Coimbatore :
City boy bags a $1000 grant from a US based NGO, Pollination Project, after public voting chose his project – Nofoodwaste – as the best initiative among many others nominated from across the world. Padmanaban Gopalan and his two friends, Sudhakar and Dinesh have been actively working for over a year since October, 2014 to collect excess food at weddings and hotels that could be packed and given to the hungry in Coimbatore.
His competitors included Mark Devries from New York whose project was Citizen Drone Project in which he uses drones to gather information about factory farming methods, Maria Maneos from Eagleville, Pennysylvania, for project Prison Arts programme and Samantha N Ngcolomba from Johannesburg, South Africa for the project Lady Liberty in which attorneys were given a platform to help abused women.
“Out of 150 applications, we selected four outstanding finalists working on human rights, social justice, animal advocacy, environment, arts activism, and women’s rights,” wrote Ari Nessel, founder and director of Pollination Project. The voting closed on July 17 and he won by a margin of over 4000 votes. The grant was received recently. Padmanaban who won only based on the public voting said he was delighted by the news. “I got to know about this funding through a friend and applied for it. Generally, there is no voting system. They scrutinize the project and grant it. But since this was their 1000th grant, they launched the public voting system,” he said. He has now launched a Zero Hunger Hour campaign that would be marked on October 16 on World Food Day between 12:30pm to 1:30pm when they would feed several hungry people. “We will use this grant to mobilize people into the campaign. We have already written to various international NGOs to make it a global phenomenon and have received positive responses,” he said.
Ask him how this grant has changed his life and he says people who hardly noticed him have also begun offering help. “Earlier, when we were scouting for sponsors, nobody took us seriously. We used our own funds and packaged and transported the food,” he said. But after the award, the Rotary Club of Coimbatore gifted them a that has made their task simpler. The team plans to expand it to Tirupur, Erode, Salem, Krishnagiri and Dharmapuri.
He will soon launch a mobile application that would help people look for locations close by where extra food could be donated. They would be guided with a map and GPS system that would show 100 spots where excess food could be delivered. “On October 2, we will launch the application and the Zero Food Hour campaign,” he said. “The idea is to promote this concept of not wasting food by feeding the poor,” said Padmanaban. Meanwhile, the team is in talks with the city corporation to extend it to all the wards and zones. “If the civic body provides us with land, where food could be collected and saved in cold storage, transporting food could be easier. Moreover, people would know where to give excess food and this would help create more awareness,” he said.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Coimbatore / by Komal Gautham / Septemeber 26th, 2015