A Day with Dakshin

By Namrata Lunia | Dakshin Foundation turned 13 on the 22nd of July, 2021, and to celebrate the occasion, we invited our online community to spend the day with us (virtually) on the 24th of July, Saturday. Registrations opened up a week before and with over 100 registrations, the response to the event exceeded our expectations!  
The virtual meet was divided into six sessions, where the audience got to meet and interact with members of our programmes. The main goal was to provide the larger Dakshin online community with the opportunity to ask questions and learn about our work.

As varied questions poured in from people from different walks of life, it was extremely encouraging to see high levels of interest not just in the work that we do but also in the preservation of the environment and livelihoods.

Philanthropy for the Ocean

By Adit Dsouza, Adithya Pillai and Sanjana Chevalam | A research team from Dakshin Foundation, supported by Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy, Ashoka University, is collaborating on a project to map philanthropic commitments towards marine conservation and other ocean-related causes in India.  The research will explore three broad themes – a. characterizing the present state of resources available for  support towards coastal and marine ecosystems and coastal communities; b. prioritising marine conservation and coastal community needs for better philanthropic support; and c. documenting best practices and strategies to mobilize interest and support for marine conservation and allied sectors.

By October this year, we hope to publish (at least) one working paper outlining the public and private resource flows within the sector, and delineating some of the challenges faced by organisations seeking to make an impact for coastal communities, habitats and species.

Kick-starting the Long Term Ecological Observatories Programme

By Tanmay Wagh | The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MOEF&CC) recently launched the nationwide Long Term Ecological Observatories (LTEO) programme, a multi-institutional and inter-disciplinary initiative  to understand the impacts of climate change and anthropogenic disturbances on a range of ecosystems and taxa. The programme is being implemented in landscapes across India and involves monitoring of soils, grasslands, forests, animal movement, herpetofauna, invertebrates, fish, birds and marine ecosystems. The marine ecosystems component of the LTEO programme is led by Dakshin Foundation in collaboration with Pondicherry University, Nature Conservation Foundation and the Indian Institute of Science. The Marine Theme’s research will be carried out in the Andaman Islands and will involve long term monitoring of coral reefs, seagrass meadows, leatherback turtles and abiotic water quality parameters.

Sports and Community Wellbeing: making progress

By Kanishk Srinivasan | Earlier this year, we announced the launch of our new ‘Sports and Community Wellbeing’ programme in the previous edition of ‘Out of the Blue’. This time around, we have an even more exciting update, as we can announce that we received a grant for a three-year project to introduce sports activities as a platform to engage with youth in coastal communities in our project sites in the Andaman Islands and Odisha from 2021 to 2024! 

SOL Foundation — an organisation based in the Principality of Liechtenstein have generously agreed to support us in our endeavours to use sports to engage with youth in coastal communities on topics of social and environmental resilience.