Rural Community and Household Development

Climate change is showing huge impact on our environment. Increasing amount of waste and its mismanagement is directly contributing to massive GHG emissions. Landfills, the last resort in the waste hierarchy, is a source of greenhouse gas linked to climate change. The ill-effects of the climate change have been severe in spaces where people’s livelihood depends on natural resources. Thus, the well-being of millions of households in rural and tribal belts of India is getting affected. Dependent on natural resources and climate, the worst hit agriculture and allied sectors employ more than half of the workforce. Majority of farmers in India also have small and marginal holdings. Furthermore, the pandemic has severely affected lives and livelihoods across rural India.

Goonj’s flagship initiative Cloth for Work uses the cities’ discard for fueling widespread development work for the most neglected communities in the most neglected geographies in areas that have a long-standing impact on their development such as infrastructure, water, livelihood, sanitation, health, and hygiene, etc.

Our work with communities happens in simultaneous cycles across the country :

Step 1 - Cumulation of urban surplus headed for discard to the landfills. This discard consists of clothing, footwear, books, stationery, etc

Step 2 - Recycling and upcycling of urban discard into different need based customized kits for the rural population

Step 3 - Community Mobilization and Development includes interaction with the communities and grassroots development activities like digging wells, making bamboo bridges, sanitation drives, building kitchen gardens, road repair, etc,

Step 4- Channelisation of the need based customised kit of essentials as a reward to the thereby reducing material poverty

Contribute to our initiative and let us take forward the mission of reaching out to even the last mile communities forward.

• Building an ongoing nationwide network of channels of material from the cities to the villages, ensuring a continuous resource available for addressing critical issues in village India
• Bringing the community together, making them socially and culturally stronger about their own resources, wisdom and ideas.
• Bringing the infrastructural changes to make them stronger economically and climatically, helps resolve short term and long term challenges better like migration, health, nutrition, sanitation, productivity etc.
• It involves the masses in development work, turning people from urban cities into a volunteer (isolated from rural realities earlier) and making them more aware about village India.
• Instead of making village communities dependent on outside help or material, it encourages them to use their own resources and capacities to address their problems
• Instead of just talking about issues like health, education, cleanliness and infrastructure etc. GOONJ is demonstrating practical solutions for NGO’s and village communities to emulate and replicate on their own.