Content warning: this episode contains content based around the mistreatment of women that some listeners may find upsetting. Surabhi Yadav grew up in a rural village in India. At an early age, she witnessed the stark differences in societal and cultural expectations between men and women. But rather than bending to the norms placed on her as a young woman, she dedicated much of her life to bending them right back. Surabhi became a beacon of hope for rural women across India by refusing to accept the status quo, empowering others to pursue meaningful careers instead of simply focusing on their livelihoods. As the founder of the non-profit Sajhe Sapne, she's made it her mission to educate rural women through innovative community college-like institutions called "Sapna Centers." In this powerful conversation, Surabhi opens up about her core values and beliefs, reflecting on the emotional aspects of her work that she rarely has the chance to explore. We discuss the first time she spoke out as a young girl, the challenges faced by rural women in India when it comes to pursuing work they love, and how the joy of creativity fuels her entrepreneurial spirit.
Content warning: this episode contains content based around the mistreatment of women that some listeners may find upsetting.
Surabhi Yadav grew up in a rural village in India. At an early age, she witnessed the stark differences in societal and cultural expectations between men and women. But rather than bending to the norms placed on her as a young woman, she dedicated much of her life to bending them right back.
Surabhi became a beacon of hope for rural women across India by refusing to accept the status quo, empowering others to pursue meaningful careers instead of simply focusing on their livelihoods. As the founder of the non-profit Sajhe Sapne, she's made it her mission to educate rural women through innovative community college-like institutions called "Sapna Centers."
In this powerful conversation, Surabhi opens up about her core values and beliefs, reflecting on the emotional aspects of her work that she rarely has the chance to explore. We discuss the first time she spoke out as a young girl, the challenges faced by rural women in India when it comes to pursuing work they love, and how the joy of creativity fuels her entrepreneurial spirit.
Learn more about Sajhe Sapne.
In this episode, we cover:
Quote of the Week:
"How can you not feel the rage and the grief of not knowing women in your life [well] enough because of the way the world is designed?" - Surabhi Yadav
Hosted by Katherin Vasilopoulos. Made by Cansulta and Ethan Lee.
Music by © Chris Zabriskie, published by You've Been a Wonderful Laugh Track (ASCAP).
Songs used in this episode include: "Air Hockey Saloon," "Everyone Will Notice, No One Will Say Anything," "$50 to Breathe," "The Stars Are Closer Than You," "Short Song 020523," "Itasca, It's Glowing Red Hot," "Your Mother's Daughter."
Used under the Creative Commons 4.0 International License
[00:00:00] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Hi, I'm Katherin Vasilopoulos. Starting my own venture wasn't easy.
After a decade working in the corporate world, I realized that so many things were out of my control, like layoffs and changes in direction. I didn't like the instability. I didn't want that to define my whole career at professional story, and so I left. I started my own company and achieved more than I ever imagined.
Now I'm on a mission to share stories from extraordinary entrepreneurs who are changing the world and who never gave up on their vision.
If you're joining us from Canada, the US, or the UK, we often fail to recognize how issues related to women's entrepreneurship impact people outside of our immediate surroundings. Barriers like gender bias affect women globally. The scope of these issues is often greater than we acknowledge. But no matter where these barriers persist, you can count on equally persistent women to oppose them.
Surabhi Yadav has embodied this persistence since she was little. Growing up in a rural village in India, she quickly recognized the difference in expectations between men and women and how these expectations are socially and culturally reinforced in the region where she lives. Rather than accepting the customary path laid before her, Surabhi became a pillar of support for rural women across India, encouraging women to pursue meaningful careers instead of simply focusing on their livelihood. Her nonprofit Sajhe Sapne was created with this purpose in mind. The organization educates rural women through community college-like institutions called "Sapna Centers," or "Dream Centers." But as we spoke, we explored something that she had never had the time to reflect on in depth: how she feels about the initiatives she promotes.
