Tiffany Brar, a visually impaired person, started the Jyothirgamaya Foundation to take forward the mission of empowering the blind.

When Tiffany Brar was just six months old, she became blind all due to an overdose of oxygen. This lead her to understand that the day-to-day life of a visually impaired person was far different from the norm, with a big focus on the education aspect of it, as for her early childhood, while living in the UK, she 100% focused on learning by doing.

After many years, her parents decided to go back to their little village in Kerala India, which meant that the way Tifanny was taught would completely change to the regional language as the primary mode of instruction in her school. Working around the linguistic barrier was only the first of the many challenges she faced, as she would sit at the back of the class, and wait for a long time to get her Braille notes, which rendered her unable to keep up with that class and become reclusive.

It was at that tender age of eight, that she vowed that she would do something for her fellow blind colleagues so that no one would experience this.

Later in life, and during her university degree, she started working on this project, by visiting many blind organizations, and visually impaired people, she found that there were many backbenchers, who were fighting discrimination, but who lacked skills. She went on to do her B.ed. special education, from Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University, and then started a mobile blind school, which traveled to the homes of blind people in the more remote places in the state, training to them.

In the year 2015, she realized that much more had to be done, and she started the Jyothirgamaya Foundation to take forward the mission of empowering the blind. Jyothirgamaya Foundation provides training to blind people in rural areas, who are unable to come to the training center, and also residential training courses to blind people in all necessary skills paving the way for their employment, integration, and assimilation into the mainstream.

Learn more about this solution here https://jyothirgamayaindia.org/
This story was adapted from https://jyothirgamayaindia.org/team/tiffany-brar/

The images were taken from https://jyothirgamayaindia.org/ as we do not own any of them.