choices Foundation’s home state of Andhra Pradesh / Telangana is consistently ranked near 1st place for the exporting of girls for modern sex slavery - contributing to India’s 14+ million slaves, where every 3 minutes a girl is forced into sexual slavery and only 1% gets rescued. My Choices Foundation created a video, highlighting these harsh realities and the reason for starting Operation Red Alert, Meet Bhavani.
Through over 18 months of frst of it’s kind research, ground work, and local NGO networking, Elca and her team developed a prevention-focussed strategy for Operation Red Alert’s work. While India has more slaves than any other country in the world, and every three minutes an India girl is sold into sex slavery, it’s general public is still predominantly unaware of the issue. Most Indian parents who send their girls into trafficking situations, do not know that the opportunity being offered to their daughter is a trick by a trafficker and not a real job, marriage or education opportunity.
Similar to Operation PeaceM aker, Operation Red Alert places the family at the centre of the focus for solutions. 3 Pillars - or categories of action - have been established as the Operation Red Alert approach to preventing and ending sex trafficking in India
The frst Pillar is the Safe Village Program (Rural Education). Girls being trafficked in India are primarily from poor, rural households that lack education on safety for their girls. Operation Red Alert has developed a Safe Village Toolkit that includes innovative tools like comic books and operates through local feld agents and partners all around India. The Safe Village Program is a two day investment into the education of local stake holders to teach rural communities how to keep girls safe from trafficking. Special messaging has been developed for each of these stake holders to speak to their particular psyche and provide powerfully relevant information and motivation.
The second Pillar is India’s frst, national anti-sex trafficking helpline. Operation Red Alert has built a network of over 100 NGOs, service providers and Government contacts willing to respond to reported cases of sex trafficking in their geographic zones all across India. The helpline is managed by Operation Red Alert, and was built under the expert guidance of Khadijah Farouqui who pioneered India’s frst helpline for women in distress on behalf of the Chief Minister of Haryana. The helpline refers cases to local action partners all around India, depending on the specifc need.
The third Pillar is a Mass Media Campaigns to lift awareness of the issue among the general Indian public. If we are on Red Alert, India’s girls will be safe. While preventing girls from entering trafficking must happen in rural India, there is still much that urban and semi-urban India needs to wake up to in order to combat and end trafficking.
Operation Red Alert launched the Safe Village Program in 2015, and has since conducted programs in over 4,148 villages around Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Jharkand, Rajasthan, Bihar and West Bengal together with our 100+ implementing partners. Through these programs our helpline has received over 37,296 calls. Surprisingly, many of the calls have been to thank us for our work and to verify the helpline - which is a big validation of the work we do. We have handled over 252 helpline cases through the helpline, although a larger portion of cases are reported directly to our feld workers during the Safe Village Program.
The Mass Media Campaigns launched in 2017 starting with the Good Father Campaign. The Good Father campaign is based on research commissioned by Operation Red Alert and conducted by world class the Behavioural Economists of Final Mile, Mumbai that looked into the compulsions behind male behaviour to buy and sell girls. The campaign harnessed the power of affirming the good in men, including them as champions of the cause, and educating them on their potential to keep their girls and their country safe. The research commissioned won the best Market Research paper globally in 2016, beating the likes of Coca Cola. Together with Oculus VR For Good and My Choices Foundation, we created the world’s frst live action, VR documentary on sex trafficking and will be the frst campaign of its kind in India, and was aimed to get the country rallied behind the cause and to commit to being on Red Alert. The documentary on sex trafficking called Notes To My Father. In 2018, Elca spoke at TedxHyderabad on the journey of My Choices Foundation and building an Army of Good Fathers at India’s largest Tedx Event.
Elca and her husband, Roger Grobler have been pivotal funders of My Choices Foundation. Their family have made a long term commitment to India and has been living there for the last 9 years, in terms of their time, passion, fnances and skills.
Under Elca Grobler’s leadership, My Choices Foundation is becoming one of the most impactful NGOs in India addressing women and girl’s right to safety. Much has been accomplished, and there is a long, long way to go.
Accolades and Awards:
Vision
Matthew 10:7-10
Tell them that the kingdom is here. Bring health to the sick. Raise the dead. Touch the untouchables. Kick out the demons. You have been treated generously, so live generously.
Fundraising Strategy
Don't think you have to put on a fund- raising campaign before you start.You don't need a lot of equipment. You are the equipment, and all you need to keep that going is three meals a day. Travel light.
Methodology
Romans 12:13 (MSG) Don't burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don't quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality.
