Women empowerment, is not a fresh issue, in global context. Empowering and inspiring  young women of different spheres of their lives through necessary dialogues shared by women for women to bring about change and help building their own success stories, has been put into practice through different means for some time now.

These days the intuitiveness lies with how innovatively one can present, to connect with more women to drive such programme, as that will only bring them out of their inhibitions.

Ayesha Dhall, an XI grade student of The Shri Ram School, Aravali, took a stride in one such direction, with her interesting project on “reverse mentoring” recently.

Ayesha hosted the first appearance of her programme on August 10 at Urban Akhara, Gurgaon.

The evening event had witnessed a trail of activities, of which the most interesting was an unusual tumble down the rabbit hole which wouldn’t have got any better for the participants.

In totality, with an objective to help themselves to get acquainted with their inner fierceness, the participants indulged thoroughly on zumba, overcame obstacle (literally) courses, and other self defence lessons. All of these were done by teams of teenage girls and corporate women.

Ayesha, when asked about her inspiration behind taking up this sort of an initiative, expressed, “I’ve always been someone who has loved adventure sports and taking the risks that come with it – I did cliff jumping at 12 and deep sea diving at 15 – but somewhere I have always felt that women need to take more risks to feel more empowered and that is what inspired me to create ‘She Dares’ – a programme that encourages women to push themselves and take risks”

Ayesha feels rather than doing a run or walk, she wanted to do an obstacle course since a lot of women have not experienced that. Just by participating in the event women climbed ropes, crawled under nets, rappelled on walls, and that was their first step of doing something risky and combat ready.

Ayesha added, “Inspiring women to embrace risk is the objective. I hope this risk taking will manifest itself in more women senior leaders, more women start up founders and women going out of their comfort zone to achieve their dreams. That’s exactly why I teamed up with Pratham. All the funds from this event will go to The Second Chance Program that helps women who have dropped out of school complete their education. I wanted to empower not only women in urban India but provide women in the rural areas with a chance to succeed and be empowered.

There will further legs to this initiative down the line with multiple such events in the year in the same format as also on other adventure activities. Some corporate houses have also shown interest to do an exclusive programme with Ayesha.

She intends to develop a platform for women empowerment for corporate and teenagers, as well.

(The writer is a Delhi-based independent contributor to print and online publications)