Courtesy of Anoop Jain.
This cold Evanston winter, Anoop Jain will be homeless.
“I plan on sleeping outside when the weather is not too miserable and crashing at people’s apartments so that I can put whatever I am saving on rent straight in to the donation fund,” Jain says.
“Donation fund” is what Jain, who graduated from McCormick in June, is tending to alongside his engineering career. Since graduation the 22-year-old has been heading a $25,000 fundraiser through GiveForward.org, a local Chicago organization, to build a community kitchen for Tibetan refugees who have escaped to India. So far he has raised nearly $3,000.
“The community kitchen would basically be a place for the Tibetan refugees to come get really cheap healthy food, and then also they could work in the kitchen,” Jain says, “the idea being that if you work in the kitchen or clean dishes, then your food could be even cheaper. It would also serve as a community center for women and children.”
“It was sort of an accident that it happened to be Tibetan refugees. It didn’t matter to me who the people were.”
“One of the big ideas for this organization is Tibetan cultural preservation, so it would really encourage people to cook traditional Tibet food which I think is really important because there’s less and less people cooking that food,” Jain says. “It would be a great place for them to practice it or even give foreigners cooking lessons.”
Jain’s fundraising path to helping others, though, first began with destruction in his own hometown.
“I’m from New Orleans and so after Katrina, I felt the refugee experience first-hand and I was really lucky,” Jain says.
Jain was fortunate enough to have family in Houston, Texas to provide him shelter, but despite his protection, Jain could not stop thinking about those who were not as lucky.
Soon after Katrina, Jain spent the first two months of the summer helping gut houses in New Orleans. There he found a volunteer organization based out of Tulane University that would allow him to teach English to Tibetan refugees in India.
“It was sort of an accident that it happened to be Tibetan refugees,” Jain says. “It didn’t matter to me who the people were.”
Jain spent the summer of 2006 in a town located in the Himalayas named McLeod Ganj, a spot for refugees to escape to during this period of Tibetan and Chinese struggle. He came back to Northwestern with a passion for their cause, which he carried with him through graduation.
Jain works an engineering day job in Northbrook, but has found the balance between work and this fundraising project easier than expected.
“I have always had multiple things going on in life. While I was in school, I was very involved with ASB and WNUR and on top of that I was in McCormick,” Jain says.
“I see working on this project as a break from my day job. I think that working in the corporate world gets very monotonous and so at the end of the day, or even during the day, if I have some time, I always am working on ways to collect more money or spread the word.”
“Originally, I wanted to help them build a radio station,” Jain says. “But my contact there, Ngawang, the program director in India, said, “look, right now what we really need is a kitchen.’”
Because the town is the official home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile, it’s a very popular tourist site — which drives up the price of food, Jain says. Refugees can’t pay tourist prices, and the high altitude makes transporting food difficult.
“I told my friends in India, ‘Look, once I raise the money, I’m not just sending you the check, I will come with the money and I’m going to stay there until this thing is finished.’”
That’s where Jain comes in. Essentially a one-man fundraiser, Jain has tried to find ways to contact others to spread the word about his cause, but it has been his former and current Northwestern peers whom he has looked to for the most support.
“I just started emailing 90 of my closest friends,” he says. “I just said, ‘look, put this on your Facebook or whatever social network.’ Any working media outlets you use, please use [them]. I just started about a month ago, so it’s in its very early stages.”
Even with this support from friends and a large NU network, though, Jain still faces monetary challenges and realizes that students can only provide to a certain extent.
“I think right now my biggest obstacle is getting people involved. A lot of my good friends are abroad, and while they want to help, there is not much they can do sitting so far away,” Jain says. “Also, since most of the people I have reached out to are either recent graduates or still in school, money is not something they have a lot of.”
While the project is still in the early stages, donations can be made on the its Web site, http://www.giveforward.org/kitchenproject.
If and when the fundraising goal is reached, Jain will be leaving the Midwest altogether.
“I told my friends in India,” Jain says, “‘Look, once I raise the money, I’m not just sending you the check, I will come with the money and I’m going to stay there until this thing is finished.’”
As you loyal GiveForward blog readers know, this month we started giving out a blog award for our favorite blogs and websites. We run into a lot of great people with amazing tips and great articles, so we thought we’d share them with you and give back to some stellar sites at the same time! Our second GiveForward Awesome Blog Award winner is Karyn Brianne, creator of The Fabulous Giver.
“The competition between NU and Illinois on the football field is the result of many men and women putting in many hours of training and hard work to be the best they can be,” says Dan Bassill, director of Cabrini Connections. “When we get donors doing all they can to help nonprofits like [us], we’ll be able to do much more to help kids overcome poverty and succeed in school and careers.”
Here at GiveForward, we meet a lot of fantastic people, read a lot of cool blogs, learn great tips, etc. Well, we’ve decided to give back by awarding some of our favorite blogs and websites with the GiveForward Awesome Blog Award!