ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM FELLOWSHIP - CLASS OF 2024
United Nations Academic Impact and MCN are proud to partner on the Millennium Fellowship. This year, 52,000+ young leaders applied to join the Class of 2024 on 6,000+ campuses across 170 nations. 280+ campuses worldwide (just 5%) were selected to host the 4,000+ Millennium Fellows.

UNITED NATIONS ACADEMIC IMPACT AND MCN PROUDLY PRESENT MAHALAKSHMI GURURAJ, A MILLENNIUM FELLOW FOR THE CLASS OF 2024.
Sai University | Chennai, India | Advancing SDG 5, SDG 4 & UNAI 3

" Gender is a complex concept that is not addressed or taught with adequate seriousness. Gender inequality, unfortunately, is not understood to be a global issue that can challenge peace and stability. The lack of proper social and emotional education results in a poor understanding of marginalised identities and in the worst case, discriminatory violence. Since Millennium Fellowship understands these shortcomings and their consequences, I'm excited to join the class of 2024 and interact with other Fellows to hear their takes on the matter. Project PonVizhi is not just built by our team, it is built on the ideas that my team and I hope to receive from our fellow peers at Millennium. "
Millennium Fellowship Project: Project PonVizhi
Project PonVizhi, consisting of eight undergraduate students, is an organisation that aims to raise awareness about sexual assault, domestic abuse, and child sexual harassment in particular. We aim to educate people on the steps that can be taken to report harassment and seek help in terms of their mental well-being. The target audience of the program is school and college students. When we were school students, there were no committees or legal mechanisms that provided redressals to child sexual harassment survivors or conducted events to spread awareness on gender rights and sexual harassment prevention in our schools or in other educational establishments like coaching centers. Cases of child sexual harassment often go unreported. We seek to raise awareness among kids and young adults (both girls and boys this time, as our educational systems often leave boys out of this) on what counts as harassment, because abuse comes in all forms, and goes much deeper than “good touch and bad touch”. We intend to push educational establishments to have POSH centres. Also, if possible, educate parents, teachers, and guardians on how to respond to children when they confide in them. As a survivor of sexual assault, it is difficult to navigate a world that turns a blind eye towards victims. Through this program, we aspire to create a community that will provide a safe space and support for people, particularly, girls and women who have been through abuse and sexual assault.
About the Millennium Fellow
Mahalakshmi Gururaj is an observant research-inclined student of Literature, Sociology and Media Studies at Sai University, Chennai. As a queer person, they are passionate about LGBTQ+ and feminism, wielding academia as a tool to solve real-world issues. Through Project PonVizhi, they seek to educate marginalised school students on gender, identifying and reporting sexual harassment, and gender rights; topics that are not comprehensively covered by an outdated syllabus. The integration of Mahalakshmi’s leadership experiences as a vice-cultural secretary, teaching experience as a Teaching Assistant, and academic experiences of research writing on nuances in gender guides them with this project.











