Formalising the Rangoonwala Community Centre Model
Our analysis is that women do not look after themselves…They worry about the family budget, they put the children first, they live and work in difficult conditions and their health suffers.
The Rangoonwala Foundation (India) Trust runs community centres in six locations in Mumbai. Each one is designed to serve a population of 100,000, a huge figure when compared with the modest size and facilities of each centre.
‘Our analysis is that women do not look after themselves’ says Nisreen Ebrahim, CEO of the Rangoonwala Foundation (India) Trust or RF(I)T. ‘They worry about the family budget, they put the children first, they live and work in difficult conditions and their health suffers. So our community Centres approach is about making a place where women can come to improve their physical and emotional health’. The Rangoonwala Community Centres or RCCs are described by Nisreen as physical spaces with activities happening in them.
Working through BasicNeeds, Steve Fisher and Ingrid Horton helped the Rangoonwala Foundation (India) Trust bring together all the information required to design, established and manage an RCC. Steve spent time visiting the centres and worked with the team to organise and structure all the material. He then produced a two-volume draft of the manual, which we called the Operations Handbook, which was then refined over a period of several weeks through email-based exchanges of drafts and additional content. Finally, Ingrid designed and produced a version that the organisation printed and launched under copyright and which can be found under the publications page of this website.
The Rangoonwala Foundation (India) Trust wants to help its work reach many more people. Formalising and publishing its model is one step towards this goal.
