COVID Hunger Warriors - Heart Head Healing

Heart, Head and Healing is a pioneering initiative by the Asian Heritage Foundation, launched during the apocalyptic 2004 Tsunami Disaster to provide urgent relief to the survivors and latter to ameliorate the plight of flood-ravaged communities across Kashmir in 2014. The unprecedented threat to daily wage workers brought on by this pandemic has demanded a revival of this initiative that has been extended to artisan communities across India.

The artisanal communities affected by the COVID-19 pandemic are struggling to survive. Their livelihoods have been completely destroyed, and the rural economy that supports them has plunged into a coma.

For these artisan communities, nothing matters more than reclaiming their home-based workspaces.

Help us minimize the risks these brave COVID Hunger Warriors have to face.

Setting up Community Kitchens operated by JIYO Mahila Mandals in Gumla and Hazaribagh in Jharkhand to provide fresh and nutritious meals to 4000 families daily.

Distributing Rations and Sanitary Products to artisan communities across India and construction and brick kiln laborers and families of landless agricultural workers, who are out of the Public Distribution System orbit.

Distributing Micronutrient Supplements for chronically undernourished infants and children. We are making special dry food packets using locally sourced micronutrients in Gumla and Hazaribagh, where access to critical nutritives are limited. This fortified micronutrient supplement is made of ragi, soyabean, jaggery, split chickpea and edible oil.

Producing Cloth Masks : Entrepreneurial groups of women, part of our crafts clusters in Bagh, Jhabua and Patangarh in Madhya Pradesh, Kotpad in Odisha and Basvanbigha in Bihar and Gumla and Hazaribagh in Jharkhand are producing cloth masks for distribution to the extremely vulnerable clusters in their blocks and ASHA workers in their communities.

We are immensely proud of our Covid Hunger Warriors who have been plugging the blind spots in the government's relief work by traveling long distances, mostly by foot, to reach out to the most vulnerable children, women, the old and the disabled.

So far, we have provided rations to over 750 families of artisans in Kathputli Colony, New Delhi and over 40 Manganiyar families in suburban Jaisalmer. Currently, we are mobilizing community kitchens and ration distribution systems at rural artisan cluster groups in Jharkhand, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha which will help these communities meet their basic survival needs and improve their access to crafts-based value chains.

Our goal is to feed these families in artisan communities across the country. There are approximately 4000 families in need of urgent support. Join us, as we continue to track the risks to the clusters through our nutrition and morbidity monitoring systems.