When the movie Born Into Brothels won the Oscar for Best Documentary and exposed the world to both the troubling circumstances for children from Kolkata's red-light district, as well as the incredible potential to affect change for them, the filmmakers knew they had an opportunity to leverage their success and build a project that would make a lasting impact for the impoverished community. The result of their vision: the Hope House.

Hope House is safe, fun, and productive campus where young girls from Kolkata's red-light district will come to live and grow into empowered, autonomous women. Our vision is to create generational change by breaking the cycles of poverty that force young women to sell their bodies, and by doing so allow them to alter the course of their future, their family's, and in time, the whole community.

The Hope House project is 100% built upon trust from the community. Without their support, we could never expect families to volunteer to send their daughters to grow up away from home. Conscious of this pivotal foundation, we have worked with local partners to operate a free health clinic, providing much needed services to the community, and we have opened a small business laundromat that hires women from the neighborhood, providing them with a safe alternative to making money on the streets. While the clinic and laundromat remain modest in size as we focus on construction of the Hope House, these two auxiliary Hope projects have incredible potential for broader impact within the community.