Newsletter - women's centre in India

Project         Newsletter

Organisation    Saheli Women’s Resource Centre

Goal            Inform & educate client with latest news and advice

Audience        Supporters, clients & others

Format        Newsletter
Low cost, black & white

Frequency        Bi-monthly, since 1993

Sustaining a regular newsletter for 25 years entirely on voluntary effort is not easy. There is much to learn from the experience of this small women’s group.

Saheli Women’s Resource Centre is a New Delhi-based autonomous women’s organisation working for the past 25 years on women’s rights. It is non-funded and runs entirely on personal donations from supportive individuals. It has functioned as both a crisis centre and a campaign group. It brings out a quarterly newsletter to which people can subscribe.

Saheli’s newsletter is a very important vehicle of communication. Particularly because it runs on individual support, the newsletter keeps supporters informed about campaigns and activities. From reproductive health issues to domestic violence, from sexuality minority rights to economic policy, the Saheli Newsletter covers diverse and often difficult terrain. A critique of reproductive technologies, for example, needs to be presented in a simple, concise and jargon-free manner, one that would allow ordinary women to make meaning of their experiences with medical care in the light of the larger politics of the drug and medical industry.

The fact that Saheli works as a non-hierarchical women’s collective is both a strength and challenge as far as bringing out a time-bound publication is concerned. Communication in the absence of a formal structure can be a nightmare. The group maintains a Daily Diary where volunteers log the day’s events. It not only helps the group to understand what works and what doesn’t work, it’s also a piece of historical documentation. Writers by-lines are not included as a matter of editorial policy since this would “fail to acknowledge the inputs of others into the newsletter – be it to type, translate, proof, edit or even post the newsletters.” (Saheli:”25 Years of Continuity and Change”; August 2006)

The early issues of the newsletter tended to be text-heavy. Group discussions and study circles however brought a rich quality of intellectual rigor to the articles. In later years, the newsletter experimented with design changes, incorporated a more humorous style and used cartoons to pack a punch. In terms of content too, changes were brought in. Based on internal and external feedback, more issues began to be covered. The Saheli Newsletter continues to have wide outreach and relevance.