In this moving conversation, Surabhi talks about the values and beliefs that are at the core of what she does. She also discusses the first time she spoke out as a young girl, the issues that are currently holding back rural women in India from pursuing work that they love, and how the joy of creativity continues to motivate her as a woman entrepreneur.
Hi Surabhi. Thank you. Thank you so much for being with us today. We're so excited to have you as a guest because you have a very special story. I would love to hear more about how you got. Started in this and what inspired you to bring this into your life and start working on this.
[00:02:40] Surabhi Yadav: I'll start with introducing Sajhe Sapne, my nonprofit.
I am a gender and rural development practitioner, and the nonprofit Sajhe Sapne literally means shared dreams. And it's addressing a key problem in India, uh, that after 12 standard or after school, rural women, young, rural women, don't have real tangible options for professional growth. Uh, usually the options that are available are marriage.
You know, you have some kind of private or government colleges. You have community colleges, or as we call ITIs in India, or small short-term vocational courses by a lot of wonderful nonprofits in India. The issue is that none of these options really open up a growth pathway. I think as a sector or as a nation, we are sort of stuck in a livelihoods mentality, which is to say slight income increment for rural youth, not just women.
What we are hoping to push is that can we think in terms of growth pathways instead of livelihoods, can we think in terms of, uh, professional development, career development for rural women. So there are a bunch of structural things that are going on, especially in villages. There are four systemic factors that are at play.
One is cast, one is class, one is gender, and then there's geography. So in terms of cast, the conditioning that you are given over and over by advantaged cast groups, or privileged cast groups, is that you don't need dignified jobs as long as you you are getting a chance to live here. You're fine. You don't need dignified jobs, right?
Second part of it is class. Uh, if you're coming from a low income family, what is expected of you is, again, menial repetitive manual jobs, labor intensive jobs. You're not supposed to think big in terms of, I want to think about aspirations, I want to think about, you know, you can think all of those, but the reality is that if you're getting a repetitive labor intensive job, you're good enough.
Then comes the gender. Girls are not being raised with the idea that you are gonna earn and you're going, someone else is gonna be dependent on you. No, no, no. You are raised with an idea that you have to get married and you have to be so good at being daughter-in-law. And that training begins right from, you know, age two and age three because you're seeing all the rewards and all the punishments are centered and anchored around you being an amazing daughter-in-law.
[00:05:05] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Is that what happened with you in your case? Did you have that same kind of mentality driven into you with as soon as you were old enough to, you know? Yes.
[00:05:14] Surabhi Yadav: No, not at all. I think thankfully, I mean, I cannot thank my parents enough. I don't know how did they become so, so, Oh God, they were amazing. So what they did is I had cross eyes as I was growing up, uh, like massive cross eye, like one eye looking in one direction, the other eye looking in another direction.
And of course, you know, children being children, they bully you. Like, oh, you know, you have bad eyes and this are not good and this are not bad. So I'd come back and I would fight with my father and I would tell him to get me operated. You know, like, why don't you get me operated? A simple operation can fix it, and everyone hates me.
And he would say, and that I don't look beautiful. And he would say, again, I think my father and my mother were amazing storytellers. So my father would say two things. One, he would say, your eyes are God gift. And second he would say, he would mention some amazing women's name, women leaders name. One is like Rani Lakshmibai and Kiran Bedi.
And he would say, look at them, people, their work is so amazing that people don't even dare to look into their eyes. So now I bought these two stories.
[00:06:18] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Interesting.
[00:06:18] Surabhi Yadav: So I, I internalized, my eyes are gift of nature and I would go to my classrooms and yell back to the, you know, my classmates. This is God's gift. I have got God's gift.
Yeah. I'm, I'm glad you mentioned the term self-esteem. I was 5 or 7 and we were back in our, uh, native village in Madhupur in Deoghar, and in our village the rituals of the culture is that women and girls do not attend the wedding procession of the guys in the house. So in Hindu marriages, a wedding procession goes from the groom's house to the bride's house, usually in a different village, and sort of get married there and bring the bride back home.
