Red Brigade Lucknow
| Founded | 2014 |
|---|---|
| Founders | Ajay Patel, Usha Vishwakarma |
| Type | Non-governmental organization |
| Focus | Women's Rights, Safety and Empowerment |
| Location | |
|
Area served
|
India |
| Method | Awareness Campaigns, Protests, Nukkad Natak, Self Defense Training |
| Website | redbrigadetrust |
Red Brigade Trust is a non-governmental organization located in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. The organization was founded by Ajay Patel and Usha Vishwakarma and focuses on empowering women through self-defense education.
Ajay Patel had been working for woman empowerment with many non-governmental organizations (NGO). He found Usha Vishwakarma, who was an aspiring social worker at one of his friend's NGO. Usha was a survivor who survived an attempted sexual assault by a coworker at the age of eighteen. Usha's locality had more such survivors. Ajay formed a team of 15 girls including Usha and started conducting series of self-defense workshops for girls. Usha was the eldest and most active of all the girls and was made the face of the group.
In 2010, while conducting a workshop with teenaged girls, Ajay and his team discovered that most of the participants (53 out of 55) were sexually assaulted in their own houses by their own family members or close relatives. This workshop broke their belief that the girls are safe at home. Hence along with a group of 15 girls, most of them the victim of one or other form of sexual assault decided to fight back. Red Brigade Trust is formed by a group of Survivors of Sexual Violence under the leadership of Ajay Patel and Usha Vishwakarma. The group was officially registered as a trust in 2014 with Ajay Patel being the Managing Trustee and Usha being the Assistant Trustee/Secretary. The founding trustee members of the trust were Ajay Patel, Usha Vishwakarma, Preeti Verma, Pratima Vishwakarma, Akash Patel, Razia Begum and Jyoti. The current trustee members are Ajay Patel, Preeti Verma, Akash Patel, Jyoti, Pooja Vishwakarma, Bhavna Chhonker and Aastha Dikshit.
Initially, the group started an awareness campaign regarding women issues through street plays and workshops; dressed in red and black, red denoting struggle and black denoting protest. Subsequently, the Red Brigade members took martial arts (wu shu, karate) lessons at a local studio called the Dragon Academy Dojo in Lucknow; however, as word spread of the group, several international teachers began to travel to instruct the group. Later, they found that self-defense techniques are more reliable in protecting oneself from sexual assault; the Brigade learned self-defense and started training/equipping other girls with the self-defense techniques under the name Mission One Million.
Domestically, the Red Brigade Trust has received extensive media coverage in India including numerous television appearances, radio interviews, and news coverage.
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