Vadaavaran Collective Baroda

Many thanks to United way of Baroda and Centre for Environment Education for recognising Vadaavaran in ‘Decentralised Waste Management’ at the Environment Conclave 2023! We are grateful for the support our community as we all work towards a greener future 🌏

A huge congratulations to all the team members, Sakhi Mandals, volunteers, mentors, coaches, waste workers and citizens of Vadodara whose care and combined efforts have paved the way so far. 🌻

First image credit: United Way of Baroda

A lovely day out for Team at Savitri Urban Food Forest. .urbanforest...
from CU visited us from Mumbai and we showed her and members from SEWA Ahmedabad around our concept permaculture garden.

Our OG member gang- Rajasi .rasa, Abhinav , Ananya Patel along with for reunion!

The hardworking ladies of Sama Sakhi Mandal of GT Baroda Team are busy making compost from food waste from nearby vegetable vendors.

Here are Kala Ben and Rekha Ben showing the GT team (.challenge , ) and friends from SEWA Ahmedabad ( ) their fresh batch of compost and how they sell it. 🌱

These ladies are part of L3 Gigatonne team - They collect waste from nearby Swati Market 🛒...Their composters are a few feet away from the vendors so they don’t have any transport. They have also been managing the accounts book for selling and purchase of compost by local customers.

If interested in buying compost from these ladies, please contact Gayatri Ben @+91 90162 48513 🌾🌾🥞🥞

The hardworking ladies of Sama Sakhi Mandal make compost from waste by nearby vegetable vendors, and sell them.
Here are Kala Ben and Rekha Ben showing the GT team .challenge , and friends from SEWA Ahmedabad fresh batch of compost. They have also been managing the accounts book for selling and purchase of compost by local customers.

If interested in buying compost from these ladies, please contact :

GULM ( Gujarat Urban Livelihood Mission) and EDI (Entrepreneurship development Institute) with UCD(Urban community development) visited all of our Vadaavaran's site on 27 Dec, 2022 to look how we're developing waste to wealth system.
We explained them the problems that we faced while doing all this.

The actions of our small group has resulted in decomposition of around 17,000+ kg of waste into compost, which is equivalent to abating 20,000+ kg of CO2.

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Gayatri Ben, lead member of Laxmi Sakhi Mandal, has multifarious entrepreneur skills to be an independent woman.She is a hardworking women with a keen interest in stitching cloths. Her outgoing work towards the environment after being a part of vadaavaran from 2022 is marvellous.

By maintaining the cleanliness of the Swati market (a self-sustainable site) she has independently composted approximately 5 tonnes of organic waste by collecting and interacting with the vegetable vendors.

Thus, she is a superwoman who handles all her responsibility to the best of her ability.

VMC officials came to visit our waste to wealth initiative at kadakbazar.

Meet the team behind the Sakhi Mandal Waste-to-Wealth Project 🌟

Aditya Tripathi - Strategist and Project Leader
Aditya is a Physics graduate from MSU, Baroda working on co-creating a climate action group with local communities and making them self sustainable.

.university

"Over the past few months, our team has been working with Sakhi Mandals (women-led self-help groups) around Vadodara to effect climate action in our city.

We connect with Sakhi Mandals and train them in waste management and composting, enabling them to gain sustainable, independent sources of income that reduce the carbon footprint and bring economic benefits to their local community.

With our support, these women leverage their networks to collect kitchen and market waste, build decentralised composting units and manage a community-led waste-to-wealth system in low-income areas, which we call Waste-to-Wealth Hubs.

The Sakhi Mandal Waste-to-Wealth Project is supported by and the Gigatonne Challenge .university

🥳 We are happy to share that Vadaavaran Collective, through two of its members, is awarded the “Swachhta Saarthi Fellowship”, organised by the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India under its “Waste to Wealth” Mission. ♻️ 🗑

As a part of the fellowship, we receive ₹4000 per month for a year’s period. The mission assists and augments the Swachh Bharat and Smart Cities projects by leveraging innovation among citizens and communities to extract resources of value. This falls right in the purview of the ‘waste to value’ ideal Vadaavaran practices. 🐛🌿🌱

One would find these familiar faces at workshops with Vadaavaran. 🗺

🪴 Shaistah, Rucha, Sara and Smita Aunty have taken up multiple workshops with various residents and kids. Those entail fun walkthroughs through composting and segregation essentials along with interactive quizzes and doubt sessions.
Others members like Zubair, Abhinav, Aditya and Kruti also chip in and help out during these.

We’re grateful for this team and the efforts they put in to engage with the green community. 🌱

🪴📢Call for new members!

https://complexity.university/gtbarodateam?utm_source=FB%20ad&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=GT%20Baroda&utm_content=interests-baroda&fbclid=IwAR3d8mI9pNFYdxHiafRoVzLCdYTxurubUgf0o73cIkmv5oNgbmjIGN7qN84

We are looking for motivated people with 3-4 hours to spare per week with any of these roles:
🧩 Logistical/ Operational Support: Documentation, Data Collection, Monitoring
📰 Community Outreach: Relationship building, conducting workshops and activities
🤝 Stakeholder Engagement: Connecting to local stakeholders and communities, building partnerships
🏘 Project Coordination: Managing on-going/ new projects with local societies
💻 Social Media: Social media account management and design

Join forces with Vadaavaran and help up cut down 10 tonnes of carbon emissions per month.