On the wedding card, so it was my cousin's wedding. It was my first cousin's wedding that I remember, and she was my older sister. On the wedding cards, usually they write each and every man's and boy's name as a welcoming party in the house. So we have four siblings and I have an elder brother who's two years older than me, and his name was on it, and my name was not on it.
And I remember creating a big scene about it that why is my name on, not on it? And I go to my mother who is not supposed to talk to men in the household because she's a daughter-in-law in the household. So she nudges me to go and talk to the papa there. Like she didn't stop me. She didn't justify it like everyone else did, that, shut up. You know what? What do you know?
I go to my father and my father got like thousand cards reprinted with a special line written at the end of a wedding card. Special request: our daughter Surabhi Yadav welcomes you to this wedding. So I became this first person in the entire village to actually get her name on a wedding card and then also go to the all the rituals that are involved in the process.
And fast forward 20, 25 years later, my father recently sent me another wedding card from the family. This time my niece, who is actually 19 and she's getting married and her wedding card, which not only mentioned my name, but are also mentioned like daughter-in-law's name with their education listed. Next to their names.
[00:08:37] Katherin Vasilopoulos: So you were the pioneer and the trendsetter back then?
[00:08:41] Surabhi Yadav: I think my parents were. So, I used to joke with my father that either you were like really progressive, amazing thinkers, or you were just careless parents that you didn't care whatever is happening to your children because you just gave us so much freedom, you know?
So my parents, what they did is they put us in convent school and we studied in English education or whatever, the most prestigious school that was possible in that town. And even if that world was very far away from their own education and upbringing, they just didn't stop us. You know? So we tried a lot of new things.
They just didn't come in the way. So a big part of our work is around giving things a wider range of exposure, both inside and outside. Like what all is possible for yourself? What are your interests? What are your thoughts? What are your questions for the world? What is it that you wanna create for the world and for yourself?
And then of course, showing this exposure of, you know, there are different kinds of people doing all kinds of interesting things, but in the beginning, that's not the ambition.
[00:09:43] Katherin Vasilopoulos: What you've learned as a child, and this idea of creativity can only happen from a place of security and, and feeling safe.
[00:09:50] Surabhi Yadav: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:51] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Do you impart that then, to your students? Do they understand that concept and what, what's gonna make them feel safe if, for example, you're telling me that there are no options for growth or maybe there's financial insecurity?
[00:10:04] Surabhi Yadav: In Sajhe, we talk about three key things. Content, culture, and community. And we say when these three are offered, then hopefully the output would be increase in skills, agency, jobs, you know, sense of possibilities and support system.
So we call our students sapnawaalis, which literally means a woman who dreams, a woman who has a fire in the belly. We call our centers, Sapna Centers, which mean dream centers. Then there's a term called sapna dal, which literally means a team for your dreams. A set of people who get excited because you are growing, and we make our students make a list of those people.
Right, starting from your home, like find that one person who's ready to listen to you. And again, this goes back to what was happening to me in the childhood, right? Like you don't need the whole army. Just find that one person who's ready to listen to you start from your family, your friends group, and now to your new sapna dal.
So the whole cohort is called sapna dal. The language about rural women in the mainstream media swings in extremes. Either they're really innocent being this romanticized idea of rural women that they're so innocent and pure at heart. They had no, they have no malice and they have no knowledge. And the other side of that extreme is they're so oppressed.
This language really doesn't help my students at least, you know? So then you need to create a new language, which is a lot more empowering and it plays such a big role. I remember this first year I was sitting with my students, I asked them to write a story about a protagonist has to be rural women, so you just write a story.
And they were around 25 students each and everyone talked about how oppressed she's, so we read the stories and I asked them, how many of your rural women here? Everyone raised their hands. I said, okay. How many of you're deeply oppressed? And nobody raised their hand. I said, well, your protagonist is very oppressed.
