International Women's Day Special: How singer Isheeta Ganguly is empowering young lives

The theme for the 2015 International Women’s Day is 'Make it Happen' and singer Isheeta Ganguly has been doing exactly that by empowering street children through her organisation Neerupama. 

Born in Kolkata, Isheeta was brought up in the United States but she returned to India to follow her music aspirations. Releasing her first Rabindra sangeet album at the age of 15, Isheeta has eight albums under her belt since beginning her musical career at the age of seven. While obtaining her BA from Brown University and a Masters in Public Health from Columbia University, she often spent her university vacations in Kolkata, volunteering at a local municipal school and at the Child In Need Institute (CINI). It was during her volunteer work, that she realised she wanted to make a difference in the lives of these children. 

“Working with street girls during trips to Kolkata, particularly in health and education, made me think that I definitely wanted to do something in the space of empowering young girls,” Isheeta says. That's how she went on to found Neerupama in 2008, which provides organisations with essential programs to give children an opportunity to turn their life around.

“Instead of reinventing the wheel and creating a safe house for children, I decided to partner with CINI, an organisation that was doing outstanding and credible work,” says Isheeta. Having previously worked in healthcare, Isheeta focused on interventions in health and hygiene. Through Neerupama, she developed three resourceful​ programs to provide for the children in Kolkata and now in Mumbai since 2014:

Reach: This program provides English literacy to the children, focussing on teaching them to converse and build opportunities if they want to go to secondary school, but more importantly for basic employment and vocational training.

HealthNet: is a public health awareness programme which is focused on basics like washing hands and information on respiratory and diarrhoeal disease. It was created to empower children, so they could go back to their home environments and train their families with what they learned. This could ultimately help prevent diarrhoeal and acute respiratory infections related deaths.

Arts for Starts: is a performing arts programme where artists from around the city, like renowned actors, dramatists and musicians, conduct a session with the kids.

Through the Neerupama programmes, these children showed dramatic improvements over time. “We measured English capabilities over three months, six months, a year and found marked levels of improvements in conversational English and basic health knowledge,” says Isheeta.

While all three programmes have been successful in making a huge impact on the children, it was the performing art sessions that were most powerful in healing traumatic pasts like facing sexual abuse and abandonment. Being exposed to music and dance brought out a positive change in the children. 

“In the arts programme, whenever they were around music and dance, a lot of these kids who had clearly been through all kinds of trauma, would come out in completely different ways,”says Isheeta. “I felt it had a profound effect on healing these kids who could not talk about what they had been through.”

Isheeta found that the performing arts has a unique quality to allow the children to stay focused on the present. “It has the power and ability to stir and move the subconscious like nothing else can,” she says. “You can’t change the past, but you can live in the moment. And there is nothing more in the moment than feeling the power of music, theatre, or the power of dance either as a spectator or a participant.”

The programme has helped restore hope back in their lives and seeing the profound effect of dance and music, Isheeta now hopes to scale her efforts using mass media as a means to impact minds. “If you can create a solid product on film or through music, that can be shared with hundreds and thousands of kids that will resonate.”

Her organisation Neerupama, named after her grandmother, means beautiful, which is what she says the children she works with are. It has not just been rewarding to be able to make a difference in their lives, but it has been equally satisfying in the way they have received it, she says. 

“I think what has moved me so deeply are two things, the fact that they would never ask for anything and then, how grateful they are that you just showed up. The fact that you've come to conduct the class or session just lights up their world, because so much of their little lives has been about people just not showing up," adds Isheeta.

Her advice to young girls and women wanting to make a difference is, "Start small and do what you feel is natural." Any change can make a huge impact, she believes.