Covid 19 Pandemic an unprecedented global health emergency has been disrupting the lives of daily wagers without essential supply chain and logistics. Thousands of people are unable to manage their basic necessities like rent & food. However people from downtrodden community face overwhelming obstacles, as the entire world was forced to shut down due to the Covid 19 pandemic. To light up with hope to the people from vulnerable community. Retain Smilez initiated working on the ground to identify and to embrace the deserted people by providing food, provisional kits & preventive care kits by implementing the project “Namba Unavu – Community Kitchen”. Our employees & volunteers work on the motive of not to live people in hunger, especially the daily wagers, migrant workers, Auto drivers and needy at this pandemic.
Our Namba Unavu – Community Kitchen has the unique quality of delivering nutritious and healthy food at subsidized price. (Production process is done as per Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) guidelines).
Covid 19 Initiatives
During Covid 19 pandemic, to support needy with basic essentials and necessities, Retain Smilez commenced a project “Community Kitchen” on Mar 28th 2020, since the day one of the lock down. Initially we started to serve 500 food packets with water bottles every day. Later with in few days we came across many needy people and so we extended serving more than 2000 food packets per day, throughout 150 days of lock down. We feel blessed and glad that, we have fed more than 2.5 Lakhs underprivileged people, sanitary workers & daily wagers.
Since August 2020, we have provided food packets with water bottles, biscuits, fruits & energy drinks to the needy on pavements and those who are at major risk. Also dogs, cows and crows were fed out of the food drive.
Being preventive has become a big necessity for human being during Covid 19 pandemic. Retain Smilez provided more than 30,000 face masks to green warriors, street vendors, auto drivers, petrol bunk staffs, general public and underprivileged. Fruit juice & multi vitamin medicines were also provided to boost their immunity levels.
While serving food packets during lock down period, we came across many heart burdening cases which made us to expand “Namba Unavu – Community Kitchen” concept, to work & to eradicate hunger to the maximum extent. It’s the major reason for this initiative.
Project 1 – Hope for daily wagers
During the crisis, 45 crores of migrant workers were affected in India & 2.5 lakhs of workers were affected in Tamilnadu, without basic necessities. COVID 19 crises left the daily wagers into hunger and desperation. While serving at this crisis, we got an opportunity to study more about the daily wagers. Daily wage earners reply, we never imagined about this coronavirus and lock down. Now, we realized the importance of savings. By considering their worries. Since daily wage earners suffer with minimal income, they couldn’t save for their future. Our motive is to help them to have reliable meals of approximately 450 grams on daily basis at the subsidized price of Rs.10, also to improvise the habit of savings with the caption of “Save money and money will save you” at unprecedented situations, simultaneously will improvise the socio economic status of the daily wagers family.
Project 2 – Feed the Needy
As per the census taken on 2011, 1.77 million people live without basic canvas shelter. Despite of several measures implemented by the government to alleviate poverty, we visualized thousands and thousands of people living in roadside, railway platforms; pavements, bus terminus, under flyovers… It melted our heart and forced us to plan for their basic needs, so we initiated a project named “feed the needy” to support them on consecutive basis. Our Retain smilez N.G.O has been extending its helping hands to the needy through our initiatives. Our motive is to eradicate hunger to the maximum extent by identifying and serving the needy. Under this project, we feel that being a human, it’s our basic responsibility the help the most vulnerable people by providing nutritious food with water bottles, fruits, etc. on regular basis with the aim to reduce the number of street side starvers.
Project 3 – Hope through livelihood for deserted women
Being women are the mother board, by connecting the members of the family jointly. Our focus is to overcome the economic struggles of the deserted women through livelihood and to balance the socio economic inequalities. This project provides high priority for women under the following criteria. Widow, deserted, divorcee for their self-sustainability, to strengthen their family through livelihood and result in betterment of the society. As we work on with the community, the deserted women have high zeal to become economically stable & independent. Our aim is to provide hope, to uplift the deserted women through self – entrepreneurship with minimal resources by boosting up their confidence by providing an opportunity to elicit their talents, to generate their own income and take decisions for their well- being. Through this livelihood initiative, we ensure to make a deserted woman as a cynosure for other women, who are in struggle.
Project 4 – Retain our Tradition of feeding animals
In our Indian tradition we have the habit of feeding the animals mostly at temples and home. It is believed that, feeding the animals is very significant in nature. On the other side, animals have uniqueness in nature, especially cow, crow, Pigeon, dog, cat, e.t.c. In our modern culture, both the men & women are under high stress in managing their work and family. So we derived a project from Namba Unavu – Community kitchen to feed the starving strays in and around AVADI. Our aim is to retain this habit of feeding animals and prevent the street animals from starvation. During Covid 19 crises, under the complete lockdown of six months we saw many street strays starving without food. This provoked us and we have initiated to spread the awareness of feeding the animals by this project. Also human beings health is maintained as excess food refrigeration will be reduced to an extent.
Project 5 – Feed the patients & their attenders at Government Hospital
As per the census, one third of the Indian people are treated at Government Hospitals, owing to their financial instability. Our target is to alleviate hunger from grass root level in all the directions. As we aware that, deserving people from the nook and corner of the states are forced get treated at Government Hospitals. To strengthen hope and to hold them throughout the treatment we initiated to provide two chapattis with gravy and 100 grams of white rice with dhal @ Rs.1(will be utilized for the same cause). The aim of the project is to support the apt needy , especially younger children suffering from malnutrition, our motive is to provide nutritious food to help them gain adequate strength to undergo throughout the treatment. Approximately, one doctor for 11,000 patients to be treated in the Govt. hospitals.
Women Empowerment – Entrepreneurship assistance with livelihood
Women are the pillars of the family, they connect everyone together. Our retain smilez N.G.O rudimentarily focuses on women empowerment. We determined to empower the women, to improve the livelihood of the women and to provide financial independency among their family members and society. With this initiative, we support the deserving women for their sustainability, by eliciting their talents.
Our motive is to balance the socio economic inequalities. The project provides high priority for women under the following criteria. Widow, deserted, divorcee for their self-sustainability. The project is designed to design the lives of the women from the vulnerable community, results the same in enhancement of multi skills, which leads to commence new business with less resources. The main purpose of the project is to empower the talents of the women by upgrading their skills, to make them self-reliant. Such as, “Master in sewing technology & Aaree work (Embroidery)”.
