Le Méridien Ahmedabad Illuminates the Season’s Greetings

with Happy Faces Foundation to strengthen livelihoods for women in vulnerable communities

Happy Faces Foundation began in 2016 with a handful of women who needed a way to earn without leaving their households, without compromising rules they didn’t set. Its founder, Reeta Bhagat, did not imagine that the experiment would scale; it was, at first, an act of immediate necessity. But a decade later, more than 450 women circulate through the foundation’s workshops and training programmes. Bhagat says, “They embroider, weave, and stitch; they package goods for local businesses; they learn how to negotiate - first with customers, and then, more radically, with their own families.”

Le Méridien Ahmedabad’s partnership underscores the hotel’s commitment to purpose-led hospitality, aligning its cultural calendar with initiatives that deliver tangible community gains. Against this backdrop, the hotel’s decision to anchor its holiday programming around the foundation is an acknowledgment of the vast, unseen economies that prop up cities like Ahmedabad. For Prashant Chadha, the hotel’s General Manager, the point is not charity. “Celebration without consequence feels hollow,” he says. “If we’re going to gather people under a lit tree, it should cast light somewhere else too.”

On December 15, when the tree is lit up, the lobby at Le Meridien Ahmedabad will hold more than tinsel and warm spices. It will hold the work of women who have spent years learning to take up space in ways denied to them; women whose hands have stitched the ornaments, which will adorn the tree and the hotel’s lobby all through the festive season, and whose stories will, for a moment, step into public view.

In a season ordinarily marked by excess, the lighting of a tree rarely carries ideological weight. But at Le Méridien Ahmedabad, among the carols and the lacquered surfaces, it is a reminder that progress is often made not through sweeping reforms, but through these small and stubborn acts of recognition.