Safe spaces after trafficking: what Ekaimpact funded, and what it bought
Leaving is not the end of it.
That is the part most people never hear. A young woman comes out of a trafficking situation and the story, as it is usually told, stops there. What actually begins is a long stretch where she has no money, often no documents, sometimes no family willing to take her back, and a community that has already decided what it thinks of her.
Impact and Dialogue Foundation works in that stretch. Ekaimpact's community funded ₹3,07,800 of it.
Why the founder stopped trusting rescue on its own?
She did the rescues first. More than a decade of them, much of it undercover.
What changed her mind was watching what happened next. Her account, to our community, is blunt: you rescue someone, she goes to a shelter home, she is sent back home, and she is trafficked again. Back to the same place. In her words, go looking in the same place a while later and she will be back there.
So the organisation she started in early 2021 was built around the opposite instinct. It spends very little of its money on rescue. It spends it on the thing that makes rescue unnecessary: going into the villages people are trafficked from, finding out what work could actually pay there, and setting that up.
That is an unusual thing for a funder to be told by a founder. Most pitches claim the dramatic work. This one explains why the dramatic work is the part she has stopped putting donations into.
What the money actually bought?
Ninety-six per cent of it went on food.
Where the grant went? | Share |
Monthly food expenses | 96% |
Miscellaneous | 4% |
Those are the two line items, in the fund utilisation report's own words. We are not going to dress the 4% up as something more impressive. It says miscellaneous, so we say miscellaneous.
Here is the figure that makes it concrete. Presenting to our community, the foundation's founder put the cost of keeping one person in a safe space at about ₹3,000 a month, and in that ₹3,000, she said, sits everything: meals, accommodation, training.
And here is why food can be almost the whole line. The building costs them nothing. The young women in Assam are housed in the convent school the founder herself attended, given free. A residential programme normally has to pay rent, and in this one that cost has been given away. That is not a saving a funder can take credit for. It is the reason a grant this size stretches to four months of meals instead of a few weeks of overheads.
Food being almost the whole line surprises people who expect counselling or legal aid to dominate. It should not. Somewhere safe to sleep and enough to eat is the precondition for all of it. You cannot do trauma therapy with someone who is hungry, and you cannot teach a skill to someone who is deciding whether to go back.
How the grant was actually assembled?
It did not arrive in one piece, and the record is clearer if we say so.
About ₹2.5 lakhs went in first. The foundation then came back to our community on an impact call and presented again at our fifth Conclave, and the remainder was collected over the months that followed, bringing the grant to ₹3,07,800, which is the figure in the fund utilisation report and the figure we publish.
This matters for one reason. If you watch the fifth-Conclave recording, you will hear the support described as covering about two months. The report says four. Both are right. She was describing the money that had reached her by the time she was speaking; the report accounts for the whole assembled grant. We have left both recordings up rather than quietly picking the bigger number.
The 24 is likewise a consolidated figure across the whole grant, not one round's intake.
Why it is built this way?
Most funding pages explain what an organisation does. Rather less often does anyone explain why it is shaped the way it is. Presenting to our community, the founder answered the questions donors usually only think.
"Why so few? Why not take more?"
She raises it herself, which is the opposite of how organisations usually present scale. They cannot take more. The residents arrive from extreme hardship and need daily attention; there is an issue of some kind most days, and the team is small. Taking more would mean keeping none of them properly.
"Why skills rather than school?"
Twelve or thirteen years of schooling, and at the end of it many still do not find work, and some are trafficked or migrate anyway. Skills convert into income faster, and income is what makes going back unnecessary.
Why not teach baking?
Because in the places this work happens, people do not have two square meals a day. Who buys the cakes?
Why a residential safe space rather than a day centre?
This is the answer worth sitting with. They tried the obvious thing first, and it failed. They set up centres in the villages themselves, which is what everyone recommends. Attendance stopped after about a month. When they went back to find out why, there were two reasons: a constant threat hanging over the women who came, and the near-certainty that traffickers' families would go after anyone who was seen attending. The residential safe space was not a strategy. It is what was left after the obvious thing did not work.
Why not use government shelters?
Because all categories of survivor are housed together and cannot be separated, which affects everyone in the building.
