World Hope Forum INDIA
THE DAWN OF HOPE
In this special end-of-year edition of the World Hope Forum, we will be taken on an inspiring tour of incredible India’s north, south, east, and west, hearing remarkable tales of community, conservation, and craft. Reset your compass for 2023 by not missing what promises to be our greatest Hope Forum yet!
Curated by Devika Krishnan, WHF Ambassador for India
THE DAWN OF HOPE Devika Krishnan, WHF ambassador for India
THE FORAGING OF HOPE Margaret Zinyu, founder, of Woven Threads
SPINNING THE THREADS OF HOPE Amitra Sudan Saha, Ssahaworks
THE SEEDS OF HOPE Sushma Veerappa, Kandu
THE COMMUNITY OF HOPE Dr. Regi George & Dr. Lalitha Regi, Tribal Health Initiative
RESILIENCE AND HOPE Dastkar Ranthambhore
EMPOWERMENT THROUGH HOPE Nishit Sangomla, director, Somaiya KalaVidya
HOPE THAT OVERCOMES DESPAIR Shruti Jagota Mittal, project head, Commitment to Kashmir & co-founder, Zaina by CtoK
HOPE FOR GLOBAL RECOGNITION & TRADE Souroudop Ghosh, co-founder, Karghewale
SPEAKERS
Devika Krishnan
OUR WHF AMBASSADOR FOR INDIA
A designer in true measure, Devika Krishnan is currently working with various tribal women as well as weavers and artisans to restructure their business models. A graduate in ceramics from NID and with an MBA in entrepreneurial business management from ISB, Hyderabad, Devika has been a part of Dastkar since 1993 and continues to work at Dastkar Ranthambhore. Her current projects include setting up or restructuring businesses for the Gujjar Bakarwal tribe in Kashmir called Shepherdcrafts, the Lambadi women in Tamil Nadu at Porgai, wives of migrant labor in the slums of Bangalore at the AnuLife project and Joy at Work project, SEWA in Gujarat, weavers in Varanasi and artisans entrepreneurs in Srinagar via Commitment to Kashmir.
Margaret Zinyu
Founder Woven Threads
Is an entrepreneur and Founder of Studio Predilection and NID alum. She started her journey into the craft in the year 2014 having an eclectic influence. A Design initiative, the label Woven Threads by the indigenous people of Nagaland to craft innovative high-end loin loom textiles using sustainable materials and zero waste manufacturing process based on indigenous knowledge systems. The label Woven Threads has bagged the World Craft Council - Asia Pacific Region, Award of Excellence 2018 & EDIDA Elle Décor 2020 for fabrics. She is also a craft consultant and trainer in upskilling and a part-time design educator. Her Design Studio collaborates with cooperative societies and like-minded people in sustainable handloom, handicraft sector, and livelihood skills involving the younger generation. Her industry experience includes home exports, garment & paper manufacturing, museum & space design, color and materials for the automobile design industry.
Amitra Sudan Saha
SSAHAWORKS, a grassroots creative laboratory
A visual artist and scenographer, Amitra Sudan Saha, is the co-owner of “SSAHAWORKS”, a design Studio that associates & works with various creative and cultural communities. A graduate of the Indian Institute of Crafts and Design, he joined Rajeev Sethi Scenographers as a Design Lead. Among his many prestigious projects, some of his notable works are, the Artwork at Shantivan, [Adani House] at The New CBI headquarters, New Delhi, The New Mumbai Airport, The Andaaz Hyatt, and The Leela Gurgaon. The project “JIYO”, a Japan Social Development Fund facilitated by the World Bank and implemented by the Asian Heritage Foundation, where Amitra Sudan had to revive the dying craft of Sikki weaving, and, in so doing, is now a highlight of his career. The designer for social impact has traveled across the globe and received wide recognition. His documentary film, “Charkha My Life”, commissioned by the Indian Council For Cultural Relations, Govt of India, was showcased at the prestigious International event “Weaving Tradition – Textile Relation. Along with his wife Santosh, their work and close association with the textiles and Crafts of Bengal thus made their brand “SSAHA” synonymous with the mantra “Design for Change
Sushma Veerappa
KANDU
Sushma has come into Kandu’s land-to-loom work with naturally coloured cotton after decades of work in the audio-visual medium. While with the CIEDS collective, she worked as a sub-editor at Deep Focus, their film quarterly, and also conceived and executed a film education programme for school children in parallel. She began making documentaries in 1998. Her work spectrum as scriptwriter, editor, producer and director includes films about people co-operatives, leadership imaging as a participatory research tool, bio-energy, training modules for blue-collar workers, issues relating to malnutrition in children, the politics of belonging in the urban, water, women and violence. Her research for a film on the handloom industry led her to discover brown-coloured cotton. Sushma is the founder-trustee of Vikalp Bengaluru, a collective of filmmakers which has been screening documentaries in Bangalore since 2005. She is currently the general dogsbody at Kandu, working to understand decentralised systems of production in the land-to-loom value chain with naturally coloured brown cotton. Her search is for an alternative journey for cotton.
