Since October 2020, Jump for Bread team is serving the small community composed of 9 families in Shahre-Rey county in Tehran, Iran. A total of 45 people in 9 families live in this village and they have been suffering for a long time.
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene were the most fundamental needs of the the families. Some village women told us they suffer from frequent kidney diseases which is directly related to water quality. Noor Khatoon, a 35 year-old women who claims she had lost her husband, now lives with her three children. She says that her eldest son, Shahnavaz, collects plastic wastes from rubbish and makes 20 thousand tomans (0.8 cents) every day.
We initiated our activities by raising donations to get shoes for the all children in this village. Surprisingly enough, no child was used to wear a child when we first met this village. Our next step was to build a classroom for the children to learn them the basic literacy nd calculation but here was where the shift happened. Some of the parents told us they prioritize self-employment rather than building a school for their children. At the beginning we were astonished by this idea but we trusted what the parents actually wanted. That was when we started to accept we have to have a petition-based project where the farmers of the parents freely express what they require most to the advancement of their community.
We rented a 2.5-acre farming land for all the families and now it is the main work place for 9 families where they harvest 200 to 400 kilograms of vegetables including parsley, mint and spinach every single day. The farmers previously had their marketing channels – as the middlemen of course – and we identified this problem. We connected them to some of our verified grocery shops across Tehran and now they can sell their produces with a relatively higher marginal profit as well as ease in packaging and distribution.