Like she really doesn't know anything. And they were like, no, no, no, Didi. That is different, different person. But they literally borrowed the language from the mainstream media the way women are talked about. So then this language piece really creates a situation where it tells them, listen, we expect more from you.
You gotta expect more from yourself.
[00:12:17] Katherin Vasilopoulos: I'm hearing from the story that you had a certain upbringing and then you're talking to your students and they're bringing up. Another set of values that doesn't exactly match what you learned, which was you came from a place of caring and abundance and yeah. Your protagonist, so to speak, in your head was more of a positive one.
And these women have an idea in their head of what it means to be successful and, and yet they write stories about non abundance. And how does that make you feel? You hear these stories, what does that bring up in you? Or why is it important for you to do this work?
[00:12:53] Surabhi Yadav: Yeah.
Yeah, that's such a fantastic question.
How does that make me feel? I think it's a mix of anger and wonder. I would not even say anger. It feels like rage. Like every time I have gotten immensely, like gut trenching, rage from like just to feel it in your nerves. It has mostly been related to gender. I just wonder that how can you not, how can we as a society and as, as a country, cannot provide opportunities this to this whole set of population, which is so hardworking, like the rural economy is on the backbones, on the heart, on the body of rural women, everything is run by them. So they're clearly capable. They're so hardworking. They're so eager to learn. How can you not provide them the kind of opportunities that matches their caliber? How have we shrunk everything in just the narrative of the pain and not their potential?
Like what would the world be if they were redesigning it, if they were bringing in their intellect in it, right? Like when we imagine a leader, we often imagine a person standing on a stage, usually, you know, a man in a suit. Giving life lessons and leadership lessons. You know, if I nudge a little bit more, someone would imagine a woman standing there speaking in English, probably a white woman standing there and speaking in English, giving a TED Talk.
But what about a sari-clad woman working in her farm, has gathered all that wisdom, where are her life and leadership lessons for us? So the country is missing out because they're not living up to their potential. The world is missing out. That sense of wonder that how can we be so silly and stupid that we are losing out on such a big potential.
It's just like this rage bit. I just, I don't know how to answer to that. Like, it just, this is how I feel. I don't know why, but this is how I feel. Right. Like it just doesn't sit right.
[00:14:52] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Is it because it's an injustice in your, in your eyes?
[00:14:54] Surabhi Yadav: Of course. I mean, it's a mad unfairness. And I think the reason the rage is like, because it, you've seen it so close to home.
Not just in my own family, but like friends and you know, the broader community. When the Covid had begun and I started volunteering cause there was so much chaos in the country and everyone was volunteering in one or the other way. And I was volunteering for helping domestic violence survivors get in touch with the kind of support services that are available.
Domestic violence survivors were reaching to meet through social media. Mostly they were urban women using Instagram and all of that. And there were so many cases where these women were vice president in a tech company. And like, being beaten and abused by their husbands. That just doesn't sit right.
Like it just doesn't sit right. Yeah, it just doesn't like-
[00:15:43] Katherin Vasilopoulos: And so that brings up a sense of rage, really it does. There's a sense of injustice and rage and almost powerlessness because as much as you wanna try and help and you see the problem persists.
[00:15:53] Surabhi Yadav: The problem persists. You see it in dayin and day out, like, I do wanna mention that the time when this burst opened for me. So when I graduated from IAT, my plan was to work for villages. I didn't know what exactly in villages so, I framed a question for myself as I graduated from IAT Deli, that I want to do something in villages. Now I need to find what is it exactly that I want to work in villages.
And I was doing my own set of exploration and that led me to Berkeley. So when I entered in Masters, the question was what exactly in villages that I want to do? And first year, Me Too burst opened. Right? And I remember when the initial stories of Me Too were trending, I laughed in my head and I said, instead of Me too, the hashtag should be Who Isn't?