Ravi Kiran
Kandu
After graduating from Karnataka University in electronics in the year 1993, Ravi Kiran chose to work in the field of textiles/garments. For the next 4 years, he worked in a few garment factories, until he realized that his true calling was towards handcrafted textiles and made-ups. In 2010 he established 'Metaphor Racha’, a brand which works with local craftsmen-spinners, weavers, dyers, printers and tailors. Ravi engages with various co-operatives working with ambara charaka spun and hand-woven cotton textile of Karnataka and tries to bridge the gap between the rural crafts and the urban need. He is a trustee at Udaanta - working with rain-fed, chemical-free naturally coloured brown cotton, a member of Indian Handmade Collective (IHMC) a group promoting khadi, a member of Grama Seva Sangha (GSS) and works closely with 'Janapada Khadi Sangha' which believes in non-violent economies. He is Consultant Product Designer at 'Seamstress', Cochin, and is involved in product and skill development of 'kasuti' hand embroidery at 'Sakhi Sapalya', a self-help women's group based at Dharwad. He was a part of the 'khadi report' and a consultant for 'green mark' embarked under the All India Arts and Crafts Association (AIACA), Delhi. Apart from mentoring young craft-oriented brands, he is a guest lecturer at NID, Gandhinagar.
Shruti Jagota Mittal
Project Head at Commitment to Kashmir (CtoK) and Co-Founder, Zaina by CtoK
Shruti Jagota has over 16 years of work experience in the corporate and social sectors comprising companies such as Grey Worldwide Advertising, Contract Advertising, Dastkar, Fabindia, and Commitment to Kashmir (CtoK). She has spent the last 9 years devoted to the creation of sustainable rural livelihoods amongst the craft producers of the Kashmir region. Her work at CtoK has involved artisan / rural entrepreneur outreach, funding, project management, program implementation and monitoring, promotion of business & small scale entrepreneurship through targeted capacity building and product re-engineering, providing forward marketing linkages for livelihood creation of economically active rural craftspeople and stimulating processes and framework for collaboration among the stakeholders with context-specific backward and forward linkages. During Covid, in partnership with the founding trustees of CtoK, Shruti co-founded Zaina by CtoK, an eCommerce platform that makes contemporary products based on the traditional crafts of Kashmir. Zaina by CtoK is a social enterprise that aims to provide sustainable livelihoods, pride and identity to the artisans from Kashmir by bringing their creations to a platform (online and offline) accessible by all.
Nishit Sangomla
Director - Somaiya KalaVidya
Nishit Sangomla has a bachelor’s in chemical engineering from NIT Trichy. He started his career working with Reliance Industries limited as a safety engineer and then shifted to the development sector. Over the last six years, he has worked extensively with craftspeople from Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Ladakh and Gujarat, through renowned organizations and entrepreneurial ventures. Currently, he is the Director at Somaiya Kala Vidya, one of the few institutes of education for traditional artisans in Kutch and India. In 2020, he co-founded another organization – Navikarana Trust that works with the communities at the forefront of climate change in the Himalayan region by providing them with access to water and resources. Nishit strongly believes that the true changemakers for society come from within the communities, External agents of change as such I must just act as a catalyst to positive change. Somaiya KalaVidya’s and Navikarana’s vision and mission align with this thought and form the foundation for building a much better and more inclusive society.
