One child can have a huge impact on another child’s life with just a simple donation. Encouraging a child to do something outside the realms of academia in support of another child helps foster a sense of compassion and shapes a grateful attitude towards society. This is what makes the Me & You campaign organised by The Akshaya Patra Foundation inspiring.

The campaign encouraged young children from two international schools in Bengaluru to contribute something to our beneficiary children in Government schools. The campaign drove home the fact that by sacrificing something as small as Rs.63, even children can help feed an Akshaya Patra beneficiary for a month.

The campaign, which has so far run for one month, had youth volunteers from IIM Indore and Flame participating and encouraging students to sacrifice some of their small desires to feed a child. The first phase of the campaign was organised at Primus Public School on June 17, 2015. Volunteers from The International School Bangalore and Chitrakala Parishad joined the second phase of the campaign at Prakriya Public School on July 9, 2015.

The students from the two schools made generous donations, some of them even willing to donate their pocket money towards the cause. The 5th grade students from Primus school collated a generous contribution of Rs.66,000 which will be utilised to feed children in our beneficiary schools.

This generosity displayed at such an early age is heart-warming and will undoubtedly help the students become socially responsible citizens who make giving a regular part of their lives.

The one thing all 7 billion of us – regardless of all our differences – have in common is our home. We all share a little bit of space on this planet Earth, so it’s important that we work together to preserve it. That’s why the theme for World Environment Day 2015 as chosen by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is ‘Seven Billion Dreams. One Planet. Consume with Care.’

Each of our actions on an individual, organisational and community level, impact the environment in some way, and it is up to us to choose whether this will be positive or negative. At Akshaya Patra we have chosen to adopt environment friendly methods of running our mid-day meal programme.

One of our big initiatives in ensuring green practices is the implementation of a solar plant at our Vasanthapura kitchen in Bengaluru. This plant has the capacity to produce 70 units of power a day, and is used to run all the applications in the kitchen that work on single phase power like the computers, fans and other systems.

The plant runs through the use of photovoltaic (PV) cells which convert sunlight to direct current electricity through the course of the day. Using the power of these cells the plant has the ability to run till 4 am. With basic maintenance on a yearly basis, the plant has the capacity to provide environment friendly, reliable energy to the kitchen for decades. Through this plant, Akshaya Patra has reduced its dependence on non-renewable sources of energy to function.

Besides choosing to adopt solar power, there are so many other ways to reduce our negative impact on the environment. Some of the alternative methods we’ve adopted at Akshaya Patra are implementing effluent treatment plants, reducing our carbon emissions by optimising our meal delivery routes and installing BioUrja plants to utilise waste for energy.

Akshaya Patra is also adopting ISO 14001 standards of implementing its Environment Management System (EMS) in the Hubballi, Ballari, HK Hill and Vasanthapura kitchens in Karnataka. ISO is an international organisation for standardisation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. We aim to receive ISO certification for the EMS programmes in the four locations in the coming months.