Healthy Planet, The Who, Why And Where - About The Greener Energy Culture

Whoever heard of a bookshop giving away free books? I hadn't and thought there must be a catch in it somewhere, that's until I met Shaylish Patel,the founder of the Healthy Planet Charity who explains

by Lawrence Perry

(WireNews+Co) - London, England - 07 April 2011

I met Shaylesh at a BNI breakfast meeting in Hammersmith on the 1st of April where he made a 60 second presentation on his charity Healthy Planet, and without hesitation I offered to write some copy for him, which led me to interview him in his office at 349 King Street, Hammersmith W6 9NH.

Shaylesh told me a little about how Healthy Planet (http://www.healthyplanet.org/home.aspx) came into his mind when he was commuting on the underground into London everyday about three to four years ago, and how he was thinking about some questions in his mind as a parent, one of them being, 'Are our kids on track to have less exercise, become couch potatoes watching video games ?' and that kind of thing worried him as it's not something that parents intend for their children, and there is all this concern about the society that we live in. 

Shaylesh lives in Hammersmith, and he remembers that a tornado landed in Kilburn about five miles away and came out of the blue and took down five houses and half-a-school - you kind of know that there's a connection to how we live our lives on this plane and ourselves, and so Shaylesh thought that he wanted to do something about it, rather than just encouraging them to change their lives, he became a man of action - a life changer and created Healthy Planet.

Shaylesh continued, "We promote, reward society and encourage to make better choices in healthy living on everyday life, for example turning off your tap when your brushing your teeth, walking the kids to school rather than driving them - things like that you can do in your everyday life. One of the biggest things that we kicked off with was an opportunity where you could buy the greenest place on earth - you can adopt a piece of land through satellite images, and we had the backing of the UN environment teams, the big geography brains - you can put your name, picture and message through Google maps on a plot of land in a conservation area, and from the money that comes to us as a charity, 90% of that will go to that project that's going on in that area, and for someone who is buying a gift for someone that's great - although it's virtual it's a really good gift to give someone, and your getting to dictate where your money is going to end up. We kicked off things like that which no-one had done before, and it's a very clever piece of technology that makes the most of Google maps and that's how we started out. We even had Stephen Fry to it for mother's day and he obviously tweeted about it, and though it didn't become an overnight success the project became well-known as a result of that. We have won awards along the way for that kind of initiative, and that story's a couple of years old that initiative".

"More recently we've turned our opportunities to offline, for example we take over empty shops and premises and we go in there and do our charitable work, for example we give out books for free that would otherwise turn up in landfills - books that were taken from your house when you were doing a bit of a clear out, and have gone through the charity bookshop mill, and that other people have tried to sell them under the Amazon as a new category and they are literally on the edge of landfill. At that point we step in and for not much money - it works out to be about £90 for half a ton - we get about a thousand books. We get books delivered to any location in that quantity and we give them out for free, to save them from landfill, to give them a new lease of life, and to raise literary levels, as a correlation with your impact on the planet - it's all in a positive way."

" We get to do this because landlords are giving their otherwise empty premises rent-free and they are giving us a donation to cover the costs to do this as well, so paying the rates and so on - they are happy that the unit is in use and they are actually saving some money, and we get to do some charity work as we go along - that's really taken off in the last twelve month's or so, and that's the kind of thing we have been up to really."

How many is we?

"We being myself until 18 months ago, and then we had some interns in, and we now have got some paid staff as well, and we still have some interns as staff who come and go. For example we have a really good volunteer in Leeds, and one in Leicester who used to look after the shop, and unfortunately the shops come and go, though we have a team of four paid staff, and we have a lot of people who work around us as well".

I asked him where the funding came from, and Shaylesh answered, "the funding right now comes from the landlords who donate to our activities if we take over their premises. When we started we had £5,000 and we have never received any grants or external funding - we tried but it's really, really hard and takes up too much energy and we have almost given up - we raise money our own way doing our activities at the same time, because otherwise you can spend a lot of time fundraising, whereas we get to do that and at the same time, deliver on what our charitable reason is, just for example giving out books for free, and the proposition - it makes our lives much more easier, and we've gone from 13 grand (£13,000) to £1.1million in the next year as a result of this property....."

I remarked that was amazing!  - Shaylesh replied, "that he had to admit that they had been really lucky and that the £1.1million had been premarked already as they had the cost of the shops to run, and the agents fees, and everything else that comes with it - posters and all that sort of stuff, so a lot of it is already allocated, and getting the books in and that sort of thing, but you know it's been great guns for us and we have got to do what we have to do and actually it really make a difference."

I suggested that this is his brain child and the baby he had given birth to on the Tube, and Shaylesh laughed, and said, "luckily no-one saw me doing that, and the property only materialised  eighteen months ago, when it took them about five months to get their first unit from an agent, and another agent gave them loads of properties, and then it really snowballed..."

Shaylesh is 39 and will be  40 in a few months time - he struck me as a young entrepreneur with a life-changing vision, a man on fire to change the way that society is, and a true inspirational leader and catalyst for change. 

Shaylesh was born in Hammersmith and his routes are in India, his parents came from Gujarat in the 1960s

"We just got the DOH accreditation for the Information Standard for anyone writing documents on Health, and for us - we want to encourage about living a healthier lifestyle and looking after your diet that sort of thing..."

I asked Shaylesh what his background was, and he answered, "I'm an accountant by background originally, a Chartered Accountant and worked for IBM, before moving to Flight Centre an Australian travel agency and becoming their director of finance, then did contracting, before working for Tesco in their commercial department, and at that point I knew what I wanted Healthy Planet to do and gave up paid work and focused on this full-time and that was October 2007."

Shaylesh added, "that Healthy Planet are really looking for volunteers to work in their bookshops", and if this is something that you would like to do please look at http://www.healthyplanet.org (http://www.healthyplanet.org).

On Saturday 9th April 11am-4pm at the West 12 Shopping Centre, Shepherd's Bush Green. There will be a wide range of activities on the day and Priyanka Patel, who stars as Dede in Sadie J, the new CBBC drama, will perform the opening ceremony.

Healthy Planet Registered Charity
349 King Street
Hammersmith
London
W6 9NH.
Tel: + 44 (0) 844 478 0349