A trust for the land, and for the people who live from it.
We work at the meeting point of environmental conservation and rural livelihoods — restoring degraded landscapes and helping communities build lasting incomes from a healthier natural world.
Banani Foundation is a registered public charitable trust based in Cuttack, Odisha. We restore degraded land, expand native tree cover, and design that restoration around real, sustainable livelihoods — so green work continues to pay for itself long after we step back.
Too often, conservation and livelihood are treated as competing claims on the same land. We are built on the opposite belief: that a forest lasts when the people who live beside it have a stake in keeping it alive. Every programme we run is designed to serve both at once.
Our vision
An Odisha where thriving forests and thriving communities are the same project — not competing ones.
Our mission
To restore degraded landscapes through native afforestation and to anchor that restoration in real, sustainable livelihoods.
How we measure success
Not by saplings planted, but by trees that survive, watersheds that recover, and households that earn more from a living landscape.
In Odia, banani means a forest — a grove of trees standing together. It is the idea we are named for and built on: that ecological restoration and human wellbeing grow best side by side.
The principles under everything we plant.
Survival over spectacle
A planting drive isn't the goal. Trees that are still standing years later are. We plan, plant and monitor for survival, not for the photograph.
Community at the centre
Nothing is done to a place. Local knowledge decides what grows, local hands do the work, and local families share in what it earns.
Honest, patient work
Ecosystems recover on their own timeline. We stay long enough to measure real change and to hand over systems that keep working.
Want to see the work itself?
Explore the three programmes that make up everything we do.