In a country where millions of people go hungry and with no cloth to cover up their body every day, an account manager cum social changemaker has come up with an initiative “Second Bite” to feed the need with food and cloth. We all the time love to eat every time at home, restaurants, hotels or hostels and often organise feasts for others. However, very often a good quantity of food is left over and find its wat to garbage bins. To tackle this issue, they made a start with the city of Chandigarh in 2007 to ensure that no one goes to sleep with an empty stomach by turning the food which might have found itself in trash, into a delicious meal for someone who might have slept another night on the walkway without having meal. The team approached and requested people to make packets of their leftover food and contact them. “To our surprise, we received 300 packets/day from the very first day of our campaign. This amazing response motivated us to reach more than 1000 underprivileged people every day in the following 5 years.” Ms. Manisha Gothi (Founder of HHF)
She believes that wasting food is a crime as it is a wastage of our resources and man hours. On one side the country is fighting to eradicate malnutrition and hunger, on other, a large quantity of food is going down the drain because of the lack of awareness. She aims to end food waste and hunger and to make the nation “Hunger Free”. The team recovers surplus leftover food from weddings, households or hostels, parties, functions, and donates it to the neediest people.
She replicated the same initiative in Patna in 2013 and diversified its target by including dormitories and function halls as well. This time, they satiated the hunger by distributing approximately 1000 food packets everyday with increase to 3000 packets per day. Then, in 2018, She expanded this work in Hyderabad to distribute 400-2000 food packets every day.
Apart from this, she along with her teammates has conceptualised an initiative in the marginalised areas of Hyderabad wherein a group of 20 families of beggars & commercial sex workers are trained in different trades. “If the pilot succeeds, we intend to make this a social enterprise and replicate it to a few more locations with a higher target of 150 families in the first phase of Hyderabad”, said Ms. Manisha Gothi (Founder of Happy Hearts Foundation (HHF))
This idea has the power to transform the livelihood and give them (the beggars, sex worker and Transgender) dignity and respect, which will be a huge game changer in coming times.” Since we are highly religious, we believe we earn punya (Dashwant) by giving alms to the poor. This ‘punya’ market is very huge and it is growing gradually,”
We urged the government to allow the organisation to identify the people and issue them identity cards so his group could differentiate between those really in need of help and those part of rackets.
The trust also runs a ‘Deepalaya’& food basket at Secunderabad in Hyderabad, wherein 360 children from these families are being taught. Manisha’s dream project is to empower commercial sex workers, transgender and No More orphan. She believes that orphanage can be turned into government hostels whoch will give more open space and inclusive environment to those childrens. Furthermore, this will considerably aid the children’s psycho-social development and save them from physical or sexual abuses that often occurs at such spaces