Ruchita Zaparde

Ruchita Zaparde

Let's go back in time to 2010, and around the world to India. 12-year-old Ruchita Zaparde of Plainsboro, New Jersey, visits India with her family and meets Asha, a 27-year-old widow struggling to make ends meet for herself and her two small daughters. Like many of India's 40 million widowed women, Asha and her children were disowned by her husband's family after his death and abandoned to fend for themselves. Women such as Asha are shunned and isolated by society, often forbidden to remarry, and find it nearly impossible to find work. Asha struggled to make ends meet by doing hard labor on farms during the day and repairing clothes with a needle and thread for people in her rural village at night, but it wasn't enough. She had to pull her little girls out of school and put them to work, too.

When Ruchita got back to the United States, she couldn't stop thinking about Asha and her daughters. So she organized a fundraiser at her school, returned to that rural village in India, found Asha, and gave her a sewing machine. But Ruchita didn't just give Asha a sewing machine. She gave her a fighting chance. Within a year, Asha was supporting herself on a steady income as a seamstress... and her little girls were back in school.

She saw Asha's success and knew she could change the lives of other women just like her.  To continue her work, Ruchita founded Sew A Future.  For $110, Ruchita is able to provide a woman in India with a sewing machine, enough thread and fabric to get started, and seamstress training if necessary. 

Ruchita is now 17. She attended the We Are Family Foundation's "Three Dot Dash" Summit for Global Teen Leaders in New York City this year, manages 1,400 young volunteers in 57 schools across the United States, and has already expanded her efforts into Taiwan and the Bahamas. For all the lives she has changed, and for all the lives she WILL change, Ruchita Zaparde joins the ranks as our newest Peace Fund Radio Hero of the Week.


Ruchita Zaparde has appeared in the following PEACE Fund Radio episodes: