Breaking Barriers, Maximizing Potential

EquiBeing foundation is a public charitable trust formed with the vision to enable persons with disabilities to maximize their potential. We dream of a world that treats Persons with Disabilities with dignity and respect.

Our Three Pillars of Work

Education

Livelihood

Health and Wellbeing

Our Vision

EquiBeing enables persons with disabilities to be productive partners in the growth of our society. In India, children with disabilities are majorly excluded from sports opportunities, hindering their overall development. Equity in sports aims to make sports accessible for people with disabilities. The various projects under this Vision are-

• EquiFloat develops water sports and swimming skills for children with disabilities.
• Inclusive sports educate mainstream students about inclusive play and promote public inclusive sports opportunities.
• Inclusive Arena builds inclusive sporting spaces for all, within institutions and through partnerships.
• The Action Research Program examines the impact of sports on children with disabilities through research in selected schools.
• Equi Speak, an initiative by EquiBeing, aims to teach conversational English to children with disabilities in India. Special schools primarily use regional languages, creating a gap in global language proficiency. 

How did we get started?

It all starts with a story…. Our Founder Ananthalakshmi grew up knowing that she had a macular degenerative eye condition, which meant that she knew she would lose her eyesight. Filled with fear of the thought that the day blindness dawns on her, life would come to a grilling halt, she started hiding her condition. After finishing her education, she came into the corporate world where she spent the next 25 years of her life growing and working as a senior leader with multinationals. These decades in the corporate world made her realize that blindness was a fuel and not the villain she thought it would be.

With this realization she decided to go to Tata Institute of Social Sciences to get a Doctorate on blind achievers and explore the question of what blindness meant. And how blind achievers transitioned to it. There, at the TISS campus, she met Afsal, a young blind scholar himself. Both of them shared a vision to see how they could with their lived experience, take it back to the society, to see how children with blindness and other disabilities come through the social stigmatization and the fear cycle much faster. Durga.S, a chartered accountant, and a school classmate of AL came on board along with Vijay Pillai, a leader in the corporate sector and Jayasankar SS, a senior banker and a renowned social entrepreneur and together they started EquiBeing Foundation.

The greatest good is what we do for another