Circle of Sisterhood Embraces Sambhali College Students

by Carlea Bauman

A U.S. charity whose donors are comprised of college-educated American women and their supporters who deeply understand the value of education has awarded a $10,000 grant to Sambhali U.S. The grant will enable women in Sambhali’s boarding home program to pursue their own post-secondary educations.

Some of the college students at Sambhali's Abhayasthali Boarding Home

The Circle of Sisterhood Foundation is a community of sorority women who are dedicated to removing educational barriers for girls and women facing poverty and oppression. Each year, they award ten organizations with grants up to $10,000 each.

Circle of Sisterhood’s statement of purpose is a perfect match for Sambhali’s work:

For too many girls and women around the world, access to quality education is often limited. Two-thirds of all illiterate adults in the world are women, and not even seven percent of the world’s population has a college education. Education can equip all of us to challenge many of the global issues impacting women – poverty, oppression, misogyny, brutality. Ultimately, more and more educated girls will mean stronger and healthier villages, communities, and entire countries. And education will eradicate poverty.

Quality schooling can serve as an emancipator from poverty and lead to a better life for a woman and her family. The Circle of Sisterhood exists today to help make that better life possible by removing barriers to education and creating sustainable change for girls and women around the globe.

Sambhali U.S. submitted a grant request to fund the Abhayasthali Boarding Home, which Sambhali established in 2021 to enable girls who had graduated from secondary school while living in the Sheerni Boarding home to go on to college. The Abhayasthali program currently supports 10 women working toward their bachelor’s or master’s degrees. It pays for their tuition, books, school supplies, clothes, food, transportation, healthcare, hygiene supplies, and cultural programming. The $10,000 grant will fund 90 percent of the total cost to run the program over one year.

Abhayasthali provides comprehensive services to enable college students to enroll and thrive in college and find employment. As explained in the grant submission, “Abhayasthali offers the only viable opportunity for these young women to attend college and to avoid early marriage. The idea of young women living on their own…is so far outside of cultural norms that even if the students could arrange and finance this option, they would face enormous social pressure from their families and their communities to return to their villages and be married.”

When the trustees at the Circle of Sisterhood reviewed the grant, it was clear to them that this was a program the organization wanted to support. “Sambhali’s commitment to supporting this cohort of young women beyond their high school graduation is compelling. Supporting a proven, comprehensive program that addresses the myriad challenges facing young women from Rajasthan as they pursue their education was an easy decision,” stated Ginny Carroll, Founder and Executive Director of the Circle of Sisterhood Foundation.

Ginny Carroll, Founder and Executive Director of the Circle of Sisterhood Foundation

Sambhali U.S. volunteers Adelia Gray, Lynn Broadbent, Susan Olsen, and Shereen Arent saw a natural fit between Sambhali U.S. and the Circle of Sisterhood Foundation. Working together as part of the Sambhali U.S. Foundations Team, they completed the application, which required great attention to detail and a comprehensive understanding of the grant funding process.

Sambhali U.S. President Shereen Arent reflected on the beauty and the power of the two groups of college women: “We’re so grateful to Circle of Sisterhood for their ongoing dedication to the education of women and girls and for extending their circle to the women of Abhayasthali. When the students at Abhayasthali were young girls, they bravely ventured away from their village for the hope of a better education, but few dreamed that one day they would be the first women in their families to go to college, let alone graduate school. And they certainly never dreamed girls growing up at the same time on the other side of the world would someday be extending their sisterhood across the many miles.”