Happy 2025 !! We hope and wish for this year to be a peaceful, purposeful and actionful year till date. In the first issue of the year we want to share a glimpse of Goonj's work in 2023-24 (Annual Report 23-24). In our 25th year, We take this opportunity to underline the impact of our work in building a bridge between the people of urban and rural India. Our work starts with people in cities across India, mobilising and motivating them for collective action for their fellow citizens in rural India. This year it lead to harvesting of 8 Million kgs of urban underutilised material of all kind (clothes, footwear, utensils, books to furniture, hardware, dry ration and more).

In Goonj Centers of Circularity we turned this material into a currency for rural development, to bridge the growing inequality of abundance and scarcity between the cities and villages of India. Otherwise a majority of this material would have landed in landfills or burnt or buried etc. harming our world in many ways. In turn this would have been a colossal waste of energy spent into the making of all this material. Instead Goonj transported these kits to the most neglected and vulnerable geographies and communities in 26 states and UTs and over 7500 villages.

We used this material to nudge people there to use their wisdom, efforts and local resources to trigger over 20,000 community development projects to address their own diverse problems of water, health, sanitation, menstrual hygiene, infrastructure and much more. We also worked on relief and response across many climate emergencies across the country like Cyclones Biparjoy and Michaung, sudden cloudbursts, landslides, seasonal floods, and fires.

The systemic impact of our work is the creation of a unique large scale barter between people in the cities and people in the villages, to foster development. At the root of this sustainable circular economy is the core value of human dignity. We are deeply grateful to every individual and organisation who participated and partnered in this work with us. You would be glad to know that this year we touched over 2.5 million lives through our diversified initiatives.

Our invitation to you is. Start Where You are..

More on www.goonj.org or write to mail@goonj.org

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