On July 11th, Anshu Gupta, a world renowned social entreprenur and Ramon Magsaysay award winner 2015 gave a talk at TiE Boston titled "Minimizing resources, Maximizing change" The event was in partnership with the American India Foundation who brought Anshu Gupta on the AIF platform to tour different cities in the US.

Anshu Gupta started his presentation by putting forward the question on the sustainable Developmental goals and how in the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, clothing has never found a place in the conversation. For him these are 'non issues' but deserve attention. 

On his own personal journey of moving away from the corporate world, he said that one incident changed his life. While doing a story on the streets of Delhi he came across Habib, a carrier whose job was to cart away unclaimed dead bodies to a morgue but found that the the bodies was far more in winter than in summer . The reason - people died due to lack of clothing in the winter months. He also shocked the audience when he said that the daugther of the carrier hugged the body in the night to sleep as it neither moved nor turned and kept her warm. This incident had a profound effect on him and he launched Goonj and cloth for work. The essence of Goonj is to create a parellel economy where material and labor are exchanged and logisitics is where the money is spent.The work of Goonj is taking urban waste and turning it into a rural resource. 

Constantly referring to the concept of human dignity and respect, Anshu Gupta said that charity, donor, beneficiary does not exist in the vocabulary of his work and every person is a stakeholder.It is the dignified act of giving and receiving as a equal that must be the focus. Participants saw a short film on the cleaning of the Dal Lake in Kashmir by the locals which was initiated by Goonj.

Venky Raghavendra, Senior Director of Philanthrophy at AIF  introduced Anshu Gupta and Anu Yadav welcomed everyone and gave an overview of the upcoming TiE Boston events.