In the book “The Emperors New Clothes” by well-known author Hans Christian Andersen, the emperor unknowingly parades the streets without a stitch of thread on him. His people whisper, stare and laugh as he walks by.
Cloth, we realise as we’re reading the children’s tale is more than just pieces of material stitched together to cover the human body. It embodies dignity and protection. It motivates and reiterates powerful positive perceptions of self and pride. Above all, it is a basic need and a necessity.
In the urban cities of our modern societies of excess however, these tenets are lost in the sea of clothing brands, choice and plentitude. We forget. Unfortunately, there are many communities in India that still struggle to meet this basic human need that many have taken for granted. While sporadic cloth collections are not uncommon during periods of humanitarian disasters like the Boxing Day Tsunami or the Gujarat earthquakes, there are few organisations that focus on bridging this divide on a more systematic, developmental level.
In 1998, motivated to make a difference, 40-year-old Anshu Gupta left his corporate job in the private sector to found GOONJ (“life echo” in Hindi), a New Delhi-based organisation that aims to do just that. Twelve years on, he has not looked back.
Who are you?
According to its website, GOONJ is a social enterprise that seeks to “make clothes a matter of concern.” A bridge between those who have vital resources in urban and middle-class households in India to those who live in the far reaches of rural India and need them, GOONJ’s network extends to 21 Indian states throughout the country. While its base is in New Delhi, in order to manage its operations more effectively, it currently has nine branches/offices based in some of the key metros of the region.
Illustrating how this social enterprise operates, Gupta takes usthrough the entire process of what happens when an urbanite donates a piece of clothing to GOONJ. He first explains the various avenues available for people to make their donations. “Material is collected primarily in two ways. One, we organise awareness-cum-collection camps in various residential areas, corporations, schools, colleges and institutions where people give their material on a specific date. Two, we have collection centres all across the cities where people can go and give their material whenever they wish.”
After the donated material is collected, it is brought to a GOONJ processing centre in each city where it is sorted and packed purposefully according to the specific needs of each target community. The centres are located in Delhi, Jalandhar, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkatta, Hyderabad, Saharsa (Bihar) and Kumool (Andra Pradesh). Gupta explains, “The collected material is brought to a GOONJ processing centre in each city, where it’s sorted and packed, and sent out to our rural partner groups in the region according to the information received from them about the requirements of their target communities’ details like gender ratio, dressing habits, clothing needs, etc.” At this sorting stage, every piece of cloth is maximised to its fullest. Demonstrating this, he shares, “At the sorting stage, the un-wearable cotton cloth is seperated. The cotton cloth is used to make clean cloth sanitary napkins for rural women, while the other cloth is used to make different products.”
Drawing strong support from the community, the network in the slums and villages has grown to a group of over 150 implementation partners including units of Indian armies, NGOs, community-based organisations, social activities and Ashoka fellows. This is a far cry from its humble beginnings that began with one man’s call to action.
Why did you start the organisation?
“Why don’t people have clothes? Why is there so much poverty, despite so much resource? There’s no lack of wealth in India. You really need to be disturbed. I feel if each one of us does his part, half the issues will be solved but right now we are into a certain kind of escapism. We keep waiting for someone else to fix the problem?” says Gupta.
His passion for helping the poor, stepping up and making a difference is hard to deny. It is this drive that fuelled his decision to leave his corporate job where he was performing well in a managerial position with one of the well-established telecommunications brand entering India in 1998, and delve into the developmental sector. The change in direction, notes Gupta, was inevitable. He shares, “I guess an initiative begins with one’s need to figure out a way to deal with the basics of how you define life whether you are going to take the path that your parents, friends and everyone else around you have taken, or want to deal with things a bit differently. It’s not as heroic as it sounds. It begins with day-to-day things, whether you want to pull up your car or window when a beggar comes close to your car. Whether you are happy to see your house spick and span but walk on the badly littered roads crowded with homeless people.”
It started informally, with him wanting to work on some issues that he felt strongly about. He knew he wanted to focus primarily on clothing and he, his wife and friends decided in the first few months that the target had to be villages because “that’s where things don’t reach as people are not paying attention to them,” he says.
Determined to make an impact, Gupta started work from his bedroom, literally with collecting the first set of 67 clothes from his family’s wardrobe. He recalls, “We started with collecting from family and friends, and distributing on Delhi roads, outside hospitals etc. GOONJ’s first staff was our maid’s unemployed husband who took up the basic sorting and packing. Since there were no funds, we sold one-bedroom furniture and turned it into GOONJ’s office. Later we also dipped into our personal finances for sometime.”
