On the ground
Major activities
Biodiversity and habitat monitoring. Community awareness programmes. Forest protection initiatives. Capacity building of village conservation committees. Environmental education for youth.
Programmes
What we actually run
Eight programmes across conservation, livelihoods, women's enterprise, food security and rural infrastructure — all delivered through village institutions rather than around them.
Biodiversity conservation
Protection of the Western Hoolock Gibbon & its habitat
A community-driven project at the New Ngaulong Community Conservation Area, under Dawkling Forest in Peren District, implemented in partnership with GroundUp Asia Pvt. Ltd.
The Western Hoolock Gibbon is one of India's endangered primates and lives entirely in the forest canopy. Protecting it means protecting continuous, intact forest — work that only holds if village councils, youth groups and local volunteers are the ones doing it.
Outcomes
What changed
Higher community participation in forest conservation, better awareness of why biodiversity matters here, stronger collaboration between communities and conservation partners, and improved protection of gibbon habitat.
Leadership
Grassroot Leadership Programme
Built for community leaders, women and indigenous youth who are already making decisions locally but have never been given the tools — or the invitation — to make them formally.
Workshops have run at Mokokchung and Darjeeling among other sites, covering community mobilisation, project planning and management, environmental leadership and youth engagement.
Result: more local leadership capacity, noticeably greater participation by women and young people, and stronger community ownership of the development work happening in their own villages.
Sustainable development
Livestock, beekeeping and plantation
Income that doesn't come at the forest's expense.
Livestock Initiative
Piggery, poultry, beekeeping and goat farming for economically vulnerable households — combined with livestock distribution, financial support and technical training in animal husbandry. Households report higher income, better livestock management and improved food security.
Beekeeping
Bee boxes placed with beneficiary households, and the harvest that follows. It is the clearest example of what we mean by aligned incentives: the income only exists while the forest does.
Plantation Initiative
Community plantation drives, seedling distribution, climate resilience awareness and forest restoration. Restoration and income are the same activity here, not competing ones.
Women's enterprise
The Tailoring Centre
A six-month course for unemployed women and school dropouts in and around Jalukie. Training is paired with entrepreneurship development, sewing machines for selected trainees, and business mentoring afterwards — because a skill without a machine and a first customer doesn't become a livelihood.
Several graduates now run home-based tailoring businesses. Household income rises, and so does the economic independence that comes with earning it yourself. Assam Rifles supported the centre with a handover of machines in Jalukie Town.
Craft
Cane and bamboo
Cane work is one of the oldest skills in these hills. The risk is not that it disappears from memory but that it stops paying — at which point it disappears anyway, one generation at a time.
The cane project trains and produces: furniture, baskets and household goods made from material that grows locally and regenerates fast. It is the rare livelihood that needs no imported input, no electricity and no supply chain beyond the forest edge.
Food security
Faith Garden: food always in the home
The premise is in the name. A household with a working kitchen garden does not have a hunger gap between harvests, and does not have to sell an animal to buy vegetables.
The programme covers garden establishment, seed and seedling supply, and training. It also includes wood-vinegar making — a natural pesticide and soil treatment produced from the same wood residue the household already has, which removes a recurring cash cost from the farming year.
Rural infrastructure
Public sanitation
DONetS designed and built a public toilet in Peren District. It is the least glamorous thing on this page and one of the most consequential: sanitation is where women's safety, school attendance and disease burden all meet.
The build was covered by NLTV, and the footage sits in our film archive alongside the construction record.
In progress
Clean energy access
Under an MoU with Gajam India Private Limited, DONetS is implementing Economic Empowerment through Clean Energy Access: A Sustainable Development Project in Peren District, Nagaland.
The project expands access to clean energy technologies, promotes sustainable livelihoods, reduces environmental impacts, and improves socio-economic wellbeing for rural households across the district.
Fund one of these directly.
Tell us which programme and we'll send you the costing and a report on where it went.