Contents
Summary
The Being Human Foundation is a Mumbai-based charity, established by Bollywood star Salman Khan in 2007, that provides education and healthcare services for the disadvantaged in India. The organization is principally supported by sales of Being Human-branded merchandise, which amounted to purchases of Rs 2460 crore till 2018 August.
Overview
The foundation performs many charitable activities. It funds the education of 200 children at the Akshara High School in Mumbai and another 300 through Aseema, a Mumbai-based non-profit. The foundation supports the VEER Initiative, a program to train differently-abled people. As of December 2015, the program has trained 1909 individuals, 1194 of whom have gained employment. The organization has set up programs to improve basic skills for students and career development centers.
Being Human has provided funding to treat children with congenital heart defects and craniofacial deformities. It has provided drought relief in Maharashtra and blankets for flood victims in Kashmir, conducted free eye camps to provide cataract surgeries, and helped conduct bone-marrow donor registration camps in Mumbai.
In 2018, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai threatened to blacklist the foundation for failing to set up dialysis machines in Bandra. The project was a public-private partnership where the municipal government would provide the space while the foundation was to maintain and staff the low-cost dialysis facility. The foundation’s representative denied that the organization signed any formal contract with the civic body.
Educational establishments that the charity supports
1. Akshara High School: Being Human – The Salman Khan Foundation has been supporting Akshara High School since June 2012. Akshara High School is a not-for-profit neighbourhood school located in the western suburbs of Mumbai.
Akshara High School (ICSE Board) began in 2007 with the concept of creating a friendly environment for the education of children in the vicinity of their homes. Over the past years, they have successfully developed as a ‘Neighborhood School’ in Kandivili, Mumbai. The school’s motto is to focus on social inclusion for educational and economic growth and to level inequalities ingrained due to gender, caste, economic and religious discrimination. To make education accessible to people from middle and lower economic strata, the fee structure at the school has been kept at a basic minimum.
2. Aseema
3. Career Development Center
4. Educational Resource Center, Maharashtra
5. Banashthali vidyapith jaipur rajashthan
6. Maharashtra Prabodhan Seva Mandal (MPSM)
7. Theatre And Drama #Initiative
8. Being Bajrangi
9. Brillant School of Science
10. Tubelight Project
The charity receives private donations at times, but it is primarily backed by 8 to 10% share of the sales of Being Human-branded clothing, manufactured and marketed by Mandhana Industries, as a licensing fee for the use of charity’s name as brand. A quarter of the company’s revenue comes from overseas sales and a tenth of the revenue comes from Internet sales.
Fashion
In 2007, Salman Khan launched the Being Human Foundation (BHF); in 2009, he introduced the ‘Being Human’ clothing line at the HDIL Couture Week. The greatest Bollywood stars walked the catwalk wearing early versions of the Being Human T-shirts; Katrina Kaif even wore a gown with a print of Salman Khan’s artwork.
Clothes, watches, paintings… whatever talent I have, whatever sells, we will sell it and all the money from that will go into the (BHF) charitable foundation. – Salman Khan at the HDIL Couture Week 2009Speaking to Forbes India about Being Human’s foundations lately, Salman had said: I told myself, ‘This is it. We’ll sell T-shirts to make money for charity.’ We couldn’t keep asking people for donations, so we set up the clothing line.