Goonj

GOONJ, meaning echo, is a multi-award-winning social enterprise that uses the urban discards to fuel widespread development across villages in India. GOONJ deals with more than 3000 tons of material annually and treats this material as a resource to be used with dignity. This resource acts as a parallel currency for rural communities as they take up large-scale development work like recharging water bodies, rebuilding local infrastructure, health, education, and for addressing local issues. GOONJ’s work has led to systemic changes in disaster relief and rehabilitation work, while it has also opened up the highly taboo issue of menstrual hygiene and provides clean cotton cloth as a viable solution. Goonj has created a process of channeling unused clothing material from urban centers to the far-flung villages of India as an important economic resource. Thereby making its mission to re-position cloth and other underutilized material, beyond charity, adding dignity and turning it into a big resource for development.



Over the last 18 years, GOONJ has also worked extensively on relief and rehabilitation for a series of disasters such as the monsoon floods in parts of India in past few years.