Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM), Pune has designed a COVID 19 response programme for a period of one year. The plan is to reach out to 2500 families from the most vulnerable communities from nine talukas (sub-districts) of Pune, Sangli and Kolhapur districts of South Maharashtra.

SOPPECOM’s COVID 19 response programme would move in three phases:

In Phase One the emphasis is on immediate relief and most needy families from vulnerable communities would be provided with the essential food items (dry ration), soaps and medicine (paracetamol). It would cost Rs. 1000-Rs.1100 per one family kit.
In Phase Two, the effort would be to provide some minimum support to the neediest families (about one-third families from Phase One): support school-going children from these families to buy essentials like textbooks, notebooks and other stationery so that the children can go to their schools once the schools reopen in June; support the neediest families to meet costs of buying seeds and other inputs and also to partially meet the costs of land preparation so that they can do Kharif sowing in time, and support supplementary livelihood activities.
Phase Three is going to be a long-term engagement. During this phase, the effort would be to work with the social activists in the area for awareness building and also improving their capacities to engage with such incidents/events/disasters in the future. The themes/issues that could be taken up include:

building more self-reliant and resilient communities and strengthening Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) and local self-government institutions in small towns,
disaster preparedness,
safety nets for the most vulnerable communities,
database and information sharing system for quick response actions and
rethinking development – alternatives to the present developmental model (especially in areas like agriculture, livelihoods, water, energy, health, etc.) that are informed by equity, social justice, sustainability and democratisation.

The list of families for Phase One is already ready. The families include: local and migrant labourers, construction workers, brick kiln labourers, rickshaw drivers (most of them are daily wage earners), single/widowed/deserted women, baluthedar (artisan) communities, nomadic tribes including Laman Tandas and so on. The condition of these social sections is particularly precarious in small towns like the taluka headquarters where no safety net exists for them.

APPEAL FOR SUPPORT

To support the initiative from phase one through phase three, you can contribute to below-mentioned details. The Indian contributions can be sent to SOPPECOM bank account for which details are given below:

Name of the account holder	Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM)
Name of the Bank	State Bank of India, Khond Arcade Parihar Chowk, Aundh, Pune: 411 007 Maharashtra, India
Account Number	32924345393
Branch IFSC	SBIN0008784
SWIFT/BIC#:	SBININBB218

SOPPECOM has FCRA to receive foreign contributions. Those who are abroad and would like to contribute please do get in touch with Pratima Medhekar (pratimamedhekar@gmail.com) and she will send you the FCRA bank account details.