Not once in ten years. This is where you can give anyway.
In 2015 he was a software engineer in Pune — Wipro, then Infosys. There was a suicide in his village, the first he had seen from close up. He went home for Diwali, saw children whose schooling was about to stop, and resigned.
Snehwan is what he built: a home and school at Alandi, near Pune, for children who have lost a parent to farmer suicide. He and his wife Archana have run it for ten years.
Not as a project or an exercise. These are standing responsibilities, held every day by children who arrived at Snehwan having lost a parent.
Children are grouped by what they can actually grasp rather than by age, and comparing one child with another is not allowed.
The land given to Snehwan in 2019 was thorn scrub with no house for two kilometres. There was no milk, so a cowshed began with a single cow. There was no gas, and the cylinder men would not drive out that far, so they built gobar gas from cow dung and biogas from kitchen waste — now cooking for a hundred people, run by ninth-standard children who can explain the digestion process.
There was no power, so solar: ten kilowatts, then twenty, now seventy. There was no water, so rainwater harvesting, with five lakh litres in storage. They named the place Dnyangram, the village of knowledge.
Child, do not be afraid. I have great faith in you.What Ashok says to every child at Snehwan
Snehwan itself has a rule of never asking anyone for money. This exists simply for those who wish to give. Donations are made through Lokre Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3), and are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. A receipt reaches you by email immediately.
Donate through Lokre FoundationZeffy will suggest an optional contribution to its own platform. You can set that amount to $0 before completing your donation, and the full amount then goes to the work.
Ashok gave a ninety-minute interview in Marathi on the Atmaudyog channel. It is the fullest account of how Snehwan works and why he built it that way.