None of those answers appear in a budget. All of them explain the budget.
What the money makes possible?
The meals are not the point. They are what makes the point possible.
One young woman arrived waking from nightmares, screaming, and barely spoke for months. She is now taking part in group sessions and, the staff say, has started smiling again. That is not a metric anybody reports. It is most of the first six months of recovery.
Another could not speak at all when she arrived. She now works in a local garment shop.
The training runs to tailoring, stitching, computer literacy and handicrafts, and the test applied to all of it is whether it converts into income. As the founder put it in her own pitch, there is no point teaching a skill that only produces a certificate.
One young woman described what that did for her:
> "When I stitch something that someone else wears, I feel like I exist again."
Another, now earning from her stitching:
> "This work is not just a job. It's my proof that I've survived."
Then peer support, which donors tend to skip and residents tend to name first. One described the safe space simply as:
> "the only place I don't feel judged."
And reintegration, on the resident's own terms where she wants it. One young woman had taught children in her own community before, and was told afterwards that she was no longer fit to. With the foundation's help she tutors again, which returned both the income and the standing. Another, shunned by neighbours and barred from houses she had grown up visiting, now attends community events as a speaker. One who had been held in domestic servitude now helps run peer training for new arrivals.
As one of the foundation's staff put it: "This is not just a shelter. It is where healing begins."
What a year there is meant to lead to?
The safe space is not open-ended. It runs as a residential course of about a year, with a plan attached to each resident rather than a bed and good intentions.
What happens at the end of it is the part worth knowing, because it is where a donation turns into equipment somebody owns. On finishing, a resident is given a machine of her own and a certificate, and the organisation introduces her to buyers or marketplaces. The sewing machine is the whole point: a certificate without a machine means going home to look for work with nothing in her hands, and a machine without buyers means a skill with no market. They try to hand over all three.
There is a ladder above that, too. One woman who came out of bonded labour at a brick kiln now runs a centre of her own and is training five others, paid a stipend by the foundation to do it. That is the outcome the programme is actually aiming at, and it is rarer than any funder's report makes it sound.
And the route is the resident's own to choose. Several have gone the formal-education way instead: nursing, coding, graphic design, digital marketing, with sponsors paying either the organisation or the college directly. The founder is firm that nobody is pushed: you cannot make someone study, and a programme that tries produces dropouts rather than graduates.
Free help that cannot be used!
This is the section we would most want a donor to read, because it is the one that changed how we think.
Offers of free help arrive constantly, and a surprising share of them cannot be taken up.
A national design institute offered to train the young women at no cost, in Kolkata. They cannot go. Their families will not agree to the distance, and the distance is itself the risk the programme exists to manage. A free course in the wrong city is not a free course.
A stitching centre inside a donated school building had to be given up, because getting there and back cost residents about ₹200. Nobody had ₹200. The foundation moved to a nearer space at a nominal rent, and paying rent was the cheaper option.
"Why not teach them tech?" comes up at almost every table. The honest blocker is not aptitude or curriculum. It is electricity first, then internet, then the floods that take out both. The obstacle sits two layers below the one the suggestion assumes.
Pro bono lawyers do appear, and most waive their fees. Several have still had to ask for travel costs, because drafting a victim-compensation claim and attending hearings consumes days. Free advice with unfunded travel attached does not quite get someone into court.
The pattern is the same each time: the offer is real, the generosity is real, and the thing that stops it is small, unglamorous and nobody's line item. We have started asking partners what free help they have had to turn down. It tells you more about an organisation's constraints than its budget does.
They check whether the skill pays before they teach it(H2)
Before starting a livelihood in any community, the foundation maps whether it will actually earn there. Her reasoning, in her own words, is that starting something at random which brings in no income is simply a waste of resources, money and effort.
It is the plainest statement of diligence we have heard from a partner, and it is applied in the direction that is usually skipped: not whether the training is well run, but whether anyone will buy what it produces.
In one state that produced a spice vending machine. Residents grind and sell their own masala through it, under their own name, rather than being paid piece by piece by somebody else. The foundation is now working out the food-safety registration so the packets can be sold properly.
The part that is not a safe space at all?
The foundation's own view is that getting someone out is not the main event, and neither is what follows it. Prevention is.