📌 New members have an official orientation call on Monday, 27/09, so we hope you apply before that. That being said, applications are looked at on a rolling basis, so there is no deadline to applying.

🔗 Head to the link in our bio to know more about the GT Challenge and join the team. We hope to see you on Monday (or later)!

🪴What have we been up to?

Vadaavaran has been collaborating with Nilamber Bellissimo II in helping the society go green.

♻️The society has mandated segregation of wet waste, recyclables and rejects in every household 15th August onwards.

The wet waste is being handled by us, wherein we compost it and return it back, transforming the waste to wealth. 🍯

The last month recorded Vadaavaran’s highest daily collection with waste upwards of 1000 kgs getting composted. 🏅

Nilamber Bellissimo stands out as an inspiration for societies that realise the importance of waste segregation and its alarming need today. We hope that more societies in the city look up to this initiative and realise that waste can be imagined beyond landfills. 🪵🪱

It's now easier to contact Vadaavaran Collective Baroda.

A glimpse of the meet up last Sunday🌻
We had a great group of people who felt as deeply about climate action visit us at our plot in BIDC where we had a conversation about community composting and ways to take it forward.
Society members from Darshanam and Nilamber Bellisimo 2 that have started community composting joined us to talk about their experience.
Glad to see the initiative moving forward 💫

Get to know the faces behind Vadaavaran Collective 🌻

🌾 Ananya is a multi-disciplinary designer, researcher and illustrator, whose work involves finding dynamic ways to activate and disseminate research. These projects often fall in the intersections between various subject areas and disciplines, including gender, cultural identity, and ecology.
She has been working on independent projects since graduating from Goldsmiths College in 2018, and has presented work at the Victoria & Albert Museum, South London Gallery, Lakshmi Vilas Palace Vadodara, Dutch Design Week, and the first Trans-South East Asia Triennial in Guangzhou.

🌾 Abhinav Dey has been living and working with farming communities across India and Africa to co-create climate smart businesses and technologies through www.freedesign.co.in.

Last Friday our team had the chance to speak with the amazing .composting.
Vasuki Iyenger sir is a waste management specialist in Bengaluru with over 10 years of experience working with community composting and city-wide green initiatives. Lately he has been influencing many Indians including our team by his intriguing composting videos and a strong reel game...and it was a pleasure to hear from him in person.

He shared with us-
1. How segregating at source is an essential process to be performed with attentiveness.
2. How we can compost at the comfort of our homes.
3. How the compost is a healthy feed for our plants,
and helped our team understand the aerobic composting process in a deeper sense, composting troubleshooting and gave us a handful of guidelines for successful community composting.
We thank you sir, for encouraging and inspiring us!

"Faces behind Vadaavaran #3

🌿 Rajasi Rastogi is an Industrial Design graduate from the University of Illinois. She works as a design consultant for NGOs and social enterprises working towards creating accessibility and disability inclusion. Rajasi believes that global problems can only be solved at a grassroots level. She is passionate about bringing together young people to tackle these complex challenges and is currently setting up a social innovation lab in Baroda.

🌿 Suhrd Joshi is a designer, among other things. Currently, he works for a startup on weekdays. On weekends, when in Vadodara, he paints and plants things on the street through his initiative, Retrofit. Whatever little time he gets within his schedule usually gets used up for other sustainability-based initiatives of his such as rooftop gardens, edible cutlery, detachable head toothbrushes and more. Over the years he has learned to stop throwing around big words, just get on with the hustle and grind.

What we have been upto?

🍁Over the past few weeks, our team conducted brainstorming workshops with residents of Darshanam Central Park Apartments at Sayajigunj, where we figured out the best solution for their society to start segregating waste and composting it.

🍁Residents came forward and inspired by DIY videos of .composting, an enthusiastic resident Mr. Deven Deshpande prototyped a low-cost composting bin.

🍁Now, 6 such bins are placed all across Darshanam Flats where residents can put their raw organic food waste which will naturally become compost!

We are excited to see how this pans out. We are also in talks with societies around Vasna to incorporate similar models for them.... More community composting updates coming soon! 😀

⛅️ બરોડા મોટા હૃદય વાળું એક પ્રાચીન શહેર છે. આખું શહેર વડ ના ઝાડ, વન્ય પ્રાણીઓ અને અસંખ્ય પરંપરાગત કલાઓ થી ભરેલું આ આપણું ઘર છે.

હાલ માં, બરોડા માંથી પસાર થતી વિશ્વામિત્રી નદી પ્લાસ્ટિકમાં ડૂબીને સુકાઈ રહી છે. વડ ના ઝાડ કપાઈ રહ્યા છે અને આપણે ખાલી ઉભા રહીને આ વિનાશના સાક્ષી નહીં બની શકીએ.

