Charity Drive Ecosystem

School(s) involved: The International School Bangalore (TISB)

City: Bangalore

Project leader: Rahul Krishna

Start Date: 29-Feb-2020

Establishing a Global Charity Drive Ecosystem Across Schools

This was one of the very first projects implemented in our school under the LEAP banner. The reason why we started this initiative in our school is rather simple: at the end of every year or term our boarding house would dispose of a wide variety of items ranging from textbooks, stationery, clothes, shoes and much more. Although some of it was donated we realised that it was just not enough as a substantial amount of the items were still being allocated inefficiently or just thrown away into bins where they had no second life.

So we saw this rather pressing problem and well, tried to solve it. We knew implementing this system would not be such an easy task, so we decided to tackle this issue with a simple 2 step plan.

Firstly we tried grouping together all the other charity initiatives currently running in our school to form a single charity system without adding any additional organisations to the list. We thought this would help us create a strong foundation and understand the strengths and weaknesses of the current system and help us see where exactly we are lacking. This also helped us reduce any inefficiencies in the current system before we added more organisations to the list. For example in our case we had two organisations collecting books, which was leading to redundancy and inefficiency, as sometimes right before the other starts a drive, the other one might have just finished it. And as a consequence of this, the second one to organise the drive does not have many donations, this is for one very discouraging for the person in charge and second the impact of the drive becomes very minimal.

Then, the second step is to simply analyse and reach out to organisations which seem to fill the gap in the ecosystem, for example if your school has organisations collecting shoes, books and stationary, then it would be beneficial to look into organisations collecting clothes or even e-waste.

This is a never ending process, as there is almost always something else that the school can do. The hardest part will almost always be setting up the first charity organization in your school but if you already have many organizations then the main task would most probably be to form the system of collaboration between all the charity drives in your school.Once the system is officially implemented in your school you will be able to get more organisations joining more easily.

Furthermore, we have plans to expand this initiative to schools in our neighbourhood (such as Inventure and Greenwood) and hopefully to schools even across the globe. We hope to ensure that no item that can be reused or repurposed is disposed off in our community.

Note: For now due to COVID-19 this project is unable to reach its full potential but we hope to resume the project after the situation eases, as this project is a continuous project.

The organisations we are in touch with:

1. Rotary Club Indiranagar: https://www.rotaryindiranagar.org/

2. Kindsteps: https://www.facebook.com/Kindsteps.In/