As the organisation gained momentum, he soon faced fundamental challenges that would markedly affect the manner in which GOONJ scaled up its operations and outreach.
What have been some of your challenges and solutions?
Though we cannot refute the fact that access to clothing is an essential basic human need, Gupta quickly discovered that many funding agencies were reluctant to fund GOONJ as clothing did not fall within their different lists of parameters, which often included issues from global warming to domestic violence. Instead of letting the rejections faze them however, GOONJ strategised instead and decided to reach out to the masses for both collecting of materials and financial donations. In fact today, one of the biggest components of its funding comes from the masses, thus reflecting the strong base of supporters that the social enterprise has acquired. While GOONJ has not counted the number of supporters it has to date, this support has resulted in the organisation’s resounding success of Rs 1 crore (US$217,000) revenue in 2008 to 2009.
Gupta shares, that while the journey and the learning are an ongoing process, this was one of the most important lessons that the organisation learned and this shaped the fundamentals on which the social enterprise operates. “The one most important lesson we learnt the hard way was never to tie up our existence and sustenance to any funding agency or any one organisation. We decided to make the masses our funding base, believing strongly that if our work were relevant, people would support it. Today, even though a lot of organisations and funding agencies do projects with us, a big chunk of our financial support still comes from individual contributions. And we plan to keep it that way.”
Can you share 5 lessons learned/advice for other social enterprises?
Since its humble yet challenging beginnings, GOONJ has grown from strength to strength, winning the Indian NGO of the Year award in 2008 and S$150,000 (around US$109,017) at the international Lien i3 Challenge 2009, particularly for its ‘Cloth for Work’ programme. This programme effectively uses clothing as a development resource where it works with partner agencies to identify issues (e.g. road repairs and cleanliness drives) for the community to work on and rewards clothing as a motivation for a job done.
Gupta shares five lessons he has learnt since founding GOONJ 12 years ago:
- Develop a team that does not look at the work in your organisation as a job. Make them owners of the idea. Let them be volunteers first.
- Learn your own lessons and do not try to follow conventional wisdom all the time. That’s the only way new things get done.
- Use the power of the media wisely. GOONJ spreads its word through word-of-mouth credibility as it feels it’s the strongest kind of credibility. Bring in the mass media only if you have a clear objective for doing so, not just for the sake of calling the media.
- Try and grow organically but from the beginning, build clarity into a broad framework around what you want to do and never be afraid to think big but be mindful of your capacities as well.
- Keep a close watch on your expenses. As a non-profit that works in the public service, we not only have to be accountable for each and every penny, it is our responsibility to make the most effective use of each penny.
Can you share a beneficiary’s story?
Two to three days before Shalu (from Saharanpur Star Pradesh, India) got her period, she started feeling ill, worrying about what to use during the coming period because there was no cotton cloth except a little terry cloth. In school, some of her friends bought and used pads from the market but she couldn’t because her parents were very poor. Her father is tangewala (horse cart puller) with a very small income.
Shalu shares her monthly trauma, “Whenever I thought about it, I got a headache. When my periods started, I used to take any thing from my house. I have spoilt cushion/pillow covers, etc. to use for periods. Many times I would be scolded and even beaten by my mother, but what could I do? Once in anger I didn’t have food for two days and I was very sad. When I asked my classmate for pads, she replied, “This is not for free, these are very costly pads. I get it from the market, how can I give it to you for free!” Thinking about all these little things, I used to get ill. I used to pray to God to stop my periods. When I was sharing all my experiences in a meeting, friends told me to just go and tell GOONJ and they would give me sanitary napkins. Now I am so happy and relieved.”
What’s next for the organisation?
The future looks promising for GOONJ and Gupta has clear plans about the strategic direction of the organisation. While GOONJ has grown as an organisation over the years, he shares that he has always aspired to grown not just as an organisation but as an idea as well. To this end, it is working towards having a more focused approach towards self-sustenance through intensifying their newspaper campaign – marketing recycled material products, one rupee one cloth campaign, etc.
As Gupta concludes, “The underlined emphasis across the board is on streamlining systems and processes to make our work more effective and replicable. In the coming two years while we plan to work closely on building and strengthening our team, the spotlight will be more on the implementation of our programmes.”
Of all the different programmes under GOONJ, which is your proudest and why?
Of all the programmes that GOONJ has under its belt, its founder is particularly proudest of an initiative that he feels the development sector has not paid attention to and thus has not actively worked on over the years – the provision of low-cost sanitation napkins for women living in rural communities. These women often use unhygienic methods to manage their menstruation cycles. Gupta explains, “There were times when women in the same house would use the same cloth after washing it.”
Read the original article as published in Humanity Magazine in May 2011.