Goonj..

The main initiatives taken by Goonj are:

• Cloth For Work (CFW): This is Goonj’s flagship initiative involving rural communities for undertaking development activities with urban material as their reward. The programme not only helps villagers identify basic problems, but helps them address these in a dignified manner by using their community power. During the year Goonj initiated more than a thousand Cloth for Work activities in 700+ villages and worked with more than 50 partner organizations across the country.
• Disaster Relief (Rahat): Goonj was involved in relief and rehabilitation after several natural disasters in FY14 – the floods in Uttarakhand, rebuilding homes and livelihoods after the cyclone in Odisha and continuing to provide relief to those affected by the riots in Muzaffarnagar in UP. They also helped to highlight ignored annual disasters like winters, annual floods and village fires in some states.
• Not Just a Piece of Cloth (NJPC): Goonj has been working on the issue of menstrual hygiene by initiating discussions at various national & international forums & providing a viable solution with cloth sanitary pads. The NJPC initiative starts with providing a physical product but stresses more on long term change in practices, behavior change, education & replication. This year over 300 meetings were held in various regions and approximately 350,000 napkins and over 12,000 undergarments were dispatched to different states.
• School to School (S2S): The S2S initiative aims to reach out to children all across the country and provide them with basic educational material. Goonj addresses the educational needs of remote & resource starved village/slum schools by channelizing under-utilised material of city’s affluent schools. Apart from reaching out directly, they also worked with 70 partner organizations across the country.

In 2014, Goonj was selected as one of the winners of the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award for their work in changing patterns of consumption and production of resources, and creating employment in Delhi.