A happy new year to all the readers, ours is a small community but growing with time! 🙂

2014 was a good year, it was the first full-year of work for me, as I had shifted to Bangalore in 2013 for work after graduating from college. Through this post, I would like to highlight 2 NGO campaigns being driven in India that I had the chance to work with and I really believe they should be getting more visibility.

Not Just a Piece of Cloth is a campaign by Goonj which focuses on opening up the most taboo and ignored subject of menstrual hygiene: a female health hazard by involving the masses in generating an affordable cloth napkin. The NGO from India promoted by Anshu Gupta, aims at re-positioning cloth and other underutilized material, beyond charity, adding dignity and turning it into a big resource for development. NSS, the community service team at the BITS Pilani campus had partnered with Goonj in the past for collection drives and from what I’ve read about them, they are really doing a great job with not just clothing but also in the field of calamity relief.

BMST India has been providing blood banking & transfusion services to hospitals & patients in Bangalore and surrounding districts since 1984 but they’ve recently extended their program to setup a Stem Cell Registry Drive. It is a new drive that they have started and are still in the process of setting up operations at full scale. Mentioning bone marrow transplant and leukaemia raises eyebrows and suspicion. To know more, I’d encourage you to follow the stories of Amit Gupta and Nalini Ambady if you have some time.

I had a good experience working with the teams that were working on these projects. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to know more about them. Cheers to a good start for the new year!