Women’s Month: NPO director promotes equality and empowerment

MORNINGSIDE resident, Michelle Chetty, director of the non-profit organisation Epic Youth Matters, is passionate about empowering Durban youth and feels it’s what she was born to do.

According to Chetty, having a low self-esteem as a child after being diagnosed with type one diabetes when she was eight years old and being involved in a car accident a year later drastically affected her life.

“One day I fainted at home when my sugar level was so high and an emergency doctor was called in and tested my blood and found out I was ill. All of this led to me having a low self-esteem because I was very skinny before that and I started putting on some weight. I was a chubby teenager and during the accident, I dislocated my jaw. That made me feel ugly for years as a teenager and my adult life,” she said.

Through those experiences, Chetty said she has learned to love herself through a whole lot of people who were part of her circle who helped her in her journey.

“I have accepted that I am beautiful and there is nothing wrong with me, whether I am fat or thin or whatever my face shape is, I am beautiful. I have realised that I need to let the girls believe in themselves to know how beautiful they are,” she said.

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“This organisation was founded in 2008 and it was started to meet the needs of young people. We found that there are very few organisations catering for young people’s needs, those who serve youth as their leaders and youth workers,” she said.

She said as the organisation developed, they had also taken on gender-based violence and one of their key programmes is their orientation programme for schools. They also run the YWOMB programme (Young Woman of Magnificent of Beauty) and YMO (Young Men of Honour) because over the years as children started to trust them, they began to share their stories with them and they discovered that more than 85% of the girls at schools had been abused at some point in their lives.

She said the aim of the programmes is to heal, restore and empower young women.

“Because we can’t prevent a young woman from being raped, we started a programme for boys aimed at healing, restoring and empowering because our boys need healing too, and they also need to be prevented from being the perpetrators of abuse,” she said.

When asked about the progress on gender equality she has seen in her life, she said, “My dad did teach me to become a person who sought justice but I did see little things, the way my mom and dad behaved towards each other, the males and females have their roles. I learned things about who I am as a woman. I started doing studies in the Bible about who women are, we are created equal to men,” she said.

She said her work started when she volunteered at a non-profit organisation in Chatsworth.

“I spoke to my dad about it and he said I won’t earn money from this however if that was going to make me happy then I should do what I wanted to. I then applied to become full-time staff, had to raise my funds and find a car. Those things came in time and I was part of that organisation for 10 years,” she said.

When asked about her message to women for this Women’s Day, she said women need to be treated equally every day of the year.

“We need to change the way we teach children in church, youth groups and at schools. Mothers should also teach their boys to wash the dishes, do laundry, and cook because we live in a society where women and men are working in a home so, therefore, chores need to be shared equally. This is how you can start grooming your boys to start respecting women,” she said.