Tell me one woman who hasn't gone through this, a version of this like, in one version or the other. Every woman has gone through this. The more stories poured in, and I remember the Brett Kavanaugh hearing happened and I watched through the whole thing. I was in grad school and I was going from one class to another, and my body was like, hot.
That's how much rage I felt that no, this. And then you think about all the incidences in your life, in your friend's life, in your mother's life, and that was also the journey I had lost my mother only like three, four years ago. And after her death, I got to know so much about her life that made me realize that I did not know her as a person at all.
I just knew her as one dynamic, my mother. What was she beyond that? I have no idea. So that Me Too, as a phase, it felt like a flood off. Everything clashed back. Everything came back, and now there was a strong language around it. The question had narrowed down for me that I was clear that I want to work for women with women.
I had always done that. I just never thought of that as gender issues. I always thought of them as my issue, right? Like me standing up and saying why my name is not on the wedding card wasn't a gender issue for me. At that point, it was my issue. So now all of a sudden, the second year of masters gave me the language and the framework to look at my own life experiences and women of my own life and say, oh my God, I, this is my community.
[00:18:10] Katherin Vasilopoulos: And now it's a bigger issue. It's a bigger issue. Yeah, for sure.
[00:18:14] Surabhi Yadav: And I think what you've made me do right now is like, I'm just realizing how have I not journaled about why do I feel this rage? I've definitely journaled a lot about this is how I'm feeling, like I feel anger. The other side of it is the joy that you see when someone claims their agency is just beautiful.
With my students, I use two terms. Like, atyaachaar and bahar. Atyaachaar literally means suppression and bahar means spring. So there are two ways you can look at the world. You can look at in from the lens of oppression, what all is wrong with the world. That is really required. And then there is the spring lens. What is beautiful right now and what all other flowers that can blossom in the spring. At least in the last few years, I have learned how to channel everything towards the springs, all my work is springs.
I live in the world of possibilities for myself and core people in my life. Now, my students and the springs that I see in them is they're very hardworking, they're very committed, they're relentless in many ways, and they're just hungry for learning. So a big part of it is just channeling that grief and guilt of not knowing my mother as a person into something beautiful.
Like one of the things I remember, my mother used to not let us wear sleeveless clothes when we were young. I hated my mother for that. Honestly. I, I was like, she's not forward thinking and she doesn't care what I want. After her death, my sister and I were sitting and just sitting and chatting and sort of remembering her and I was laughing about, do you remember that? How she would like really protest of me wearing sleeveless clothes? And that was so weird.
And my sister, who's six years older than me, and she was much closer to my mother, she said, The reason she said that is because there had been cases within families, someone making sexual advances on the girls. She was trying to protect us, both of us, me and her.
That moment I felt, oh my God, I misunderstood my mother to such deep extent. Like here she is. Trying to protect me in the way she understood. Like, how can you not feel the rage and the grief of not knowing women in your life enough? Because the way world is designed.
I think
[00:20:38] Katherin Vasilopoulos: that's amazing. Sorry, you're making me cry.
Because I'm listening to the story. Because, because we don't understand the motivation behind our parents actions sometimes, and they're just trying to protect us. But when you're young, you don't. See the predators. You don't see, you do what could potentially go wrong. You just believe everyone is good.
You believe everyone in your environment is good.
[00:20:57] Surabhi Yadav: And think about it, Katherin, that she managed to protect my positive worldview. Think about the cost that she paid so that I have an abundance sense of worldview. Be, because it's so beyond my mind that you could live in the same house. Where you know that your children are not completely safe. What would it like to live like- because I never felt it. She did and she protected me. I feel that I now have so much language about how neuroscience function, how our brain functions under traumatic incidences or you know, all of that. I have the language now. My mother did not have that language. My mother did not have that framework.
And yet her feminism was so solid. I don't know. I just feel, how did this happen? Like I wonder, what did my mother think about this world? What politics did she have? I have no idea. And what a loss. I don't know enough about my own creator. I did not know my mother enough. I started interviewing people in her life, um, who knew her, and I wanted to know more about her.
