1 million meals, GD app and more…

Hi all,

I wanted to share an update with you regarding GD and some of my thoughts for the future.

Across the whole organisation, volunteers have been working tirelessly with our various partners to distribute food and hot meals to vulnerable people in the UK, Nigeria, Uganda, Morocco, Nepal, and India.  When we started our relief efforts in Luton on March 15th, Hardik bhai and Hetal ben prepared 8 meals for elderly people on the first day, and we never had any idea that we would distribute over 1 million meals worth of food produce globally.  This is over 450,000 kilograms of food produce. This also includes huge food donations including 40,000 packs of Tyrrells crisps (the posh ones). A staggering 1000+ donors have contributed to our effort across the world including food businesses, government bodies, charities, and normal people like you and me. The BBC and over 20 newspapers have covered our work and our videos have been seen by over 3 million people over the last 3 months giving us a huge opportunity to grow our work. This is just the beginning.

The whole idea of Go Dharmic is for us as individuals to be responsible for our own social actions and get involved in relieving the suffering of others and improving lives. It is more than just a charity.  It’s a community of people who want to live by universal principles of Love, Compassion, Service, Friendship, Non-harming, Peace, Truth and Charity. We want to be the most efficient platform for social giving, enabling public donations to go to the causes but for this to happen we need skilled workers to grow GD and companies like Futures First who play a key role in powering Go Dharmic.  Their belief in GD ultimately allows us to operate on this scale and we need more corporate partners to continue this growth trajectory.  Futures First helped transform our look and feel by investing in the GD brand identity which was developed by Kosta Rakicevic. I believe this was one of the game changers for GD which helped us create our identity through colour, imagination and design, something all organisations need.  To give you an idea, for about 4 years of distributing food to the homeless, we received about £500.00 of donations in London.  As soon as we started wearing our high visibility vests and set up our marquee saying Love all, Feed all, we raised about £70 on the first day!  This is the impact of identity.  We want when people see GD volunteers, they feel the comfort that these people are genuinely working hard to help others.

We will continue to work on our various campaigns which sit with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and have a high social return on investment, relying entirely on human kindness to deliver our objectives.  Our community currently operates on Slack, Zoom, Google, and 163 Whatsapp groups around the world! We also have great Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin pages. It’s a miracle that we have got this far operating like this but we need a better way for us all to communicate.

Many of you would not even know that 2 days ago we did a food distribution program in Gurugram with our CSR Partners Estee Advisors led by Rakesh Kaul and Sandeep Tyagi who helped us distribute over 100,000 meals worth of rations to disadvantaged communities. This is news worth sharing, and we want to inspire each other in different places in the world by launching an app to help us all communicate easier and bring our community closer. I believe community engagement is the key to better and greater social results and we want to bring good, well-meaning people together.

We need young people volunteering alongside experienced business friends to make our world a better place.  Through helping others they will also learn invaluable life lessons from successful business leaders who can help them grow both personally and professionally. Shirish Saraf, a close friend and CEO of private equity firm Samena Capital, has spent so much time working with people on the ground across the region to power our India food distribution. He has helped mobilise celebrities, prominent business people and kindhearted donors to help put meals in the hands of very poor people across India. Just imagine the amazing ‘work experience’ a young person would have gained by working with him to implement this effort.  We will soon cross a million meals in India alone.

Our headquarters will still be in London at the Business Design Centre, but we as well as nearly every other organisation will have a greater virtual focus on communication and delivering our goals. The GD app, as well as all of the other great tools and platforms available to us, will be important for our efficient functioning but our principles are still central.  We want to make changes now by launching campaigns to help others.

Thank you to everyone who continues to believe in GD and the idea that ordinary people can make a dent and impact at a global level.  Our US Charity registration is currently in process and we look forward to working closely with our friends in states to increase our work, and we are moving from strength to strength.   As the Dalai Lama so rightly said, “The planet does not need more successful. people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds.”

I look forward to meeting you again soon and giving you a hug and discussing how we take GD forward together.

All love,
Hemal Randerwala
Chairman
Go Dharmic Welfare Foundation