@nishit.sangomla
Sourodip Ghosh
Sourodip is the co-founder of Karghewale, an incubator of artisan-promoted micro-enterprises that focuses on enhancing the creative agency of artisans by helping artisan-designed products reach the right market at domestic and international levels. Prior to this, he served as the Executive Director of The Handloom School, a one of its kind innovative project of WomenWeave Charitable Trust, from 2017 to 2021. As a part of the senior leadership team of WomenWeave, Sourodip led the team that designed and implemented the diversification of WomenWeave into two separate legal entities – the existing trust and a new non-profit social enterprise, for better program management of the umbrella organization. He was also an integral part of the team that drove the revision WomenWeave’s mission and vision to realign the organization to the changing externalities. He has extensively worked in the space of artisan education and contributed to formalizing its curriculum during his stint with The Handloom School. He has worked with marginalized communities across regions through his work with other grassroots organizations across such as Nav Bharat Jagriti Kendra (NBJK) and PRADAN. He is a graduate of the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA)
www.karghewale.com linkedin.com/karghewale linkedin.com/sourodip
Dr. Regi George & Dr. Lalitha Regi
Tribal Health Initiative is a Charitable Public Trust and it launched its activities in September 1993 when two doctors started an outpatient facility in a modest hut built for them by the local tribals in Sittilingi village, Dharmapuri District in Tamil Nadu. The institution is in a remote forested valley where 95% of the people are tribals. The Base Hospital, which was started in 1997, now caters to the tribal population of this remote area with a drainage area of more than 1,00,000. There is now a full-fledged 40 bedded hospital with all modern facilities: The initiative has been forming farmers’ groups in the villages and helping them in sustainable organic agriculture and the marketing of the produce. It is now a producer company called SOFA with 700 members. They have a turnover of close to 1.5 Crore last year. About 70 women in the 2 Lambadi villages have started reviving their almost extinct embroidery skills that generations before them were doing. They now make products for the Indian and foreign markets – taking pride in their art and generating money in the process.
Dastkar Ranthambhore
Dastkar Ranthambhore was set up in 1989 to address the plight of the population affected by the formation of a National park for Tigers in Ranthambhore, southern Rajasthan. The jungles of Ranthambhore which were once the hunting grounds of the local Maharaja were brought under India’s stellar Tiger conservation effort called Project Tiger in 1983. Close to 300 square miles of the region were declared as a protected tiger habitat and several villages were resettled from within this core zone to outside. People not only lost their ancestral homes and farmlands but also their old way of life. In a region that was one of the poorest in terms of literacy, employment opportunities, and gender parity, this conservation effort had a tremendous impact on the local population. In order to address this loss of livelihoods and reduce human dependence on the forest for livestock grazing and firewood mainly, Dastkar in New Delhi and Ranthambhore Tiger Foundation established Dastkar Ranthambhore that set about generating sustainable livelihoods for women from the villages surrounding the newly established National Park. In just over 3 decades, this enterprise has grown from just 6 women in one little village to over 400 bank accounts in 9 villages supporting a few thousand families. From women who were illiterate and became mothers in their early teens when the project began to their granddaughters finishing college and working in distant towns, the project has come a long way in not just bettering incomes but also improving the status of girls in this steeply patriarchal society which had high rates of female foeticide and infanticide a couple of decades ago. While there are miles to go to completely eradicate the disparity, seeing this ray of hope in these young girls in the region is a giant step in the direction of building an equitable society. The efforts of the conservationists have ensured a robust increase in the tiger population making it one of the best-managed tiger conservation efforts worldwide. Dastkar played a small but significant role in assuring its people did not need to depend on the forest produce for their daily lives. Dastkar Ranthambhore expanded its efforts to include men too in its fold and supports local crafts of leather workers, potters, dyers, and printers besides providing sewing and embroidery-based livelihoods to its women stakeholders. It is registered as a cooperative society where the women and men who work there are key representatives and signatories.
LIDEWIJ EDELKOORT
Co-Founder World Hope Forum
One of the world’s most renowned trend forecasters and colorists, Li is an intuitive thinker who constantly tracks how socio-cultural trends evolve. She is also a publisher, humanitarian, educator and exhibition curator. From 2015 to 2020 she was the Dean of Hybrid Studies at Parsons and she also founded New York Textile Month each September. She wrote the Anti_Fashion Manifesto in 2014 and is the co-author of A Labour of Love (Lecturis, 2020), presenting the work of a very new generation of conscious designers and makers. Her most recent endeavor is the World Hope Forum, dedicated to spreading hope across the globe through design in a post-pandemic landscape.
PHILIP FIMMANO
Co-Founder World Hope Forum
A trend analyst, design curator and writer, contributing to Trend Union’s forecasting books, magazines and strategic studies for international companies in fashion, interiors and lifestyle. Fimmano along with his partner Lidewij Edelkoort, has co-created exhibitions for museums and institutions around the world, including Tokyo's 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Design Museum Holon and the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. In 2011, he co-founded Talking Textiles; an ongoing initiative to promote awareness and innovation in textiles through touring exhibitions, a trend publication, a design prize and free educational programmes – including New York Textile Month, a citywide festival celebrating textile creativity each September. Fimmano teaches a forecasting masters at Polimoda in Florence and is on the board of directors for the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe.