Employment & Career
We know that equipping women with skills increases independence and confidence. Hence, we offer volunteering and learning opportunities that focus on:
Skills-Based Training to improve their digital skills, CV writing, interview preparation and soft-skills development.
Career Coaching and Mentorship: Connecting women with professional female mentors in various industries.
Our organisation works in partnership with a number of Coaches and Mentors who provide transformational leadership training for women. We believe that when women receive the right support at the right time, it can elevate their families and entire communities. For that reason we focus on providing leadership training to women who are ready to grow and flourish. If you are interested in this service - please get in touch.
Mental Health & Emotional Resilience
Leadership and independence requires the strengthening of women's mental well-being and our organisation does this through:
Women’s Support Circle: Facilitating a peer-led support group or counseling for women overcoming trauma, isolation, or self-doubt.
Self-Esteem and Confidence Building Workshops for young women, delivered in partnership with educational institutions.
Building Resilience in Parenting through culturally appropriate online workshops and seminars that help to improve parenting skills and develop better understanding of the crucial role of parenting.
Supporting Under-served Communities
A Networking Meeting of Black and Asian led organisations took place on 14th Jan 2025. This collective of organisations first came together in October 2024 and are now meeting once a quarter. Meetings take place in January, April, July and October. Stow Inspire are leading and hosting this Network of Black and Asian organisations and will be developing it as a collaborative initiative that helps to strengthen all the organisations that are a part of it. This is so important as many of our organisations are representative of the communities we are serving at a grassroots level.
Many of them are small community organisations with very little resources. Working together and sharing each other's expertise and good practices will help build trusting relationships and grow our organisations' capacities. The next meeting will take place on 10th April.
Support for single parent women
our organisation encourages people to make a difference in the lives of single parent women who are really disadvantaged. This involves fundraising and donating to turn shelters into homes for single parent women who have very little financial support or employment prospects.
The average woman in Bangladesh with no education, is limited to an earning capacity of 2,000 (£18) to 3,000 BDT (£26) per month, yet it could cost 8,000 BDT to maintain a household of 3. Such is the life of Beauty Begum and her two teenage daughters who live in a makeshift shelter, with Beauty as the only breadwinner, struggling to support her daughters' education. They rely heavily on donations.
An average 3 bedroom house in Bangladesh can cost £20k - £25k to build, if the land is already owned. However, in 2017 after discovering that a sustainable house to last 25-30 years can be built with less than £2k, Parvin Karim and family built 4 houses between 2017 and 2018. In 2018, Parvin Karim began ‘Shelter to Home’ to provide adequate and safe housing for single women widows and divorcees in rural areas of Bangladesh. Following crowdfunding and with generous donations, we built homes for each of our poverty-stricken mothers; Roshanara and Mosoda. Prior to Shelter to Home, these women were either homeless or residing in makeshift shelters. Now, with homes built through the project, they can live with their children as a family.
In 2019 Parvin joined forces with 2 other British Bangladeshi women to build 2 more houses and form Stow Inspire CIC, which was officially registered in 2021. In September 2022 one of the Directors (Monwara Ali) and a team of 10 climbed Ben Nevis in Scotland and raised £2,800 for the Shelter to Home project. Beauty Begum and her daughters now have a home and are living a life of dignity. We were also able to contribute towards the rebuilding of a home for 102 year old Amina and her daughter Fadibun. The kind donations and our support has impacted and transformed the lives of 5 more women for the better.