Workshops
All ten modules in a room the women already know: a community hall in Baruipur near Kolkata, a training centre at a textile mill in Kolhapur, and online into Asansol. Taught in Bengali, Hindi and Marathi.
§ 01 · The format
Ten modules, in the language of the room.
In West Bengal, a workshop gathers fifty or more women in a space the community already trusts: a Self-Help Group hall, a livelihood room, a partner's premises. Together the cohort works through the ten modules of Knowing Your Money. The first sessions introduce the whole curriculum; what comes after is shaped around the room.
The room sets the language. In West Bengal Bengali is the working language with Hindi alongside it, and most facilitators move between the two in a sentence; in Kolhapur the whole workshop ran in Marathi. Each student gets the Knowing Your Money textbook in her own script and a notebook to track her own household.
In Bengal the work doesn't end when the modules do. Follow-up sessions, several of them over video call, return to whatever a cohort still needs, from opening an account in her own name to setting up UPI, with each woman's progress tracked along the way. Some students go on to facilitate the next cohort themselves.
Control · Protect · Grow. Every module belongs to one.
The ten modules are organised under three pillars: control, protect and grow. You cannot protect or grow what you do not yet command.
Modules that put a student in command of her own money: her name on the account, her notebook on the table, her wages negotiated up to what they are worth.
Modules that defend against loss: scams that target the careful saver, debt taken without understanding, and the emergency that arrives unannounced.
Modules that build wealth over time: the compounding habit, the safe place to keep what is saved, the first real investment, and the digital rails that carry it all.
§ 03 · The CRP Model
How the work travels, and stays.
Community Resource Person: student first, facilitator second.
The CRP Model (Community Resource Person) is the spine of how this work travels. A student completes the ten modules and then, if she wants to teach the next cohort, trains to facilitate it herself: deeper work on every module, and practice in front of a room in Bengali and Hindi before she leads one of her own.
She then returns to her own community, sometimes her own neighbourhood, and runs the workshop in a room that already knows her. A curriculum carried by an outside expert is one people listen to politely; carried by a neighbour, it's one they argue with, push back on, take home.
Several of the women who first sat in a cohort have gone on to teach others. The work stays in the community after the founder leaves the room.
§ 04 · In the room
The founder facilitating. Photos from the room.
We taught through activities, not lectures: counting out a month's spending in paper notes, arguing over which jar a rupee belonged in. Some women were shy at first; a few barely spoke for the first hour. By the end they were the ones correcting their neighbours, and the room ran itself. The modules give the work its bones; the women in the room give it its voice. The lesson, I learned, was never really the slides. It was the moment a woman realised she already knew more than she thought.
Rehaan Chowdhary, founder
§ 05 · What changed between cohorts
What each workshop taught the curriculum.
The curriculum has now been taught in Baruipur, at a mill in Kolhapur, and twice over video call. Between those rooms it changed in small ways: what landed, what needed more time, which examples a room recognised and which fell flat.
The pattern that holds: the budgeting work bites harder when it's run against a woman's lowest-earning month, not her average. So that is how it is now taught.
Kolhapur tested something else: whether the ten modules survive being taught to a group in one condensed sitting rather than spread over follow-up. They mostly do, but the emergency-fund and debt work wants more room than a single day gives it, and a workplace cohort arrives with a regular wage and a payslip, which changes where the budgeting module starts.
What's still being worked out is mostly sequence and length: the order of the digital-money and scam-shield modules, and how much time the emergency-fund worksheet really needs. The curriculum is fixed in its spine and porous at its surface. We re-edit between workshops, not during them.
§ 06 · Partnership
The institutions that make the workshops possible.
In West Bengal, none of this happens without Bandhan-Konnagar. The NGO brings the halls, the relationships on the ground, and the trust that lets a workshop open its doors with a cohort already in the room. Bandhan Bank Ltd supports the work behind it. The partnership is in its second year, with the current cohort still in follow-up.
In Maharashtra, Indo Count Industries hosted the work inside its own business: its training centre, its staff, and the women it employs, released from the floor to sit the curriculum. Shristi Corp opened the same kind of door into Asansol, and FEED, a grassroots nonprofit in the same city, opened a very different one.
The Prosperity Project brings the curriculum, the facilitator training, the textbook, and the design that holds it all together. A company and a nonprofit want different things from a workshop, and the same ten modules have gone into both. Where it extends next is being worked out now.