Focus area of work: Grassroots legal empowerment of Adivasi, Dalit, and other marginalised communities
Operational in: Madhya Pradesh
Project: Website | https://zenithsociety.in/
Justice is a fuzzy area for the historically marginalised and oppressed. Often, it so happens that among the many basic rights to be fought for and won by these communities, legal justice falls through the cracks. Obtaining justice is a cumbersome, often herculean, task even for the most privileged. For marginalised communities, it is weighed down by so many other factors, from awareness to access to the right resources. This is where organisations like Zenith Society for Socio-Legal Empowerment step in.
This young and vibrant organisation helps the Adivasi, Dalit, and other marginalised communities in the Chambal-Gwalior region of Madhya Pradesh understand their legal rights better, and work towards social change. Co-founded by lawyers Abhay and Swapnil, Zenith focuses on deep work within the communities, especially in providing them with access to justice. The organisation buzzes with the energy and commitment of young lawyers, community members and other volunteers. Zenith also runs legal aid clinics and community centres in Shivpuri, Gwalior and Malanpur.
The Problem Statement
In June 2023, Swapnil reached out to aikyam fellows through our forum, looking for help with building a website. They wanted to showcase their projects and build visibility for the scalable model of legal clinics for communities. They planned to build this model by engaging law students from legal aid cells as volunteers to decode local issues and communicate with stakeholders and communities.
“We know the impact of the work we have been doing but our approach to sharing it with others was mostly, oral storytelling,” says Swapnil. “Being a grassroots organisation for so many years, we were in that classic trap of being fully involved in the operations and the doing of things, and not being able to think beyond that, in terms of how to tell our story. Creating the website was an exercise that was very much warranted from our end. We were facing major roadblocks in this journey. For us, your team really came in at the right time.”
How We Went About It
The team at Zenith already had a clear idea of the content that they wanted to put out. “The challenge for us was in designing what we wanted,” explains Swapnil. “That is obviously separate from the services that you provide, that is, developing the website. We had the initial conversations about having an online presence, but the template that was suggested didn't really work for us. We then went back to the table internally, and had a designer in place who helped us with designing what we really wanted.”
It was only then that Zenith reached out to the aikyam team once again to lay out a clear structure of what they were expecting. Being a young organisation strapped for funds, one of the important considerations for the team at Zenith was that the website should be hosted for free. Our aikyam fellows Megha, Jinso, Aysha and Lily developed the website using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Tailwind CSS, hosting it for free on GitHub Pages. The website went live by the end of June 2023.
Impact
“We were meeting a lot of good people, philanthropies, funders, interns... and the one thing they would ask for would be how can we read more about your work, or know more about what you do,” says Swapnil. This was a real challenge for the organisation before the website came up. “We would send in our internal documents and that would be an exercise in itself. But after the website was in place, we had a digital presence and we could send people a link to check out our work. In that sense, for internships, for funders, for people who want to collaborate with us, sending our website link makes it fairly easy for them to understand what we are doing.
Update: The Zenith team is considering moving to a dynamic platform for their website in order to post regular updates about their work.
