V-Day Annual Report 2016 - ONE BILLION RISING: RISE FOR REVOLUTION 1 | Page 52

EQUALITY LABS (USA/INDIA)
From hiring their first two staff members, to training 225 Dalit women and LGBTQ activists
in seven Indian cities in social media, online and offline security measures, messaging
and campaigning, to creating massive awareness for Dalit History Month, Equality Lab’s
Dalit Women Fight effort, led by a team of Dalit women throughout India with Brooklyn
and Berkeley based Thenmozhi Soundararajan at the helm, is creating massive awareness
and bringing the stories of Dalit women front and center. The work has had great results,
generating over 2 million impressions for Dalit History Month and building a partnership
with a Dalit Queer Legal Scholar at UC Berkeley and UCLA who is looking at how to
deconstruct the many bodies vulnerable under Brahmin cis-patriarchy. It was a great
launching point for their work on sexual violence. Equality Labs also stopped a frightening
Hindu fundamentalist campaign in California with the goal of erasing Dalits and religious
cultural minorities from California textbooks. Over the course of three weeks, via delivered
opinion pieces and investigative reports, their efforts got coverage in The New York Times,
Salon and NBC, and hundreds of Dalit, Muslim, Sikh, Ravidassi and Buddhist families were
activated to overturn the fundamentalist agenda. Thanks to the work of Equality Labs and
these individuals, Dalits and other cultural minorities are represented in the curriculum.