So alongside the safe spaces there are village response committees, outreach in the communities people are trafficked from, and volunteers watching railway stations. Children have been stopped before they travelled. The founder's framing is that preventing trafficking cannot be done by social workers alone. It has to be a movement, or it does not work.
That shift shows up in who now asks for help. The organisation began by supporting people after the fact. Communities now approach it asking that young women at risk, who have not been trafficked at all, be taken into the programme. Being funded consistently enough to build those relationships is what made that possible.
What they are up against?
Stigma, from the community and sometimes from their own families
Discrimination in housing, in work, and in ordinary shops
Language, for women trafficked far from where they grew up
No legal identity: no documents, so no bank account, no scheme, no job
Without somewhere to go, people are trafficked again. Not through carelessness. Because the alternative on offer was nothing.
Two things sit underneath all of it, and neither is in a budget.
The money the state provides arrives slowly, and in pieces. Where survivors have received victim compensation, the founder's account is that a part is paid out and the balance is held in a fixed deposit released years later. Set against that, earning something now is not a preference. It is the only liquidity anybody has.
The work is done under ongoing threat. The founder does not disclose where she is travelling, and a partner organisation in the source area oversees one of the cohorts precisely because her presence would draw attention to it. We mention this not for drama, since she declined to describe most of it and we have not repeated the parts she did, but because it is a real operating cost that no grant line names.
The regional point matters here too, in the founder's words: what is taught in one state cannot simply be taught in another. The drivers differ, the markets differ, and an intervention designed nationally fits nowhere in particular.
What ₹3,07,800 across 24 people actually means?
A little over ₹12,800 each, for four months. Roughly ₹3,200 a month, or a bit over ₹100 a day.
That lands within a few per cent of the ₹3,000 a month the founder quoted, which is the sort of agreement between a budget line and a bank transfer that is worth noticing.
Hold that ₹100 a day against one figure from her own account of the communities this work happens in: a woman she knows was earning ₹100 for ten days of plucking water lilies. The same hundred rupees, with a decimal point moved by an order of magnitude. That is the gap a safe space is sitting inside, and it is why the arithmetic of a grant like this looks so unlike the arithmetic of a city.
It is also worth being precise about what the 24 is. Our per-partner figures are proportional attributions, not head counts: the grant divided by the total verified project cost, multiplied by total beneficiaries. So 24 means our share of a larger programme, not twenty-four people we can individually point to.
Two different sets of numbers, kept apart. What we publish is what our grant is attributed to, at the safe space we funded, in Assam. The foundation itself is larger than that. It runs safe spaces in more than one state, a bridge school for several hundred children, and has its own totals for everything it does. Where those appear in our material they are labelled as theirs. Quoting an organisation's whole reach beside your own grant is the easiest way for a funder to overstate what it did.
And our grant paid for food. The training, the counselling, the prevention work are the wider programme, funded by others too.
₹3,07,800 paid for 24 young women. That grant is spent. A later round is running now, for a different group in a different year, and it gets its own accounting rather than being folded into this one. We claim the number we can trace.
Who vouched for them?
At our first Conclave, in February 2024, the case for this organisation was made by Dr P. M. Nair, an IPS officer of thirty-five years, with a doctorate in victimology, senior service in the CBI and the CRPF, who retired as Director General of the National Disaster Response Force and went on to a chair professorship at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. He is widely described as a founding figure of India's anti-trafficking movement.
His argument was not about this organisation's paperwork. It was that money reliably reaches organisations that already have money, while people doing the work on the ground go unfunded, and that the amount being asked for here was very small against what it would do.
How the funding decision gets made?
Ekaimpact does not decide this on its own.
Shortlisted organisations present to the Ekaimpact Conclave, and members with voting rights decide where the money goes. The people voting have the diligence pack in front of them when they do it.
A grant that clears a room of people who have each read the accounts is a different kind of signal from one that clears a single desk.
How we verified it?
Our diligence for this grant was documentary: registration, 12A and 80G, audited accounts, governance and board review, past impact reports, and the fund utilisation reporting that followed.
One detail from the foundation's own reporting we thought worth repeating: it withholds photographs where consent was not given, and says so on the page. Most organisations do not bother.
