The Facebook Community Leadership Program is a global initiative which, according to Facebook, will benefit over 100 participants from around the world and provide them with support tools, funding and the belief in themselves that they need to lead their communities.

“Since announcing the program in February, we received more than 6,000 applications from all over the world,” shared Ime Archibong, Vice President, Product Partnerships in a blog. As of today, there are 115 people who have been selected into the programme as community leaders as resident, fellows and youth participants. Three Indian mums have made it to the list and one of them is in top 5, Adhunika Prakash, who is working on the mission of breastfeeding and has received $1 million funding for her cause. The other two mums Chetana Misra and Tamanna Dhamija have received fellowships of $50,000 each

Adhunika Prakash – Breastfeeding Support for Indian Mothers

Started in 2013 and initially based in Pune, Adhunika is a certified lactation educator and counselor. Her mission was to help mothers tackle the different stages of breastfeeding, which is usually an ignored topic. Her breastfeeding support community has more than 80,000 members (breastfeeding mothers) who help each other through the peer-to-peer support system. With the increase in the number of community members, the support group now conducts meetups across the country to discuss and solve issues related to breastfeeding.

Chetana Mishra – MompreneursIndia

Chetana Misra is the Founder of MompreneursIndia. MompreneursIndia is a community that helps and sustains mother entrepreneurs. Since hers was not a funded community, she was facing constant challenges in the growth of the same and now with Facebook’s acknowledgment of her efforts, she is excited to take the community to a new level. Though working with mothers to volunteer for community development in itself is a challenge as they are always hard pressed for time.

Tamanna Dhamija – Baby Destination

Baby Destination, co-founded by Tamanna Dhamija was founded in 2016 and this community helps pregnant women and new mums to share their parenting experiences and get support from fellow mums. Tamanna had already raised Rs 2 crore last year and now with Facebook’s support, she aims at doing more for the community. To take this to the next level, she says, “We want to expand our regional footprint by creating more local and multilingual communities and also do content in various different languages.”
“We will be able to work with the Facebook product teams to automate community moderation to ensure you know growth happens, engagement stays intact, and the communities are spam free. We also have a pretty good tech and analytics framework in-house which we want to further strengthen to enable this growth.”

With Facebook’s support, these mums are ready to take on the world, and why shouldn’t they, after all, mothers form one of the strongest communities ever.