Footsteps Bangladesh is a non-profit, development-based social enterprise with a primary focus on addressing social challenges and improving current scenarios of the health, environment, and education sectors in Bangladesh. “Empowering Communities, Changing Livelihoods”- with this motto in mind, Footsteps Bangladesh was founded in 2013. It was dedicated to designing solutions that address Bangladesh’s most pressing social challenges, from safe water access to disaster resilience. Footsteps Bangladesh started its journey with a winter aid distribution program and has now grown into an organization that ensures pure and safe water access, food security, gender empowerment, and disaster resilience in communities across Bangladesh through different projects. The initial campaign was ‘Heartwarming Winter’ in 2013, where volunteers distributed clothes, blankets, and medicine to the poor during winter in the North. However, they noticed that communities were becoming easily dependent on such aid programs, which were doing more harm than good as they were not making any effort to overcome their poverty barriers. For the next two years, the team worked to build projects and ventures that not only solved community challenges but ultimately transformed them into self-resilient communities. In 2015, Footsteps implemented its first social venture ‘Project Trishna’, which ensured access to safe drinking water in marginalized communities. Throughout an eight-year journey, they expanded to seventeen districts, and three major projects through partnerships. The ‘Disaster Resilience Program’ tackles natural and social disasters. ‘Shushasther Odhikar Shobar’ improves access to public health in last-mile communities, and project ‘WE Can’ works on building greener communities through anti-pollution and environmental advocacy programs. The main mission of Footsteps is to build community capacity so that it is able to achieve its vision of creating a world where communities address social challenges on their own. “Not in terms of finances, but in terms of impact- how many people’s lives we can change for the better.”- Rafayat
