Jayanthi Ramanan has always been passionate about girl children and the importance of educating them, so their voices can be heard.
As a college student in Madurai, she had worked with children living in slums, offering them lessons in health and hygiene, emphasizing handwashing before and after eating, and informing them about the dangers and health hazards of public defecation.
Jayanthi spearheaded the mass vaccination camps against polio, whooping cough, diphtheria, and smallpox.
Later, in Canada, along with her children and her spouse, she served the elderly at nursing homes, offering support and care to those with mental health issues like dementia and Alzheimer’s, as well as to those who had little or no family support.
In Cleveland, United States, Jayanthi worked with the local police on a program called DARE(Drug Abuse Resistance Education), heading the education on drug related problems. She also helped immigrants from around the world teaching English as a second language, so they could assimilate themselves with the American societies and workplaces. She was also a mentor at inner-city schools and detention centers focusing on the importance of education in escapingpoverty.
Jayanthi has volunteered at teen centers where she took care of children of teen mothers, so that the young mothers could attend school and have better opportunities to make a living and succeed in life. She tutored Hispanic and African American children, along with her spouse Ram, in their home for many years.
Planned Parenthood was another place where Jayanthi spent her time in counseling.
In 2013 she decided to venture out and seek opportunities for service in India. She spent six months going through every slum and every government school in Bangalore (Bengaluru) to study and understand why girls were not attending school.The primary reason was a lack of toilets in the schools.They were getting trafficked or abused in the afternoons when they were alone at home while their parents worked for day wages as brick layers and construction workers.Many were sent to work in homes as domestic help, without the parents’ consent.
In 2014, her project to build toilets in schools began with a single donation.Today, she has built over 560 toilets and enabled 38,000 girls to go to school in Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Rajasthan, and the Northeast States. She is currently exploring toilet installation in more states across India. Her dream is to get one million girls in school by 2030.
Jayanthi believes “kindness is the highest form of intelligence,” and lives by that principle.
Along with the toilet program, Jayanthi started distributing reusable cloth napkins that are both eco-friendly and biodegradable, and safe for the girl children. She also has put in place self-defense programs for the girls to boost their confidence and create a better system to fight against anyone who behaves improperly.Women have been taught to stitch the sanitary napkins and distribute them locally creating a sustainable income stream.
Jayanthi has worked to implement a multi-tier program for COVID affected families, starting from tailoring to beautician programs, massage therapy, childcare, elderly care, hospital maintenance, back-office work, and front office management programs.