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Archives: Profiles

Keshav Chaturvedi

Keshav Chaturvedi

Keshav Chaturvedi is a post graduate in communications and media studies. He's a writer, commentator, photographer and trainer with three decades of experience in print, electronic and online medium. He has been tracking the issue of environment and climate change since the Rio Summit in 1992 and specialises in renewable energy, sustainable development and the impact of technology on society. He has written a book on the history of climate change negotiations published by the Government of India. Keshav has travelled extensively across India and abroad, closely watching the impact of climate change on various societies and their efforts to come to terms with it.

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Meenakshi Gupta

Meenakshi Gupta

Meenakshi juggles different roles in the organisation: from communication, research, strategic internal and external conversations, to ecosystem building.

She is closely involved in embedding and nurturing new ideas and in operationalising Goonj's values. Having contributed significantly to organisation building over the past two decades, she continues to play a vital role in the direction of Goonj's growth. She leads on many firsts in Goonj like the building of a reflective learning and thriving framework and the grounds-up strategic vision conversations.

She is a founding member of Catalyst 2030, a global network of social entrepreneurs. She has been on juries of multiple awards including the Nari Shakti (Women Power) awards. She is a Dance Movement Facilitator with a deep interest in the wellbeing of people doing the difficult last mile work in the development sector.

Meenakshi had an over 15-year-long corporate career before Goonj, which included working with the BBC for eight years. She is a commerce graduate with an advanced degree in communication.

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Anshu Gupta

Anshu Gupta

The Founder of Goonj and Gram Swabhimaan, Anshu is popularly known as the Clothing Man. He is the recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, popularly called the Nobel Prize of Asia. He quit a corporate career in 1999 to initiate Goonj, the world’s first agency working on clothing as a development issue. It disturbed Anshu that despite being a basic human need, cloth was nowhere in the development agenda. This attention to a neglected basic need set him on 24+ years of transforming India’s culture of giving of our unused cloth and other under-utilised material for development work.

Under Anshu’s leadership, Goonj has taken the alarming growth of urban surplus and instrumentalised it to trigger large-scale rural communities-led development work. While creatively and flexibly matching and seamlessly weaving urban surplus into the changing priorities and realities of rural marginalised communities. Anshu has pioneered the genesis of a parallel surplus-based economy of barter between efforts of rural communities and underutilised material as the two new currencies.

The Goonj model has emerged as a worldwide case study around deploying surplus material circularity to mobilise large scale civic-engagement-led material poverty alleviation, community dignity and agency-led rural development and rural wisdom-led climate change mitigation work. 

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