Shaktipreneur in Spotlight: Arti Dhar (Co-founder, Farmers of Forests)

“India emits only 6% of global carbon emissions but is estimated to suffer 20% of the global economic burden of climate change. So it is important for us to think of solutions,” says Arti Dhar, Shaktipreneur in Spotlight, Co-Founder of Farmers for Forests( F4F), a not-for-profit organization that aims to revolutionize India’s forestry sector to sequester carbon, support farmers, create green jobs and restore and protect fragile ecosystems.

The inspiration behind the project

Arti and her team believe that the solution to the climate crisis can only be reached by resolving the issue of ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss.

Astonishingly, India is losing forests, the size of the U.K every year.

Deforestation leads to a substantial chunk of emissions globally and is also responsible for unprecedented species extinction and land degradation. It contributes to rising temperatures and harms agriculture and farmer livelihoods. 

“We need to mainstream nature-based solutions to climate change because there is no alternative to Nature,” she adds. 

Journey as an entrepreneur

Dhar and her team came across this idea and thought of testing it, and if proven, scaling rapidly and sustainably. They also realized that no other organization was thinking along these lines.

“We knew that we needed to bootstrap initially, but we decided to go ahead,” she adds.

Luckily, they received the support of incubators like STEP (SHAKTI-The Empathy Project)  and Nudge Foundation early in their entrepreneurial journey.

Forests for Farmers: The Name

When they came up with the idea, the Farmers For Forest team realized that any thoughtful forest intervention needs to be inclusive of the economic rights and interests of forest-dependent and/or surrounding communities. 

Farmers get impacted by climate change as rising temperatures and erratic rainfall adversely affects their yields and incomes. Converting abandoned rural land into forests and providing financial support to protect existing forestland reaps environmental benefits and creates new climate change-resilient incomes for communities. 

“The only way we can have sustainable, long-surviving forests is when the environment and farmers/tribals benefit from each other. Our focus is to transform the climate change victims, the farmers, into future climate stewards. Hence, we named our initiative- “Farmers for Forests,” she says.

 Impact of the organization

F4F has 300 acres of existing vulnerable forestland under protection (with hundreds more in the pipeline).

“We have already restored nearly 100 acres of degraded and/or unused land into forests and plan to afforest/reforest around 300 more by the end of this year. We have also provided over 5000 days of employment to locals, largely women, through our afforestation activities like planting, de-weeding, and watering,” she says proudly.

The team and the roles of the members

F4F is a 16 member full-time team. 

These field team members live and work full-time in all the project locations and concentrate on maintaining high tree survival rates and integral daily engagement with community members.

“Our field team has done an excellent job by building trust within communities, managing stakeholder relationships with local leaders, community members, and public officials, and overseeing all our reforestation/afforestation activities,” she says.

Impact of covid

Three months after its launch, the field operations of F4F were suspended due to COVID lockdown. It was a setback to the young start-up, but they decided to turn it into an opportunity. 

“We re-allocated our budget to provide cash relief to daily wage workers who lost their incomes due to the lockdown,” she says.

Their work caught the attention of others, and donations started pouring in, which facilitated their job.

Future plans

Arti and her team want to collaborate with governments and other non-profits to restore 30,000 acres of unused/barren land and protect 100,000 acres of forestland in high deforestation areas by 2030.

Advice to new entrepreneurs

Arti emphasizes that entrepreneurs should be open to collaboration in terms of intellectual exchange and actual implementation, as there could be individuals or organizations in the ecosystem, whose progress could be leveraged upon.

“This is especially relevant for the environment and sustainability space, as we do not have the luxury of time to reverse decades of bad behaviour,” she adds.

Her Journey as a Shaktipreneur 

F4F was just six months old when Arti joined STEP’s incubation program.

“As an early-stage start-up, we were looking for a safe space to learn and share our organizational or sectoral challenges,” she adds.

Dhar’s experience at STEP is precious to her, as the incubation program is specially designed for women founders. She believes that many of the obstacles, external or internal, are idiosyncratic- From fundraising to the management of people in rural contexts.

Arti believes that the direction, experience, and knowledge entrepreneurs get from incubation programs can accelerate their growth.

“STEP helped us think through potential risks, how to mitigate them, gave us unprecedented direct and indirect access to investors, provided us with long-term advisors who provided us immeasurable support, and helped us focus on the skill-development of our core team- in terms of communications, fundraising and financial modelling,” she adds.

Arti is especially fond of her mentor, Mr Raj Kumar, as he has become a true evangelist of their work. He is now an official advisor at Farmers for Forests.

“We are incredibly grateful to STEP. Our mentor helped us refine our funding model, open doors to potential investors, and proactively offered his time to help us soundboard new ideas,” she adds.

Arti appreciates the unprecedented egalitarian approach that STEP adopted to funding.

“Our peers were a part of the decision in the disbursement process, and we loved it,” she says fondly.

Forests for farmers used the funding to restore one acre of degraded land in Ahmednagar to a forest where they planted about 1000 native trees.

Aarti, the person 

The lovely Arti loves to read, and Hind Swaraj by Gandhi or the Enchanted Wood series by Enid Blyton. She enjoys Korean and Thai food, but especially loves the Kashmiri food made at her home.

Her favourite holiday destination is the tiny town of Mendocino in California and Amritsar in India.

 A Quote that is the Mantra of her lifeis:

“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, and walk humbly now. It is not incumbent on us to finish this task, but neither are we free to abandon it.”