Moxietalk With Kirt Jacobs

Anshu Gupta, popularly known as the Clothing Man, is the Founder of an India-based nonprofit Goonj and one of India’s leading social entrepreneurs. Starting as a freelance journalist, he left a corporate job in 1998 and founded Goonj with a mission to address the most basic but ignored need of clothing and the multifaceted role it plays in villages across India. Today Goonj is a pan-India movement working equally widely in cities and villages, dealing with more than 3,000 tons of material annually and addressing a core challenge of our time – the growing gap between the urban prosperity and rural poverty. By taking the menacing growth of urban waste and using it effectively and efficiently as a tool to trigger large-scale development work on diverse issues, Goonj has created a model for a parallel economy which is not cash based but trash based. Anshu is a 2017 Curry-Stone Design Prize Social Change Circle Honoree, an annual prize awarded to innovative projects that use design to address pressing social justi