Naina’s Core Philosophy
Naina means eyes. We believe kindness starts with truly seeing someone, not looking past them, not looking through them, but recognizing that we belong to each other. These four beliefs guide everything we do.
1. What no longer serves you may still serve someone else.
Give it, and the means to move it, with the same care it once gave you.
2. You are not what you hold.
Letting go of what we no longer need is release, not loss. Nothing you give truly leaves you empty.
3. We are mirrors of one another.
What I see in you, I see in me. To truly see someone is to remind them they matter, and to remind yourself of the same thing.
4. Be the best ancestor you can be.
Every act of kindness today is something someone else will stand on tomorrow..
Mission
Naina Foundation Center exists to help people see one another clearly, and to act on what that sight asks of us.
We collect gently used clothing, Indian and Western, for every age and every person, and connect it with communities who need it, in the U.S. and in India, so that what no longer serves one person can still serve another. Moving clothing takes resources too, so we also rely on financial support to help it reach the people who need it. We create space for education and conversations about mental health and wellbeing, because seeing the world clearly means understanding it, and understanding ourselves. And we welcome people of every age to volunteer alongside us, whether that means packing boxes, organizing a drive, or simply showing up, because this work is meant to be done together, not from a distance.
At the center of all of it is a simple belief: that sustainability is not only about what we reuse, it is about what we allow to keep circulating between people. Every act of giving, receiving, learning, and showing up is part of the same ecosystem, one that reminds us we belong to each other, and that what we do today is something someone else will carry forward.
Vision
A world where nothing sits unused while someone else goes without. Where no one feels invisible, and no one forgets that they belong to someone else’s story too. Where children grow up believing that what they have is never only theirs to keep, and where kindness moves as freely across oceans as it does across a single street.
This is the world Naina Foundation Center is working toward, one act, one connection, one box at a time.
Poonam Gunjal
Founder & Executive Director
Poonam Gunjal is the founder of Naina Foundation Center.
She was born in England and moved to the United States when she was four and a half years old. She had only been to India once, as a very small child. She doesn’t remember that trip firsthand, but she has seen the pictures, herself as a little girl standing somewhere in India, and there was always a connection there, even without the memory to hold onto. Her parents made sure her roots traveled with her anyway, through language, through family, through the Hindi and Punjabi she grew up speaking fluently, and through the Bollywood films and music that have stayed close to her heart her entire life.
Growing up, she watched the women in her family fold away sarees, salwar kameez, and lehengas that had nowhere to go, clothes too meaningful to throw away and too far from anyone who might actually need them. Even as a child, she remembers wondering why something so simple couldn’t just reach the person it was meant for.
She was eleven years old when she came across the name Naina in a Bollywood film, and it settled into her in a way she couldn’t fully explain at the time. It would be years before she learned that Naina means eyes, and by then the name already felt like it belonged to her.
In 2018, Poonam went to India as an adult for the first time she could truly remember. She brought one suitcase filled entirely with clothes to give away, sarees and salwar kameez she had packed with this exact purpose in mind. While she was staying at a house there, she overheard a woman who worked for the family speaking quietly about her daughter’s upcoming wedding, and the dowry she was struggling to afford. Poonam could hear the weight of it in her voice.
She walked over and asked if she needed clothes. The woman said yes, and Poonam gave her everything in that suitcase. The woman held her and told her that she had just solved her whole world’s problems.
The very clothes that had sat folded away in her own closet, waiting for a purpose, had just changed the course of someone else’s daughter’s wedding on the other side of the world. The little girl who had once wondered why something so simple couldn’t find its way to someone in need had just watched it happen with her own two hands.
Naina Foundation Center was formally founded later that same year. Poonam had carried the name inside her long before she understood what she would build with it. That moment in India didn’t give her a new idea. It reminded her of one she had been carrying her entire life, and finally gave her the courage to build it.
