Collaborate, Catalyze, Cultivate: Learnings from our Covid relief work

At CSEI, we have positioned ourselves as impact ecosystem builders. The simplest definition of an ecosystem is a community that interacts with its environment. ATREE has been working with indigenous communities like Soligas around BR Hills in the Chamarajanagar district of Karnataka for over 25 years. Our work cannot exist in isolation from the ground reality that Covid has severely affected the communities we work with.

ATREE’s BR and MM Hills field stations are located in a forested area with sizable tribal populations. There are many social and environmental organizations like the Institute of Public Health (IPH), Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra (VGKK), Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) among others, working on different aspects of improving the well-being and livelihoods of the rural communities here. Led by IPH and VGKK, a group of volunteers from multiple institutions have come together to work with the district administration, hospitals and other healthcare providers to provide critical Covid care. (more on that here).

Helping the communities we work in, tide over these Covid times, is a moral responsibility. Simultaneously, the question these frontline organizations are exploring is how to build a better healthcare infrastructure that will remain in the long run, even as we prioritize the crisis at hand.

Given that we do not have public health professionals at CSEI, could we possibly make a difference? And even as we play a supporting role to frontline public health organizations, how does this experience inform our own ‘daily programming’?

Read the full post on our blog.