અમારું લક્ષ્ય સુનિશ્ચિત કરે છે કે આ સમૃધ્ધિ આપણા પછીના લોકો માટે ખાલી યાદગીરી ના રહી જાય.🌞🌚

Previous two Sundays with Vadaavaran have been eventful and exciting, getting to know and meet with new members and innovators! 🍋

We talked about green spaces, social experiments, our motivations and reflections, and the ways we would we abating 10 tonnes and upward in the coming months.
🌳🐞🐛

Get to know the faces behind Vadaavaran Collective 🌾

🌿 Kruti is a recent Economics graduate from Symbiosis, Pune with an inclination towards looking at the subject through pluralistic perspectives. Her interest also lies in exploring the intersections between gender, political economy and nature.

🌿 Smit Bhanushali is an innovator and builder at Build Things. Previously, he was a Lab manager running the Yuvalay Electronics Lab- an innovation space for people to learn, explore and innovate on ideas. He has also been the organiser of ‘Maker Fest Vadodara’ (2018, 2019, 2020)- an event for makers and innovators to showcase their creativity and interact with like-minded people.

🌿 Rucha Joshi is a designer and researcher currently building a digital tool for human centred product development. Apart from climate justice activism, she is interested in participative forms of policy making and investigating the role of design in democratising emerging technologies.

The three of them are Vadaavaran’s faraway friends (only geographically though ☂️)!

📣 Open Call for Local Environmental Champions 🌏

After a successful composting adventure, we are on the lookout for local champions to start a compost initiative in their society/ apartment. This is an open call for the people of Baroda who can actively represent their neighbourhood and take up local initiatives!

🌱A brief about what the process would look like-

🔸All you have to do is gather a group of 10-15 houses in your locality;
🔸Start segregating your raw and organic food waste from everyday plastic and paper waste- engaging your neighbourhood in doing the same;
🔸And then we will work together on turning the waste to valuable compost!

🌱If you see yourself being a local Ambassador, send us a message!

🌱If have any queries which you’d like to clarify before joining or want a direction to begin, please feel free to reach out.

We would love to talk about local climate action! 🐝

Get to know the faces behind Vadaavaran Collective 🧑‍🌾

🌿 Rhythm Rastogi is a third year Sociology student from Brown University, interested in researching, writing and reading about grassroots ecosystems, community organizing and urban planning, with a focus on gender and ecology.

🌿 Jay Dave is a third year Business student from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, interested in economics, international development and policy related to sustainable development on a global scale.

🍋 One can often spot them mining black gold⚱️at BIDC and sharing the bounty with fellow gardeners!

Last week, on 5th June ‘World Environment Day', Vadaavaran Collective was given the opportunity to be acknowledged as one of the local collectives in the city working towards climate change. We had the honour of being published in major newspapers like The Times of India and Sandesh, and featured on digital platforms like Our Vadodara, Watch Gujarat, Baroda Mirror, Amazing Vadodara.

We want to take a moment to thank our incredible team of volunteers, collaborators, and everyone who has helped us along this journey so far. ✨🙏

To our local community ambassadors and green neighbours for kickstarting our waste to value chain - Smita Andhare, Harshida Mody, Parul Gupta, Uma Nair, Renu Velani, Roopal Sheth, Poonam Raval, Manish Naik, Binoti Gandhi, Bhoomi Bathani, Sonal Desai, Anuja Mankad, Niki Kumra, Dipali ma'am and her lovely Green Army!

To the team players and volunteers who had a short stay with us but have made the long haul possible - Rishabh, Apramita Deshpande, Jwalin Patel, Ananya, Abhinav, Advaita Karnik, Sara, Preya, Shaistah, Jay, Ravin, Darsh, Rishil, Priya, Amanda, Aaron, Nitish, Megha, Partha, Mudit, and more.

To the brilliant experts who helped us out with essential knowledge and insights into the process - Suneet V Dabke, Arjun Singh Mehta, Nicky Scott, Dori, Varsha Ma’am & the entire Complexity University team - 10-in-10 .

We are grateful to each of you for being a part of this green community and actively widening the space for us to care of our city. Excited for where this journey takes us next… 🍀💚

Links:

Our Vadodara: https://www.ourvadodara.com/vadaavaran-collective-vadodaras-student-led-initiative-for-a-better-environment/

Article in Gujarati: https://watchgujarat.com/india/gujarat/vadodara-young-team-started-vadaavaran-project-to-save-environment

The Times of India:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/vadodara/youths-cut-carbon-footprint-by-composting-food-waste/articleshow/83266523.cms

Great lessons on the importance of planting native trees by local expert Mr. Pandya... Short and sweet!

We are a group of diverse individuals from different backgrounds ranging from designing to economics, but what brings us together is our collective dream for the planet and the city of Baroda.

Be part of the change, join us!