Cheryl Rebello, CEO of the CherYsh Trust has a dream. She wants to help people from rural areas achieve self-sustainability through the women in their region. To make this happen, Cheryl has partnered with several NGOs, colleges, local businesses and hotels. The CherYsh Trust joined forces with Akshaya Patra when working to foster indigenous development through the community kitchens at Haliyal.

Akshaya Patra along with other hotels in the area requires indigenous recipes, especially big quantities of sambar powder while cooking the mid-day meal. The ladies benefitting from Cheryl’s programme rose to the task, providing Akshaya Patra with 100 kilograms of sambar powder in a short span of 10 days. To make sure the powder matched Akshaya Patra’s high standards, it was put through stringent quality tests and scored high on nearly every parameter. According to Cheryl this was a proud moment for them all when she broke the good news to the ladies. “Now it was no longer subjective or charity. It was about quality,” she said.

The programme is now looking to scale up operations at the community kitchen. To raise funds for this, Shantha Pedru Dodmani from Tatwangi village in Haliyal taluk ran the TCS World 10k marathon in Bangalore recently. Explaining the impact the kitchen has had on the local community, Shantha described it as a “transformation”. The kitchen has helped create employment and foster development in the region, and also provided women with the confidence to be entrepreneurs.

Training sessions are provided to these women in collaboration with Hotel Gateway-Lakeside and Akshaya Patra. These sessions address topics like personal and cooking hygiene, efficient cooking methods and learning local recipes. According to Cheryl, these sessions have helped the ladies rise to the challenge and raise their expectations too.

Akshaya Patra is very proud to have the opportunity to partner with the CherYsh Trust to help support and guide local communities so they can develop into self-sustaining societies.

Akshaya Patra’s Baran kitchen completes one decade on 25th April, and looking back we see a 10 year legacy of fulfilment, joy and transformed lives.

The Baran kitchen was conceptualised in 2005, when a survey was taken in the district that revealed a large presence of poor and malnourished children. Born to low-income nomadic tribal families employed as labourers, these children were constantly moving from place to place, forgoing their education too.

Though it was apparent it was crucial to set up a kitchen here, the poor road connectivity and infrastructure made it impossible to set up one of Akshaya Patra’s large centralised kitchen units in this region. So the Baran unit became Akshaya Patra’s first ‘decentralised’ kitchen. With support from the local Sarpanch (head of the village) of the area, Akshaya Patra hired and trained women from self-help groups to cook the nutritious food in kitchens across the district, and feed the children.

The Baran kitchen has had some huge advantages to the women and children engaged in the programme. Very often the students benefitting from the food are children of the women employed in the kitchens. This has allowed the cooks the ability to provide safe, nutritious food to their children every day, given them permanent employment so they no longer live as migrant labourers and enabled their children to attend school regularly.

Today Akshaya Patra employes 215 women in the decentralised kitchen, feeds 9,855 children across 101 schools in the region, and also provides nutrition to 1,695 infants across 48 Anganwadi centres.

Though it was a challenge in the beginning to set up the decentralised kitchen, being strangers in an unknown locality, it was a challenge Akshaya Patra gladly accepted. During these past ten years the Foundation has built a fulfilling relationship of trust with the beneficiaries as well as the employees in the region, which has helped spread Akshaya Patra’s programme to all the villages in the district.