Only fifty organizations have been bestowed with this honor globally, Project Mumbai being one of them.This is the fifteenth award for Shishir Joshi and Project Mumbai in the last three years–including the iVolunteer Hero of the Year award, the COVID Yoddha award by the Governor of Maharashtra, the COVID Warrior by the Municipal Commissioner, MCGM, the Best Startup of the year by Keto, the Green NGO of the Year by International Advertising Association and the Nutrition Award of the Year by Glenmark.
Project Mumbai is an action-oriented model of public-private-people partnership.Environment, governance, civic empowerment, community volunteering, healthcare, mobility, safety, and security are only some of the areas it has been engaged in since the time it was formed.
People are at the core of Project Mumbai’s purpose and a positive change to their lives, is the intended outcome. Project Mumbai believes that social transformation is possible only through initiatives of scale.
Over the last 200 plus days since March 2020, when the first few COVID 19 cases were reported in Mumbai, Project Mumbai has been at the forefront of the COVID 19 fight in Mumbai and this region.
During COVID, Project Mumbai provided meals to over 75 lakh citizens, medicines, cooked meals and support to senior citizens living alone and cooked meals to doctors and hospital kitchens of all the frontline hospitals-almost 1500 a day every day for over three months.
Vanity vans for women cops equipped with sanitary pads and soaps, making the largest donation of PPE Kits in the country–two lakh plus for Mumbai’s doctors and ten thousand for Mumbai Police, launching and driving a dashboard for Non COVID-19 hospitals for the benefit of Mumbaikars, were just some of the initiatives in the first 45 days.
Project Mumbai also has been running three specialized helplines for Mental Health, including a toll-free helpline in partnership with the Government of Maharashtra–SAMVAAD– and its volunteer experts have attended to calls from as many as 24 states. It subsequently also started a special facility for senior citizens emotional wellbeing, and a separate Grief counselling helpline service.Another unique effort was a community tool book on coping with emotional challenges–ideas and solutions on coping shared by citizens-which is now in the public domain.
Shishir-led Project Mumbai also co-founded a citizen driven mission to provide cooked meals to the increasing number of hungry. Khaanachahiye-–the initiative– has at last count provided over 75 lakh meals across Mumbai and the MMR.
Simultaneously, as the crisis peaked, for almost 20 days we helped set up food trucks, providing free food, fruits and drinking water to close to 45 thousand migrants and travelers going back home, from Mumbai’s road and four rail exit points.In some cases, we organized buses to Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and a train to Tamil Nadu as well.Project Mumbai’s collaborative drive also has provided grocery kits to over 20,000 families across Mumbai and over fifteen tons in food items.
In October, merging its environmental initiative, the Mumbai Plastic Recyclothon, Project Mumbai collected two and a half tons of plastic waste for recycling and donated four times–ten tons of groceries, to families in need.Two ambulances, running 24 x 7 for the Mumbai police, twenty trolleys for the Central Railway, a helpline for domestic abuse, ten thousand raincoats and four lakh masks for the Mumbai police, ten thousand face shields and fifty thousand sanitizer kits to the Maharashtra police, have been some of the other support initiatives by Project Mumbai.
More recently, Shishir-led Project Mumbai, through an MoU with the MCGM, launched a call Centre to monitor all the home quarantined patients of Mumbai, 15,000 every month.In October, Project Mumbai launched SALAAM RAKSHAK– India’s largest voluntary gratitude art project to honor COVID warriors. As part of this, 41 railway stations of Mumbai are being painted by citizen volunteers and artists. This is in partnership with Western and Central Railway.
Project Mumbai has built a hyper local citizen volunteer network for all age groups across the MMR, which has been its strength and army. As part of this, Project Mumbai launched Tee-Champs, an innovative effort to inculcate the spirit of Giving and community volunteering among teenagers.
Project Mumbai’s effort is now to help Mumbai back on its feet. One of the initiatives has been to work on the digital education of children with lesser privileges. In November, it launched a unique Data Top up plan which can be crowdfunded to support a child’s education until March 31, 2021.Project Mumbai is also supporting MCGM in doing the door to door vaccination for the bed ridden and in partnership with Government of Maharashtra, is taking vare of the education of all children who have lost their parents to COVID.
Jalaj Dani, Promoter Asian Paints, Ridham Desai, MD of Morgan Stanley and Paresh Sukthankar, ex MD of HDFC Bank are on the advisory board of Project Mumbai.Wipro, Unilever, Facebook, JP Morgan, Avendus Capital, Atol Syntel, LandT Hydro Carbon Ltd, HDFC, Godrej, Swades Foundation, Give India, ATE Chandra Foundation, were just some of the names which partnered with Project Mumbai in its public initiatives.
Project Mumbai is not new to picking causes which impact citizen lives. Or Awards.Pre-COVID, in October 2019, championing the cause of a healthier environment, Shishir led over One Lakh Twenty-Five Thousand People to donate plastic which was recycled into benches and other amenities for Mumbai’s public gardens. This initiative, titled The Mumbai Plastic Recyclothon, now a monthly drive, has been featured in the Limca Book of records, 2020 edition as one of the largest people supported plastic recycling movements.In June 2019, Shishir Joshi-led Jallosh-Clean Coasts, a campaign to clean Mumbai’s water bodies, saw thousands join in, including corporate citizens, the municipal corporation, verticals of the state government as well as young and old. This initiative too has been featured in the Limca Book of records as one of the largest public private people initiatives for water body protection.Project Mumbai also runs The Smiling Schools Project, a very exciting adolescent mental health program for Municipal school children in Mumbai and Thane.Project Mumbai goes by the tagline Mumbai Ke Liye Kuchh bhi Karega.In another avataar, Shishir is also an international leadership, communication and media trainer.