Our 5 Areas of Focus
Education
Our Education focus empowers women and girls to realize their full potential. We enable women and children to pursue lifelong learning to foster confidence and independence. Soroptimists engage in projects to support education through scholarships, course enrollment, and facilitating training.
Women's Empowerment
Our Women’s Empowerment projects involve initiatives that give women better access to economic empowerment opportunities. We support women by sponsoring educational seminars on personal financing and holding workshops for practical skills required to enter the labor force to become economically self-sufficient.
Violence Against Women
We execute projects to respond to, prevent, and eliminate violence against women. Projects include financial aid to survivors of domestic abuse, providing counseling services, lobbying for improved prevention policies and programs, and raising social awareness of this problem. Many of our projects are conducted in collaboration with governmental policymakers and other NGOs to work towards improved prevention and response strategies and programs. Since 2017, during the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, we have promoted the “Orange Kuwait Campaign”. Through this initiative, we have focused on violence prevention through various campaigns: collaborating with MOSAL on a panel discussion on gender equality, launching social media campaigns, and facilitating self-defense classes. Our annual Orange Kuwait Campaign highlights awareness of gender-based violence by lighting up ministry and company buildings orange to bring awareness to the issue.
Health & Food Security
Our club’s health-related projects involved a breast cancer awareness campaign where we educated and encouraged women to get mammograms. We have also created a thalassemia awareness campaign where we held panel discussions on the disease and lobbied to have premarital testing to minimize the incidence of this inherited disease. Our members actively visit sick women in hospitals to distribute gifts during Ramadan. We have sponsored an autism awareness campaign and provide mental health counseling to survivors of domestic violence. As active members of our society, we have organized and participated in community events: walkathons, bikeathons, and yoga classes. For distressed teen girls, we sponsored counseling sessions and outfitted a gym and library to give them a sense of worth and help with their physical and emotional development. We have provided food to survivors of domestic abuse.
Sustainability
Soroptimist is keen to enhance environmental sustainability by collaborating with community projects that improve the environment: recycling, composting, planting trees, and greening initiatives.