‘Free the flyover’: An initiative by Goodera and The Ugly Indian

Recently, a CSR lifecycle and volunteering management platform, Goodera became partners with The Ugly Indian to assemble corporate professionals in Bengaluru. The aim of the collaboration is to ‘free the flyover’ from unwanted posters and dirt, by painting and repairing them.

India is expected to be the youngest nation across the globe, as around 250 million people are expected to join the country’s workforce by 2030.

Through volunteerism, the youth has the power to contribute in solving the developmental challenges, while enhancing the social participation, individual skills, and inclusion.

An anonymous group, The Ugly Indian (TUI) follows this model and collaborates with city professionals, between the age group of 25-40. The team has successfully fixed a number of dirty spots in and around Bengaluru.

Goodera, with an aim of powering the world of good, has adopted a similar approach. Through their volunteer mobile-based application mobilized over 120 professionals at Nayandahalli Junction in Bangalore. The idea was to ‘free the flyover’ of unwanted posters and dirt by painting it.

Abhishek Humbad, Founder of Goodera, stated, “Volunteering is one of the strongest expression of a true shared economy. Our deep understanding of the development sector has enabled us to build a first-of-its-kind technology platform that enables corporate social responsibility (CSR)/ sustainability teams and corporate volunteers to continuously track updates of the CSR and volunteering projects they are working on, in real time, with last-mile visibility through impact dashboards.”

The journey of Goodera began a few years ago when Abhishek and Richa Bajpai, his co-founder, established a startup based on renewable energy in Mahbubnagar, Andhra Pradesh. While working on their project, both of them realized how lack of transparency in the CSR space brings up different issues.

The co-founders of Goodera took this as an opportunity and decided to build a one-of-a-kind CSR lifecycle management platform in February 2014.

“It is a challenge to convince a large enterprise to buy technology regarding CSR. It is not easy, but it is a huge success when they are convinced. Once the initial set of clients came in and people started buying, there was an exponential increase of clients getting on board and NGOs getting donors,” Abhishek added.

Over the last few decades, the development sector of India has gradually evolved, and is playing an essential role in the sustainable growth of the country. Recently enforced CSR law has helped in encouraging corporates to promote a culture of giving and volunteering.

The technology platform of Goodera helps them in creating an impact, while providing effective monitoring and constructive evaluation. In October 2017, during Daan Utsav, which is a celebration of giving, Goodera provided its platform free of cost to corporates, to promote giving within their organisations.

Sarika Kulkarni, Founder at Raah Foundation said, “The platform has not only helped us and our donors measure and evaluate our investments better but the company has been instrumental in helping us drive initiatives such as Daan Utsav and other giving initiatives at scale.”

Goodera hopes to collaborate with The Ugly Indian and corporates for a sustained and a long-term engagement. It aims to adopt the maintenance of the flyover for a year. Besides, it also wishes to deploy its technology in order to continuously monitor and track the status of the flyover that has been revamped.

In the upcoming days, Goodera has a target to reach out to many more corporates and empower them with the solutions. It is also aiming at increasing employee volunteering and to help manage CSR efforts globally.