Wednesday, November 8th, 4-6pm, CHAT Lounge, 10th Floor Gladfelter
Ela Bhatt, Founder, SEWA, Ahmedabad, India
"From Independence to Freedom: SEWA Women's Journey"

About her talk at Temple, Elaben writes: "The most sustained experience of my life since India’s Independence has been the search for the Second Freedom, the economic empowerment of the poor, toiling women of India. The First Freedom, political power, arrived with Independence in 1947. The Second Freedom, economic power, has yet to be achieved. As I understood Gandhiji, economic self reliance was as important for him as political independence. There are literally millions of groups such as SEWA across the country, which are the basis of the production systems, yet they remain undocumented and unrecognised. I call this vast system of small producers/vendors/service providers with its network of formal and informal organisations as the people's sector. People’s organisations can only flourish if the macro policies and economic environment give them the space to grow. With a little encouragement, and in spite of much resistance against it, the people sector of India has survived and grown in the last decades. In many ways, the yearning for the idea of Second Freedom inspired us."

Lawyer and activist Ela Bhatt is founder and creator of the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India, one of the preeminent organizations of working-class women in the world. Starting in 1972 from a base in the Gandhian Textile Labor Association in Ahmedabad, Dr. Bhatt built a union, a voluntary organization, and a women's organization that today enrolls more than 700,000 women across India and has been the inspiration for similar organizations around the world. SEWA has been a leader in micro-lending through its own cooperative bank, through rural development programs in the hands of local women, through the establishment of health and insurance programs -- all geared to poor, working-class women. Among other activities, Bhatt founded and chaired Women’s World Banking, the International Alliance of Home-based Workers (HomeNet) and Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing, Organizing (WIEGO). Known as the "gentle revolutionary," Dr. Bhatt has served as a member of India's Parliament, the Indian Planning Commission, and has been a member of the Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees for over a decade. She is a recipient of the French Legion of Honor awarded to world citizens for their contributions to humanity. She holds numerous honorary doctorates from Temple, Harvard, Yale, and other institutions around the world.