Campaign enlists community volunteers for women's safety

Even as numerous safety gadgets for women continue to crowd the market, an NGO is set to launch a 'crowdsourcing' campaign, which enlists community volunteers to rush to the aid of women in distress.
"The concept is simple: Girls feel unsafe on roads because their father, brother or friends cannot rush to help them in less than five minutes. On the other hand - every street has at-least two people who will rush out to save the girl if they know there is a problem. The key is to connect these two which can easily be done via technology," says Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder of 'The Social Cop'.

The organisation says it uses technology to bring together people from different areas "to create systemic changes and install processes that lead to long lasting changes in the community."
For its "SAFE" campaign, the NGO begun by Delhi-based 21-year-old attempts to find "two people on every street" who would be provided with an "identity" as well as training to equip them to intervene in a problem situation.
"On the one-year-mark of the December 16 Delhi gang-rape incident, we plan to release an Android application equipped with SOS which can connect the girl not only to her family but also to people who can respond in under two minutes," Prukalpa told PTI.

With approximately a 20-core team based out of Hyderabad and three to five core volunteers in cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai, the organisation plans to rope in corporate employees in different cities as community watchers.

"We are also working on collaborations with other NGOs like Bhumi, Youth Ki Awaaz and Delhi Polite to drive our outreach," Prukalpa says.
The "Safe" campaign is part of the "Joy Of Giving Week" (JGW) a festival set to be held between October 2 - October 8 and which had first originated in the year 2009. In its fifth edition this year the festival "is in fact an idea to spread happiness among people by gifting, sharing anything materialistic and abstract."

It engages people by "acts of giving" to underprivileged, money, time, resources and skills and spans corporates, NGOs, celebrities, educational institutions etc.
The distinguishing factor of JGW is that it is a volunteer driven idea, with a bunch of core volunteers in each city or town who evangelise the idea, engage the media and promote the event.
Events like "Under the Stars" (UTS), "Compassionate Delhi", "Shadow a CEO" are some of the initiatives included in the JGW.