Goonj's entire programme is based on giving, by connecting urban consumers who accumulate so much material -- clothes, books, utensils, toys, etc -- that they don't know what to do with it all, with the needy underprivileged in rural pockets, especially those affected by disasters who have lost home and all material possessions.
Indian people want to give; it's just that they should have the trust factor, feels Anshu Gupta, the founder of Goonj who is one of the two Indians who won this year's Ramon Magsaysay Award.
Gupta should know: Goonj's entire programme is based on giving, by connecting urban consumers who accumulate so much material -- clothes, books, utensils, toys, etc -- that they don't know what to do with it all, with the needy underprivileged in rural pockets, especially those affected by disasters who have lost home and all material possessions.
And he's been remarkably successful in getting Indians to give. Goonj distributes around 1,000 tonnes of material a year; during natural disasters such as the Nepal earthquake in April this year and the Kashmir floods last year, it was the main agency transporting urgent relief material raised from individual all across the country to the affected areas.
But if giving is at the core of the 16-year-old NGO's activities, it is giving with great care taken to preserve the dignity of the receiver.
One has only to visit the NGO's offices located in a warren of run-down buildings in Sarita Vihar, a semi-urban locality on Delhi's fringes chosen primarily because the rents are low, to see how much thought goes into the process. It is here that the clothes collected from all over the city and suburban areas are brought in where they are first sorted according to sex, age, colour and material; then washed and carefully checked for damages.
Women on sewing machines then go about repairing the damages, after which the clothes are carefully sorted into packages -- a shirt and a pant, some underwear, shoes, etc, which are packed in large gunny bags.
These are then sent to the rural areas where they are used in Goonj's core Clothes for Work programme where these packages are distributed in return for undertaking works such as repairing roads, recharging water ponds, building bamboo bridges and digging wells.
The scraps of cloth that cannot be used are not thrown away: they are recycled into sanitary pads for rural, poor women under Goonj's award-winning Not Just a Piece of Cloth programme. What's left over even from that goes into making Sujni mattresses or innovative up-cycled products that are sold to urban consumers.
Over the years, Goonj and Gupta have won several awards -- the Schwab Foundation's Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2012; 'Game Changing Innovation' by NASA and US State Dept, several Changemaker Innovation awards, etc.
Goonj does not run on government funds, raising all it requires to pay its 300-odd workers from private charity, some institutional funders and its own activities. Gupta says he will use the cash component of the Magsaysay award to help other, upcoming social enterprises who might need the money to sustain their operations. "I have also thought of starting a scholarship for poor students in the name of my parents," says Gupta.
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