Not a decision made in a boardroom;
A decision made on the streets of Pune.

 

Reform Social Welfare Foundation did not begin with a grant or a strategic plan. It began with a mother who could not walk past a suffering animal without stopping — and a daughter who, from a young age, could not unsee what the world does to those without a voice.

For over fifteen years, Anjana Mishra worked on the ground in Pune — feeding community animals daily, rescuing injured and abandoned animals, coordinating neutering drives, running adoption camps, and sitting across the table from local government officials to push for humane implementation of the Animal Birth Control (ABC) Programme. She worked not as an employee of any organisation, but as a citizen who believed that care is not optional.

Her daughter Hima grew up in the middle of this work. At a young age, she was exposed to the realities of factory farming and industrial slaughter — an experience that changed her worldview permanently. It made her not just an animal lover, but an animal rights advocate. Both Anjana and Hima turned vegan around 2011, a quiet but defining moment: the recognition that all animals are equal in their capacity to suffer, and in their right to live.

 

"We had always believed that if you care, you act. But Covid taught us something harder — that individual action, however devoted, has a ceiling."

 

When the pandemic struck in 2020, Anjana and Hima did not stay home. They were on the streets of Pune, feeding over 200 dogs every day when the city had shut down. Hima was simultaneously delivering essentials to underprivileged communities — and it was in this work that she witnessed, up close, how institutions meant to protect people often fail them when they need help the most. She saw how the absence of civic knowledge, and the presence of systemic indifference, compounds hardship for those already on the margins.

That was the second turning point. Individual effort had brought them this far. But to create change that outlasts any one person's energy, the work had to be institutionalised.

In 2022, upon completing her higher education, Hima joined hands with Anjana to formally found Reform Social Welfare Foundation — bringing together fifteen years of ground-level experience, a shared commitment to animal rights and civic accountability, and a belief that a humane society is not inherited. It is built, deliberately, by the people who refuse to look away.