In 2016, the Balipara Foundation embarked on an ambitious journey to restore forests across Assam’s “Elephant Country”, a belt stretching from a belt stretching from Udalguri district all the way to Sonitpur, along the Arunachal Pradesh - Assam - Bhutan border. As this dream began to take shape, we found ourselves drawn to the same question over and over again: why not forests and people?

Hours of deliberation later and we had an answer: Rural Futures, the key to reconciling human & biodiversity needs.

A scalable, localized action framework for natural capital regeneration, Rural Futures visualizes communities as the primary stewards of habitat restoration & management. Through habitat-mediated incomes, communities achieve greater socioeconomic mobility, generating a self-sustaining loop of sustainable incomes and businesses for forest-fringe communities.