DV Seminar: Anshu Gupta
Monday, June 4th, 2007Date: Monday 4 Jun
Location: DV Lounge
Time: 10-11am
Speaker bio:
Growing up in a family of four that barely had enough, Anshu always felt the pain of the needy. Years later, he heard an echo within him that couldn’t be denied. With his wife, he took 67 items of clothing from their closet and donated it. Soon after, he quit his corporate job, and started ‘Goonj’ — a Hindi word that means echo. Six years later, Goonj transports over 10,000 kilograms of donated clothes every month, to the most remote regions of India. Moreover, they’ve done it largely with a volunteer network! It’s an incredible story.
Anshu grew up in Dehradun (one of the states where I piloted Knowledge Games), has a communications background, worked at a telecom company and quit in 1998 to start Goonj (http://goonj.org/). He is an Ashoka fellow (http://www.ashoka.org/node/2523 and http://www.changemakers.net/journal/300510/displaydis.cfm) and has recently won a World Bank Global Development Marketplace award (http://dmblog.worldbank.org/and-winners-are-0).