And I can stop. Katherin.
[00:22:03] Katherin Vasilopoulos: I don't know why this is so emotional. I thought we were gonna talk about entrepreneurs too. And instead of turning into this.
[00:22:11] Surabhi Yadav: You ask, you ask why rage? It is.
[00:22:15] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Yeah.
[00:22:16] Surabhi Yadav: And the reason I'm continuing to talk-
[00:22:17] Katherin Vasilopoulos: It's a deep question.
It's an important question. The rage question is at the root of everything that moves us to change the world.
[00:22:25] Surabhi Yadav: And the reason I'm continuing to talk is because I know if I start crying thinking about my mother, this recording is not gonna be finished. So I'll have to keep talking. I know myself, but I wanna hug you. So like right now, sister to sister, I wanna hug you. Yeah. Yeah.
Um, and I think, you know, honestly, I had sort of convinced myself in the last few years that it's not about rage for me, it's about springs for me now. I wanna think about possibilities, but the moment you ask that question, I know how it feels.
I still feel it. Sometimes I feel it less frequently now than I used to when I was younger. And maybe because I have something to create and channel towards something. But you feel it. And I have felt it in so many instances, not just for myself. Just the other day we had gone for a government meeting and I always take my students or my alumni, our alumni are also our team members now, so they're co-creating the program with us.
So there's this huge ass conference room with big chairs, huge table. We are like five women, all of us in like silver suit. My students or my alumni are basically shorter in height. So they're also young and small. They've come from rural India, right? Like, so the kind of clothes that they wear and the way they look and the way they speak, right?
There's no problem with that. So the minister who was supposed to sit at the helm, right, and the chairs next, beside his chair, I let my team sit there. Like my students at Sahje's alumni sit there, and the person who was coordinating that for us, he basically made this disgusted look on his face. And he said, Why are they sitting there?
And I said, Well, they are leading the presentation because I think our students and alumni are the best ambassadors for our program. They have experienced it. They're the core users of the program. So they are the ones who should lead the presentation. And he made this look, he said, It's a risky thing to do.
And I didn't hear that actually. And I just continued, whatever. My students and my alumni did hear that. So when we came out of that building and one of them said, Bidi, I didn't like that. Did you see his face? And in that moment, I just felt it in my gut again. I said, What? What did he say? And I was like, God, I missed that moment.
I should have gone back in. Like, how dare he? How dare he? He didn't even give them a chance. He doesn't even know them. But you see that play out in so many ways. Last year, I remember I was talking to this big company, this huge tech company, huge in India, and their investor is a big propent of our program.
So he connected me to the head of HR. So now I'm sitting there talking to them, telling about the program and telling them, listen, we have, you know, front end coders with us. They're freshers. Can you put them in the pipeline of hiring? Right? Like interview them, take their interview, whatever. These people who's the head of HR, they talked to me for like four or five times.
And I think the, the reason they did that is because their investor had put us in touch with them and they would keep appreciating the program, but they just did not give them a chance for interviewing. They just didn't do it.
[00:25:39] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Why do you think that is? Is it because that's always been like that and there's a preconceived notion that some people are less worthy than others?
What, what did you see in that?
[00:25:47] Surabhi Yadav: I think, I think the, the heart of the problem is that as a nation, we don't trust the potential of rural youth, like deep trust. That I believe that you can go to places. So the way I think about it is, So think about IAT Dehli students. My Alma Matar.
When we were in college, anyone who's thinking about doing something in IAT, they're gonna think in terms of the best solution out there. Let's go take that in IAT, because you're not gonna think in terms of suboptimal solutions for IAT students, but for rural, let's think about the most suboptimal solution that is out there. I was talking to this person, her partner was working in like a high level ministry of Foreign Affairs, so she wanted to volunteer at Sajhe.
