Students at High School North are raising funds to help educate women in India as well as to buy textbooks for impoverished schools, mostly in South India and Bombay slum areas. The fundraiser will be held at North on Saturday, April 30, from 6 to 8 p.m. The organizers include Hope Line Fashions, a non-profit organization, as well as student groups, STAND and SAASA. Highlights of the evening include a fashion show, a live performance by an Indian dance group, food, and merchandise for sale. Tickets are $5.
Aneesha Raghunathan, a senior at North, is the founder of Hope Line Fashions, established in 2009. During a vacation to India in July and August, 2009, she took sewing classes in a converted one-room garage with close to 20 women already working there. “The machines leaked oil all over the floor and a ditch ran through the outside of the place so it smelled really bad and attracted a lot of insects,” she says. “I also learned that many of the women there, including the ones who taught the classes and others who were learning the skill, were actually working in sweatshops, under horrible conditions, with bad lighting.”
Raghunathan got to know the women and became friends with them. “Most of them were only in their mid-20s, and I was upset at what they had to go through,” she says. “Many of them had so much talent and they were just wasting away in these sweatshops producing garments for large brand name companies that I once bought from back home. It’s sad because the only credit they get for their hard work is the ‘Made in India’ tag, other than that no one knows what they go through to make that shirt.”
Although Raghunathan designed the shirts, the women were the inspiration for them. “The shirts stand for what Hope Line Fashions stands for — empowering women and girls and helping them follow their dreams.” The shirts have words like Support Dreams, Empower a Girl, and Empower her World,” she says. “Around one-half of our proceeds go towards providing opportunities to the women who make the shirts so they can start their own clothing repair businesses and send their kids to school. The other half goes towards other projects like distributing textbooks and supplies to slum areas.”
Born in Connecticut, Raghunathan has lived in Plainsboro since first grade. Her father is a computer consultant and her mother is a housewife. She was first featured in The News, July 23, 2010.
The goal for the STAND for Hope fundraiser is to raise $1,000 to send girls to school in India, and stock impoverished schools with 1,000 books.
“This money will be enough to finish building a library in Kalighat, one of Hope Line’s specific projects, and to send at least 20 girls to school,” says Swetha Kodamasimham, a sophomore at High School North. Visit www.hopelinefashions.org or E-mail hopelinefashions@gmail.com for information about merchandise.
— Lynn Miller
Benefit Evening, Hope Line, High School North, 90 Grovers Mill Road, Plainsboro. Saturday, April 30, 6 p.m. 609-716-5100. www.hopelinefashions.org.
