How OHANA Community Foundation is redesigning the way we consume

OHANA Community Foundation was founded by Anjali and Alka to work on nature conservation and responsible consumption, with a particular focus on why and how we consume. Alka brings a design background to the organisation, while Anjali comes from a background in social activism, a combination that shapes almost everything OHANA does, from the questions it asks to the events it runs.

Their partnership is also a quiet example of women empowerment in action. Two women, working across very different disciplines, chose to build something from scratch rather than wait for space to be made for them and in doing so, they've created exactly that space for other women, weavers, artisans, and community members to lead, contribute, and be heard.

Questioning Overconsumption

OHANA's central concern is overconsumption. The foundation's view is that sustainability isn't just about swapping plastic for greener materials, it's about examining consumption itself: what we buy, how much, how long we keep it, and what happens to it afterward.

That thinking has pulled OHANA toward slow fashion, textile waste, thrift, traditional crafts, waste management and future materials. In practice, this has meant organising thrift events and community initiatives that push people to rethink their relationship with clothing, treating used garments not as waste, but as things that can stay in circulation longer.

Working With Weavers

OHANA's engagement with the weaving community goes beyond promoting traditional textiles. The goal is a sustainable ecosystem where weavers benefit economically while their traditional knowledge survives. In one initiative, a weaving community reinvested earnings from their work into training in ancient weaving techniques for OHANA, this is what sustainability should look like: preserving skills and cultural practice, not just materials.

Building a Sustainability Conversation in Mangalore

Alongside their community work, Anjali and Alka have worked to build a larger conversation around sustainability in Mangalore, Karnataka, collaborating with people across different fields to organise city-wide events. That effort led to the Mangalore Design Summit in 2025, which brought together speakers and participants for interviews, workshops, and panel discussions on design, climate resilience, waste, and materials, deliberately avoiding a single, narrow definition of sustainability in favour of multiple perspectives.

Later that year, OHANA ran an Eco Flea Market at Kadri Park, taking the same ideas into a public, everyday setting. The market wasn't built around selling eco-friendly products; it was a way to introduce a wider audience to different ways of thinking about consumption, reuse, materials, and waste, and to see what actually resonates within the local community.

Looking at Climate Resilience and Future Materials

As OHANA's work has grown beyond thrift and fashion, its conversations have widened to include climate resilience, future materials, and waste management. The textile industry, in particular, is a focus: what happens to clothes once we stop wearing them? Some are thrown away, some donated, some passed on and much of it eventually becomes textile waste. OHANA wants to explore whether better systems exist, and whether the industry can move toward more responsible models of production and consumption.

Starting Small, Testing Models

None of this happened quickly. OHANA began as a two-person effort, and building an organisation, running events, and introducing new ideas around subjects that are still evolving takes real, sustained effort. Rather than trying to solve every sustainability problem at once, Anjali and Alka chose an experimental approach: build a model, test it, learn from it, then carry those lessons into the next project or the next city.

Over the past three years, that approach has produced a series of projects and initiatives. The longer-term ambition is to take what's been learned and share it with other cities, policymakers, and decision-makers, showing that sustainability can grow out of practical, community-level experiments, and that ideas which work locally can eventually shape larger systems.

What's Next: December 2026

OHANA is now preparing its next major event, a five-day programme planned for December 2026, built around panel discussions and conversations that continue the foundation's effort to bring different voices into the same room. It will pick up the threads OHANA has been pulling on all along, textile waste, consumption, future materials, and climate resilience.

For Anjali and Alka, the questions driving this work remain open: Can we consume less? Can we build better systems for what we already have? Can traditional knowledge shape the future rather than just preserve the past? Can communities be active participants in sustainability, not just its beneficiaries?

OHANA doesn't claim to have a single answer. Its approach is to keep experimenting, keep collaborating, and let community-driven action point the way, with the hope that what works in Mangalore can eventually travel much further.

Get Involved

If you'd like to partner, collaborate, or simply be part of this community, reach out:

Instagram: @ohanacommunityfoundation

Instagram: @mangaluru.sustainability