Swaraj Shetty

Co-founder

Swaraj Shetty is the co-founder of Khaana Chahiye Foundation (2020)[1], an Indian non-profit working on hunger from Mumbai.

Swaraj Shetty is an Indian digital marketer and a co-founder and director of the Khaana Chahiye Foundation, a Mumbai hunger relief organisation that began as a citizen-led campaign during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.

Career

Shetty was born and brought up in Mumbai and works on communication, technology and civic engagement campaigns.

Khaana Chahiye was founded on 29 March 2020 as a crowdfunded, volunteer-driven relief operation supplying cooked meals and grocery kits to homeless people, migrant workers and daily wage labourers stranded by the lockdown. At the height of the response it was distributing tens of thousands of meals a day. It has since been registered as a not-for-profit company working on data-driven and community-led approaches to urban hunger, including an attempt to map hunger across Mumbai for use in local government policy.

Shetty is one of the foundation's directors, with responsibility for digital work and outreach, and has also been described as its director of growth and marketing. The foundation runs community kitchens at Kurla, staffed by women, and at Ulhasnagar, run by transgender people, and operates an SOS grocery service through which residents can report families in need. It reports having served more than 7.7 million meals, distributed over 73,000 family grocery kits and supported some 600,000 migrant workers.[2][3][4][5]

Khaana Chahiye Foundation

Khaana Chahiye began on 29 March 2020 as a crowdfunded volunteer relief effort during Mumbai's COVID-19 lockdown, at its peak making tens of thousands of meals a day. Now a registered non-profit, it works on data-driven, community-led hunger relief and food security policy in Mumbai.

Khaana Chahiye Foundation reports the following, on its own site: