Siddhi Vinayak🌸
Our Story · 2006
How one mother's resolve became a foundation
In 2006, when nobody around her was speaking of women's welfare, Gira Panchal decided somebody must.
Read the story →What we did, who she became, and what nearly twenty years have taught us.
In 2006, when nobody around her was speaking of women's welfare, Gira Panchal decided somebody must.
Read the story →We packed up our seminars and took them where they were needed most — government schools across the villages.
Read the story →Festivals are not a break from empowerment work. Done right, they are empowerment work.
Read the story →In 2006, conversations about women's wellness, protection and self-reliance were rare in our community. There were no local programs, no seminars, no one asking what women needed. Gira Panchal — a mother — noticed that silence.
Being a mother made it personal. She understood that a woman carries a family's health, its values, its future — and that nobody was carrying her. So she founded Siddhi Vinayak Foundation with a simple, radical idea for its time: women and girls deserve dedicated attention — wellness, protection, spirituality, and the ability to stand on their own feet.
What began with one resolve has reached over 1,000 women and girls across nearly twenty years. And the belief at the centre has never changed: when a woman rises, she lifts a family. When a thousand rise, they lift a society.
Some children will never come to a seminar in the city. So in 2014 and 2015, we went to them.
Travelling village to village, we ran education and awareness programs inside government schools — reaching around 500 children who would otherwise never have heard anyone speak about protection, wellness, or their own worth. Village girls especially rarely hear that their safety and education matter; we made sure they heard it clearly.
Those two years taught us something we've kept ever since: don't wait for people to reach you. Go to them. It remains the most important travel we've ever done.
Every year, we celebrate Gauri Vrat and other women's festivals together with our community — and people sometimes ask why a welfare foundation spends time on festivals.
Here is why: sisterhood is infrastructure. When women gather in joy — singing, fasting, celebrating side by side — they build the bonds they will lean on in harder times. A woman who knows a hundred sisters is safer, stronger and more confident than one who stands alone. Culture and spirituality are not decoration on top of our work; they are the soil it grows in.
So we celebrate, deliberately and together. Empowerment that has no joy in it doesn't last. Ours does.