What they need next(H2)
A design and skilling centre with industrial machines rather than domestic ones. The difference is employability: a woman trained on an industrial machine can take a job in a garment unit; one trained on a household machine mostly cannot.
Branding and marketing support, so what residents make can be photographed, packaged and sold under one identity. Making something saleable and being able to sell it are different problems, and the second rarely gets funded.
Peer mentor training, so graduates can run outreach and support new arrivals. Several already do it informally.
One thing you can do that costs nothing
The founder's own ask of rooms like ours is not for money. It is to find out who made what you buy.
She has visited forced labour in diamond cutting, in brick kilns and in garment manufacturing, and her point to an audience of consumers is that the supply chains run through all of us whether we look or not. Checking before you buy is a smaller act than giving, and she rates it higher.
Thank You !
To everyone who gave through Ekaimpact for this: what you funded was food, safety and four months of ordinary days. That is not the version that makes a good photograph, and it is the version that makes everything after it possible.
Want to learn more
Project Sahay on Ekaimpact https://app.ekaimpact.org/programs/impactdialogue : the programme page, with the budget, what a contribution funds, the reporting you receive and the tax exemption details
More NGO stories/blog: what the other organisations in the portfolio do, and what each grant bought
If you are deciding where to give
Ekaimpact is a Section 8 non-profit registered in Bengaluru, working with vetted NGOs across India. Every partner is checked for registration, compliance and outcome reporting before any money moves, and we publish what we funded rather than what the organisation reached in total.
If you would rather see the reporting before you give than after, ask us and we will show you a partner's last fund utilisation statement. It is the most useful thing we can put in front of you and it costs nothing to look.
Frequently asked questions
What did Ekaimpact's grant to Impact and Dialogue Foundation pay for?
₹3,07,800, of which 96% went on monthly food expenses and 4% on miscellaneous costs, according to the fund utilisation report. It covered four months of daily meals at a residential safe space in Assam.
Why did almost all of it go on food?
Because the building was sponsored. The young women in Assam are housed in the convent school the founder attended, donated at no cost. Rent is normally the largest line in a residential programme, so a grant that would otherwise have gone on overheads goes on meals instead.
How much is that per person?
A little over ₹12,800 each for four months, which is roughly ₹3,200 a month or a bit over ₹100 a day to feed one person living in a safe space. That is within a few per cent of the ₹3,000 a month the foundation's founder quoted to our community.
How many people did the grant support?
It is attributed to 24 young women, consolidated across the whole grant rather than a single round. That is a proportional attribution rather than a head count: the grant divided by the total verified project cost, multiplied by total beneficiaries. It represents a share of a larger programme that other funders also support.
Was the grant given all at once?
No. About ₹2.5 lakhs went first, and the remainder was collected over the months after the foundation presented again to our community, bringing the total to ₹3,07,800.
What does a resident leave with?
A machine of her own, a certificate, and an introduction to buyers or marketplaces, at the end of a residential course of about a year. Some choose formal education instead: nursing, coding, design, with sponsors paying the college directly.
Is 24 the number of people Impact and Dialogue Foundation helps?
No. 24 is what Ekaimpact's grant is attributed to. The organisation is considerably larger and publishes its own totals for everything it runs. We keep the two apart deliberately, because quoting an organisation's overall reach next to your own grant is the easiest way for a funder to overstate what it did.
Who decides which organisations Ekaimpact funds?
Shortlisted organisations present to the Ekaimpact Conclave, and members with voting rights decide where the money goes, with the diligence pack in front of them.
Sources: Impact and Dialogue Foundation's fund utilisation report to Ekaimpact for this grant, from which the 96% and 4% figures and the four-month period are taken; and the foundation's own presentations to the Ekaimpact Conclave, recorded on our channel: Dr P. M. Nair on the organisation's workhttps://youtu.be/-xZkvHVMomg, the first Conclave pitchhttps://youtu.be/hC_9gf0KqSk and the questions that followedhttps://youtu.be/Ml8Sgju1vgM, the fifth Conclave pitchhttps://youtu.be/jU_z4ky4stg, and the impact callhttps://youtu.be/Fbw0BenKFXA.
*No names, ages or locations are given, to protect the privacy of the young women in the programme.
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