Sahasra Bhimavarapu
Founder @ Dhara
Timeline
The Journey: Explored the relationship between sustainability, storytelling, and leadership through documentaries and research before founding Dhara.
"Founder at Dhara"
From early on, I have been consumed by one fundamental question: How can we build systems that facilitate better decision-making?
My quest to answer that question took me into sustainability; however, it was not long before I discovered that the problems at hand were more than scientific; they were fundamentally human problems. Most individuals understand the reality of climate change; however, such knowledge has not led to sufficient action.
It was from here that my co-founder, Anjali, and I started Dhara, a project that does not seek to tell people what to do but rather tries to understand the human psyche behind their decisions, using behavioral psychology, storytelling, and the ecological wisdom of India.
Timeline
The Journey: Explored the relationship between sustainability, storytelling, and leadership through documentaries and research before founding Dhara.
Top Advice
Don't wait until your idea is perfect. Begin with curiosity, not with certainty. Sometimes your greatest innovations happen through conversations with people, experimentation, and learning publicly. Design around a problem that you are obsessively interested in, for a trend will pass but curiosity won't.
Wish I Knew Earlier
Our biggest challenge has been gaining credibility as an unregistered and youth-led organization. We lacked any financial backing, staff, or reputation; we only had to gain our credibility by having conversations, collaborating with others, and telling our stories.
The other major challenge we faced was trying not to produce more environmental content just because we wanted to produce more content. Instead, we tried hard to ask some tough questions regarding behavior and culture. And that is how Dhara found its niche.
