Geography: United States
Founded: 1991
Address:PO Box 697
Santa Clara, CA 95052
About Maitri
Maitri is a free, confidential, referral nonprofit organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area, that primarily helps families from South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka among others) facing domestic violence, emotional abuse, cultural alienation, human trafficking or family conflict.
Mission
Maitri's mission is three-fold:
- To help integrate clients into the mainstream of American society, so that they feel comfortable and become full participants in it. Maitri recognizes that the very social and cultural separation or isolation that it's clients experience contributes largely to their problems, and is a hindrance to their solutions.
- To focus efforts on supplementing and complementing existing services, not on duplicating them. To this end, Maitri has developed close working relationships with mainstream agencies and organizations, as well as organizations working with similar ethnic groups.
- To work towards fostering self-reliance and self-confidence in its clients. We believe that a large number of difficulties experienced by Maitri's clients arise out of a real or perceived situation of dependency.
This philosophy is encapsulated in Maitri's motto of "Helping Women to Help Themselves" and Maitri's mission statement: Maitri believes that the best human relationships are characterized by mutual respect, open communication, and individual empowerment. To that end, Maitri's activities are designed to help South Asian women make an informed choice of the lives they lead.