Uplifting the Livelihoods of Shikara Community Affected by Covid-19 Distress

3 min readMay 29, 2020

This is how it started!

Cherish Expeditions has been working with the Shikara Community for almost a year and our on-ground partners Sustera Foundation reached out to us to discuss the hardship faced by the Shikara community due to no inflow of tourism.

We went into an in-depth analysis of the crisis and tried figuring out various reasons for such an impact. We could jot down various reasons, the major being, back to back recurrence of two floods which affected the state drastically, the effect of Nipah virus lasted almost for three months, and then the entire world was hit by Covid-19.

cherishexpeditions | kerala tourism | community | vollunteering

Cherish Expeditions along with Sustera’s team came up with an action plan by doing on-ground analysis and listed out 50 families who were facing extreme hardships. We met each of these families and got their Id Proof and Account Details.

cherish expeditions | Kerala tourism | Community | Volunteering

We came up with a strategy of initially helping these families by transferring 2000 INR in each of their accounts. With this intention, we started our fundraiser initiative of raising 1,00,000 INR. The community on the other hand wanted to gift a complimentary Shikara ride as a gesture of gratitude to the donors.

We were able to collect the entire amount in a weeks’ time with the help of our representatives: Sanju Soman, Cherish Manjooran, Aishwarya Jaiswal, Deepa Ananth, Parvathy Suresh, Saina Thomas, Ankita Chetan, Chetan Warrier and Swasti Jain.

Name of the NGO: Sustera Foundation

Location: Muhamma, Alleppey

Number of Families helped until today: 20

Coordinator: Cherish Expeditions

Mobile Number: +91 9947207548

Amount Transferred: INR 40,000/-

Email: info@cherishexpeditions.com | admin@sustera.org

Brief about our fundraiser campaign covered in The New Indian Express — Edexlive:

https://www.edexlive.com/beinspired/2020/may/16/donate-to-keralas-shikara-community-to-survive-covid-get-a-loving-boat-ride-on-the-backwaters-in-ret-12055.html