History
In 1998, Ritu Primlani founded Thimmakka’s Resources for Environmental Education (now known simply as Thimmakka), a grassroots non-profit organization dedicated to environmental outreach. While Thimmakka began with its impact in the South Asian community, it quickly grew to address environmental issues in all ethnic and mainstream audiences. Primlani felt that the best way to send an environmental message to uninformed ethnic populations would be through local community gathering spots such as restaurants. Moreover, Primlani recognized the importance of helping restaurants adopt environmentally friendly practices since they consume more resources per square foot than other retail businesses. Despite the existing guidelines for green businesses, Primlani found that there was only one certified green restaurant in all of Alameda County and only two in all of San Francisco Bay area. This low number of certified green restaurants was a testament to how difficult the greening process was for restaurants typically constrained by time and resources.
For this reason, Thimmakka designed its green restaurants program (then known as GER – Greening Ethnic Restaurants) to meet the constraints of the limited resources and the diverse language and cultural barriers of restaurant owners and workers.
Our main involvement in environmental education and outreach is helping restaurants and businesses become more eco-friendly by providing the services needed to help institutions achieve green certification. The Thimmakka Certified Green Business (TCGB) program was established to achieve our greening goals, and is dedicated to reaching out to restaurants and other businesses and encouraging environmentally friendly practices, especially within hard-to-reach, ethnic communities. TCGB was created to benefit both businesses and communities by enabling easily implemented green systems which save businesses money and reduce environmental impact in neighborhoods. Today, TCGB handles culturally appropriate and economically efficient environmental outreach for a myriad of different ethnic and mainstream businesses, ranging from Asian to African-American restaurants.
Who is Thimmakka?
Thimmakka is named in honor of a South Indian woman named Saalumurada Thimmakka, who hails from the village Hulikal in Karnataka, India. . In rural India, it is traditional belief that ‘your children are who will remember you lived’. Unfortunately for Thimmakka and her husband, such thinking causes childless couples in India to be seen as “accursed”. Frustrated from the “neighbours’ taunts for being infertile,” and the pressures on her husband, Chikkanna, to take another wife, Thimmakka and Chikkanna decided to raise Banyan (Ficus Religiosa) trees as their children. Since they had no money to buy saplings, they created graftings and then planted them along a hot, dusty, 4 kilometer stretch between their village and a nearby village named Kudur. Every year, for many years, they planted 15 to 20 new saplings. They placed thorn guards around their little wards to protect them from grazers, watered the trees everyday till they established, visiting at least once a week until their trees were 10 years old. Every morning the couple set out, Thimmakka with a pot atop head and another on her hip and Chikkanna with two more pots hanging from a pole he held over his shoulder. Because their trees required about 50 pots a day, they refilled the pots from wells and ponds along the way. More than 45 years later, their adopted “children” stretch all along the 4 kilometers between Hulikal and Kudur, a proud and memorable mark of their “parents’” dedication. Although the couple only started receiving recognition a good five years after Chikkanna's death in 1990, Thimmakka has received many awards, such as the National Citizen's and the Prime Minister’s award for Social Forestry, for the strong upbringing of her many offspring.
Thimmakka embodies several values which are at the core of our organization. She proved that environmentalism is not exclusively for the wealthy and privileged, but that it should be at the center of everyone’s daily lives, without economic, education or cultural restrictions. Our organization fully embraces the belief that everyone has the right to a safe and healthy environment, no matter what economic class, social background, or cultural difference.
