ShelterSquare Foundation (SSF) is a non-profit company registered in August 2023 under Section 8 of The Companies Act of India, 2013. Donations to SSF are exempted from income tax under Sections 80G and 12AA of the Income Tax Act, 1961.
Aajeevika Bureau Trust, a charitable trust with decades of experience in working with labor issues, is one of the main promoters of ShelterSquare Foundation.
Our Mission and Vision
Our Approach
Focus on Housing
Identifying Housing Vulnerabilities
Decades of research by our directors, mentors, partners and many others has shown that housing vulnerabilities are layered and complex. Especially among migrant and low-income workers, we identify a range of issues and questions, that drive and motivate us. Some of these are presented in the diagram below. In some ways, we identify this as the ‘problem space’ of housing in the Global South.
The Solution Space and Our Strategies
ShelterSquare Foundation identifies a set of interconnected strategies in the low-income and rental housing sectors that can potentially address housing crises of low-income, informal migrant workers in the Global South. Our strategies closely reflect our problem identification and pave the way towards a set of solutions to address these gaps.
Acknowledging and Addressing Complexity
Since our work necessarily requires practice in largely profit-driven land and property markets, we are aiming to balance our agenda in a way that generates the outcomes of philanthropic intent within a market-based environment, essentially emerging as a financially and managerially self-sustaining model of housing provision—one that is high-quality, purposefully managed, replicable and scalable. We therefore operate on a blended revenue-and-grants model with the purpose of creating efficient and sensitive housing solutions for migrant and low-income worker communities.