Women Empowerment

• Empowering women through Promotion and development of traditional arts, handicraft and textile weaving.
• Bringing Corporate social responsibility funding for AAF Resource Center.
• AAF Resource center to train the Master Artisans of different clusters.

Vision:

AAF is a social business venture committed to the promotion of a just and equitable society and to the goal of enabling individuals to live a life of dignity and respect.

Mission:

AAF will develop goods, services, and markets to promote sustainable livelihoods for those in need and will invest in other development organizations that advance human rights for all—particularly women and children.

Objectives of AAF:

1. To focus on empowering rural communities, especially women, by mobilizing them to be active stakeholders in the process of improving the quality of their lives 
2. AAF initiative is to highlight traditional skills, crafts, and lifestyles of local tribes across India and help them use their age-old tradition to earn a sustainable livelihood, empowering them not only financially, but also bringing them a new status in their families, and therefore, in their communities through promotion and development of traditional arts, handicraft and textile weaving.
3. To promote the dignity of life through financial and physical security for all, especially women and children, and provide a service that ends poverty and empowers women artisan entrepreneurs.
4. To allows the artisans to become independent entrepreneurs, having the possibility to decide where and when they want to work.
5. To provide them with market linkages. We will market our products globally as well as domestically. For global sales in beginning we can use our contact and later on we can infuse capital for further growth depending upon the scale.
6. AAF will aim at safe-guarding the independence of local markets simultaneously providing local artisans opportunities to benefit from the market opening instead of becoming a victim of the emerging market imperative.
7. To provide training with design inputs from the help of designers for the artisans, if needed, on how to homogenize their products so that they may be marketed and sold in the international market. Next, the artisans take their skills home and are able to look after their family and house while earning a living.
8. Majority of our employees will be women and for that we can have a threshold % as well. It will help us to understand the sentiments and emotions of the artisans and can directly reach every corners of the cluster.
9. Expanding Women’s Access to Financial Services will be focused. Women entrepreneurs and employers face significantly greater challenges than men in gaining access to financial services. Access to credit can open up economic opportunities for women, and bank accounts can be a gateway to the use of additional financial services.
10. The future steps for AAF –initiatives is to keep engaging more and more vulnerable communities in the initiative as well as engaging those artisans, who due to their age are not able to produce anymore, as shareholders of the AAF -initiative. This ensures that the–artisans have financial security for the rest of their life.
11. Creating AAF Resource center.

AAF  business initiative mobilizes rural artisans who are located in various different clusters across India, each of the clusters are managed by state partners and local Master Artisans, to help them earn sustainable livelihoods thus preventing the rampant unsafe migration in the region and therefore makes people less vulnerable for human trafficking. Making them independent and financially secure which contribute to their self-esteem and improved the quality of life of their entire family is our motive. 

But this initiative imposes challenges, as lot of time and resources are required for designers to travel from cluster to cluster to provide training. AAF seeks to create Resource Centres, a hub to train the Master Artisans of different clusters across India to ensure the high quality of the products. Also, the wholesale buyers can collaborate directly with the AAF’s designers and artisans to ensure fullest satisfaction to the specific requirements. The resources saved by establishing the AAF Resource Centre will be directed to engage more artisans to the business initiative.

AAF recognizes that our business activities have direct and indirect impacts on the societies in which we operate. We endeavour to manage these in a responsible manner, believing that sound and demonstrable performance in relation to corporate social responsibility policies and practices is a fundamental part of not only business success but as well as societal benefits at large.

So CSR fund to be used for AAF Resource Centre would strategically benefit the company as it increases public relations and brand image, achieve CSR goals and also provides its multi-purpose facilities for business conferences, corporate events, official accommodations and employee trainings and many more.

We would like you to be a part of this humanitarian venture and would be grateful of the support from your company.