So I met her and we really hit it off. She told me, you know that how, why she's interested in Sajhe and why, and she was really high caliber. So I was like, okay, this is gonna be interesting if you wanna volunteer, like you're so experienced and you're so high caliber. And so as I was telling her about the program, that this is what we do in program. Management, math, teaching and all of that.
And she said, Oh yeah, yeah. We also ran a skill development program in another country. And I said, Oh yeah, what did you, what skills were you teaching? And she said, Oh, you know, we opened a tailoring center. So I sat in front of her and she showed me photographs, and I sat in front of her, and I'm thinking that this person has all the government network in the world.
This person has a PhD and has traveled to more than 50 countries. This person, the best she could think for rural youth in some other country, rural women in some other country, was tailoring a solution that has been widely used for rural women and has not led to a lot of growth paths. So why is it the best of our minds are thinking most sub-optimal solutions for rural women?
To me, the answer for that is that we don't trust their potential. We don't believe that as learners they can kick ass.
[00:27:38] Katherin Vasilopoulos: So what has to change?
[00:27:40] Surabhi Yadav: During Covid when lockdown happened, EdTech solutions in India just blossomed. All kinds of EdTech happened. You know, you can upgrade your skill sets if you're even a professional.
You can, you know, if you're in school, these are the kind of XYZ solutions you have in EdTech, there were no real EdTech solutions that could work for rural India. So I don't think in India the issue is about money. Or about our strength to innovate. That's a very good question, what has to change? Like first is our own mindset.
The mindset of, I would say urban privileged class has to change people who have a lot of access to resources, and then a lot of access to resources have to be given in the hands of rural India. I think in some sense that's what Sajhe is trying to do, that access to resources, access to opportunities, and a very different mindset.
This is a mindset which is not gonna start from the bottom. It's gonna start from higher up, higher expectations, higher deliverables, higher efficiency, higher quality, both for ourselves as team and for our students. And thinking in terms of sense of possibilities. I get it. I think in India, a lot of solutions are required, which can work on bare bones.
We are a big country with a lot of interesting challenges, but my problem is why do we limit ourselves to just that? Someone has to say, no, I'm gonna move beyond the silaee, kadhaee, brunaee model. I'm gonna move beyond the tailoring, sewing, embroidery. I'm gonna move beyond this particular model. So I'm not saying stop that, let it be there, but can we create more options?
[00:29:06] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Thank you. Those are really good points. And my last question for you is where do you see things going for you and your movement, and what are you hopeful about in the future?
[00:29:17] Surabhi Yadav: If we survive for next 15 years, I hope in the sector, in this nonprofit sector, innovators, funders, government shift their focus from just livelihood, which is like any kind of income increment to growth pathways for rural women.
And the way we have defined growth pathways is that with increase in time and effort for a person, there should be increase in skills agency, you know, jobs, salary, network, and sense of possibilities. I really hope that someone else creates an amazing nonprofit because they got to know about us, and I hope they create a nonprofit, which starts from even higher standards from us.
And the second wish I have is that I really hope that Sajhe's alumni like sapne either becomes a CEO of Sajhe or open her own chain of Sapna Centers in her own community. Yeah, and I hope I continue to have my joy of creation throughout. Those are the two wishes towards which we are working right now, and uh, Sajhe is very young.
It's very small entity at the moment, and the challenges we are up against are really deeply systemic. So we hope that we are able to do a tiny bit needle shift in the systems that we are functioning. We are not there yet. We're far from it, but that's the hope.
[00:30:36] Katherin Vasilopoulos: Thank you Surabhi, for such an inspiring discussion.
You can learn more about Surabhi and Sajhe Sapne in the episode description. Community is hugely important to the success of women entrepreneurs, including those who make podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, we would love it if you shared Surabhi's conversation with a friend. "And So, She Left" is made by Cansulta and Ethan Lee.
We'll be back next Wednesday with a new episode. Our music is by Chris Zabriskie, edited for your enjoyment. You can find a list of all the songs you heard here in the episode notes. I'm Katherin Vasilopoulos, and thanks for listening.