From access
to dignity.

Shakti Foundation was registered as a Society under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. The founding vision was integration — not a single-issue NGO, but an organisation that would grow with its communities across multiple dimensions of development.

The earliest work focused on children with special needs in urban informal settlements — creating safe, structured environments where families previously had no access to therapeutic or educational support. This established the relational foundation that Shakti would build every subsequent programme on.

The Ghazipur landfill — one of Asia's largest — was both the problem and the opportunity. Women waste-pickers worked in hazardous, informal conditions with no income security or social protection. Shakti's response was to build an alternative livelihood pathway using the waste itself as raw material.

The first products were simple: paper items made from recycled flower waste. But the model was deliberate — train women in craft skills, link them to markets, and build their income base from something they could own. This principle still drives Gulmeher today.

A critical insight from the livelihoods work: women could not participate in training and production if their young children had nowhere safe to go. The creche wasn't a standalone programme — it was infrastructure for women's economic participation.

This early integration of childcare and livelihoods became a design principle: all verticals must account for family-level realities, not just individual programme participants.

85.5% of children in Shakti's catchment areas were not enrolled in any school at baseline. The Panchi programme addressed this not just through remedial tuition but through holistic engagement: digital literacy, co-curricular activities, mental health sessions, school readiness, and direct government school mainstreaming.

Panchi centres later expanded to Kalyanpuri and Bhuwapur. The NIOS pathway (Panchi Udaan) created a formal qualification route for school dropouts and working youth aged 16+. Adult literacy for women was integrated as Udaan.

60%+ of Safai Saathis in Shakti's communities were not linked to any government welfare scheme despite eligibility. 80%+ lacked the documentation to even begin the process. Shakti's financial inclusion work started with documentation drives — Aadhaar, PAN, bank accounts — and built from there.

The Customer Service Point (CSP) banking terminal at Ghazipur enabled on-site banking transactions, eliminating the barrier of travelling to a branch. This model was later replicated across CIRCLE Centres and informed the CSC rollout.

Gulmeher was already operating as a structured production unit under a Green Producer Company model — not a training programme. This period marked growth in product quality, design sophistication, and market reach. Women earned through structured piece-rate and earnings models that created predictable income pathways.

The Diwali season emerged as the strongest revenue driver — a pattern that still holds. Corporate gifting became the anchor channel, with bulk orders from impact-conscious brands providing volume and working capital predictability.

Shakti's systems infrastructure distinguishes it from peer organisations. Live monitoring dashboards track all field indicators in real time — funders can access data independently without waiting for scheduled reports. Gender-disaggregated views are standard output, not add-ons.

The Rakshak Card — Shakti's proprietary beneficiary tracker — records 12+ scheme linkages per individual, cross-referenced against Aadhaar to prevent duplication. It has been used across all three UNDP Utthaan contracts and now covers 1,521 beneficiaries.

The three UNDP Utthaan contracts (total value ₹40.09 lakhs) represent the most rigorous external validation of Shakti's delivery capacity. Phase 3 alone covered 49 locations across 2 states and 5 districts — achieving 166% of single linkage targets and 101% of double linkage targets.

Gulmeher's artisan income data tells the story: artisans with >₹1L annual earnings grew from 0 in 2021-22 to 3 in 2022-23, 16 in 2023-24, and 23 in 2024-25. Total artisans engaged grew from 45 to 97 over the same period.

This period also saw formal skilling partnerships take shape — exploring employability pathways in digital literacy, beauty & wellness, stitching, and artisanal crafts for youth from Safai Saathi households. A pipeline between skilling and Gulmeher absorption began to form.

The CIRCLE model — Community Information and Resource Centre for Livelihoods and Empowerment — is the culmination of 15 years of learning. It is not a building. It is a delivery architecture: the same team, the same geography, the same families, across all three verticals simultaneously.

A child mainstreamed into school at Ghazipur in 2017 is now a NIOS candidate in 2025. Her mother now earns above ₹1 lakh annually through Gulmeher. Her father's banking and scheme linkages were managed through the same centre's CSP. That compounding is the CIRCLE model working as designed.

What makes the model durable is the people behind it — a team built gradually, each person adding depth to what the last brought. The work did not scale because of systems alone. It scaled because committed individuals chose to stay and grow with the communities they served. As Majrooh Sultanpuri's verse captures it: "Log saath aate gaye aur karwan badhta gaya" — people kept joining, and the caravan kept growing.