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March
10, 2004 • #3 |
 Meet
Vandana and Vaishnavi
Longtime
friends Vandana Gopikumar and Vaishnavi Jayakumar founded
and operate The Banyan, a home that treats mentally ill women
from the streets of Chennai, India, and returns them to the
care of their families.
It began in the early 1990s
when Vandana and Vaishnavi encountered a destitute woman on
the streets of Chennai. After the frustration of finding an
institution to care for someone like her, they decided to
start one when they finished college.
In 1993, with hardly any funds,
they founded a residential care and rehabilitation center
for mentally ill, homeless women. They operated from an inadequate
4-bedroom, rented building for almost seven years. By then
the home was bursting with nearly 100 women.
Vandana and Vaishnavi raised
money, received a government grant of land, and constructed
a new center with dorms, treatment and therapy areas, sickbay,
offices, a modern kitchen, and solar-heating equipment for
hot water. The center now has more than 360 transient residents
and a staff of more than 80, including social workers, doctors,
a psychiatrist, and nursing aides—everything to make
a full-fledged treatment facility.
Since the beginning, Vandana,
Vaishnavi, and The Banyan staff have reached out to more than
1,200 women. More than 600 have been rehabilitated and returned
to their families all over India.(Visit The Banyan website
at www.thebanyan.org.)
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