In February 2021, Shalom Ooty was recognised as one of the top-10 social enterprises in a national ACCESS awards competition — placing 9th overall, alongside fellow honouree ACT (Action Center for Transformation), a Gurgaon-based initiative training women in newspaper recycling and upcycling. For an enterprise built on hand-embroidery from a small community in the Nilgiris, national recognition alongside enterprises working at a very different scale was a meaningful marker of how far the model had come.
From self-help group to social enterprise
Shalom began in 2005 as a self-help group, giving Heritage women a way to earn income from their embroidery. Over time, it evolved into a structured, for-profit social enterprise, built around products like cushions and bedspreads made using traditional Heritage technique. That evolution — from an informal income source into a functioning business with a defined market — is precisely what enterprise-recognition programs like ACCESS are built to identify and support.
A partnership that predates the award
The recognition also reflected an ongoing collaboration: Women on Wings and Shalom Ooty had been working together since early 2019 on their shared goal of economic empowerment for rural and tribal women. The award wasn’t the start of that story so much as a checkpoint in it — validation, from outside the Nilgiris, that the work happening inside Sheela Powell’s small Ooty store was building something durable.
Source: Women on Wings, “ACT and Shalom in top-10 best social enterprises,” February 2021
