Pune: Rotary And Spherule’s Flagship Poverty Alleviation Drive Crosses New Milestone
Pune, 9th January 2023: For the last year, the Rotary Club of Pune Amanora and Spherule Foundation (Spherule.org) have been driving a massive project of poverty alleviation to help people jumpstart their livelihoods again. The jumpstart drive crossed a new milestone when the number of beneficiaries exceeded 150.
A joint project executed passionately by both clubs is creating value for society. The correspondent spoke to the beneficiaries, who are extremely satisfied with the support and feel that it will go a long way toward improving their livelihoods, giving better education to their kids, and helping their businesses expand. One such example of success was seen when, on 7th January 2023, the Rotary and Spherule team was providing a sewing machine to a beneficiary, Sarala, who had just learned to stitch. Another beneficiary, Sunita, to whom the team had provided a sewing machine several months earlier, came to support Sarala with some business opportunities. Sunita told the correspondent that she is now getting bulk orders and is in a position to support new beneficiaries.
They spoke to the project sponsor, DD Mishra, about this, and he told the Club, “We breed success in pockets, which results in chain reactions. We often see that when a member of society succeeds, they create success stories for others. Success is contagious, and happiness is reciprocal.” The program manager for this project, Faiza Poonwala, was proud of the outcome, and as per her, “Every individual beneficiary is a story in himself or herself.” She further added, “We share the tears of pain, hope, and joy at the same time.” This was seconded by Saras Venkataraman, President of the Rotary Club of Pune Amanora, who added, “This project has been a flagship project for our club, and we are getting a lot of support from members of our club and their networks to fund this project through crowdsourcing, but we are also looking for CSR partners to help us drive this at a much larger scale.”
Geeta Bora, who is leading spherule.org, has been instrumental in supporting the ground-level execution. As per her, “Our volunteers on the ground conduct a lot of due diligence before beneficiary identification. There are a lot of synergies that exist today with the Rotary Club of Pune Amanora, and we expect to drive it at a much bigger scale across the country and abroad as there are a lot of people who need this support.”
The Rotary Club of Pune, Amanora, and Spherule now has a pipeline of activities until March 2023 and is currently in the process of filtering and identifying real beneficiaries. This is not a one-time activity for the NGOs, but they revisit the beneficiaries after a few months to see what the beneficiaries are doing and how they are scripting their success. “It is a success in almost all the cases we have attempted so far, and it gives us a lot of confidence, joy, and happiness to drive this initiative passionately forward,” says the sponsor, DD Mishra. Mishra also stated that he and his team are also reimagining this support using technology platforms that can drive the digital democratization of wealth, along with his colleagues, to deal with the global challenge of poverty. The project was supported well on the ground by Vaishali, a spherule volunteer who worked hard in identification along with her team of other volunteers and coordinated well.
