Impulse Model Prevention, Impulse NGO Network and Rural Futures (RuFu), Balipara Foundation have embarked on a co-creation partnership to enhance livelihoods through the restoration of the Environment, thereby preventing unsafe migration and creating aspirational rural ecosystems – re-creating a positive interdependence between humans and the environment. This co-creation integrates objectives of both Innovations to create a holistic system for social change through impact on livelihoods (tested under Impulse Social Enterprises) linked to the restoration of critical ecosystems.

The co-creation aims in enhancing and promoting indigenous skills of rural communities in the Eastern Himalayas – assisting in the preservation of their indigenous knowledge and heritage skills to earn sustainable livelihoods & boosting the local economy. By initiating bottom-up, community-led reforestation & agroforestry based systemic programmes, this partnership intends to enhance community benefits for sustainable forest management (which at the same time enhancing biodiversity conservation) and ‘re-wild’ agriculture to ensure farmers’ abilities to adapt to critical climate-change led challenges on agricultural outputs.

Through the Rural Futures – Impulse Model co-creation, we emphasize on the fact that the root cause of baseline livelihoods and low social mobility is a degraded environment and that this therefore, drives migration which has a high chance of being   unsafe and is prone to human trafficking. Especially in a vulnerable region like the Eastern Himalayas, systems thinking is required across the spectrum to address these issues.   We aim to tackle migration with the environmental lens and propose that we will be able to reduce unsafe migration by enabling livelihoods and sustainability of end to end value chains which are inter-connected to the growth and restoration of our critical ecosystems and habitats. For sustained long-term impact, we continue to emphasize on our philosophy of building collective and indigenous leadership, scaling-out & scaling- deep across scales of generational equity.