Stephanie Svaikauskas
Seth England
Emily Stacy
Beyond Borders
Matthew Mulhern
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Grosches first project was the outcome of their daughter catching Cholera. Helmi was an engineer for many years before starting Grosche. With an engineering design background he was able to design a sustainable bio-sand water filter that is simple to build and easy to maintain by the owners. Grosche does not only pay for the filters but also supplies people in other countries with the knowledge, to build, maintain and sell their own bio-sand filters for an income.
• Grosche works towards achieving goal #13 by planting over 10,000 trees throughout Haiti and Africa. This number keeps rising as they continue through their partnership with Trees for the Future, with a goal to help provide clean air for a greener future.
• Grosche also uses 100% renewable energy by using Bulldog Energy. By installing LED lights throughout their head office and warehouse, and by using the energy responsibly they were able to reduce their energy consumption by 40%.
• Grosche’s third action towards achieving goal #13 is their negative carbon footprint. At the end of each year, Grosche looks at the amount of carbon they've used for transporting their goods and buys enough carbon credits to cover what they've admitted into the environment and more, they purchase more credits than they used to over compensate for what they have done.
• Grosche in addition also contributes to helping life on land which is goal #15 by having a 91% landfill avoidance. Meaning only 9% of the packaging they use ends up in the landfill.
Grosche International Inc is in the business of tea and coffee products but also in the business of action. Action to take action, and better the lives of those who are not able on their own, teaching developing communities how to make, install and maintain water filtration systems and providing communities with the tools to succeed. "Every cup fills another" doesn't refer only to water and the necessary sustenance it provides but also to the idea that filling someone else's cup with knowledge gives them the ability to teach others. Teaching communities how to build, maintain and profit from biosand filters is the heart of the business. Grosche has also begun the Banana Plantation Project that enables communities in South Sudan to take advantage of their extremely fertile soil and exploit its riches in the form of bananas plantations.
After Helmi's daughter caught Cholera in a developing country, a disease commonly contracted through infected water and food, the family almost lost her. After which Helmi realized that access to water wasn't the problem that the world faced, rather the access to CLEAN water was what plagued the planet. Helmi and his wife wanted to ensure that nobody else would have to face what they had experienced, so they created Grosche in their basement. Born from this dream Grosche arose with the values to use their business for the good of others.
At this moment Grosche has focused on 6 different countries that need clean water: South Sudan, Uganda, Malawi, India, Pakistan, and The Philippines. While Helmi was in South Sudan he spoke to locals and came to the realization that in South Sudan people are also suffering from a lack of food. Some research discovered that the soil in South Sudan is extremely fertile and had the possibility to provide an income for the struggling families. Working towards SDG #1, a teacher from Uganda with expertise in banana farming was brought in to educate the people in South Sudan about farming practices and thriving banana seeds for the hot climate. This is how the banana plantation started in South Sudan, which began as a farm of 400 plants which grew through the farming of the locals into 800 plants.
Over the past 12 year Grosche has become an international company that has continued to gain profit for the company but also give back to struggling communities by supplying water filters and the basic knowledge they need to build and sustain the filters themselves. For every Grosche brand product that is sold 50+ days of clean, filtered, safe drinking water is donated to people in need all over the world. Over the past 12 years they have supplied over 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) days of filtered water.
Grosche's biosand filters provide people with clean drinking water for 50 days; and as of right this second Grosche has provided 103,308,657 days of clean drinking water for people who need it the most. Simple math shows us that that equates to about 2,066,173 people that have access to clean drinking water thanks to Grosche. Although 50 days may not seem like a lot, 50 days is equivalent to 1,200 hours, and the average person can only survive 100 hours give or take at room temperature without water before dying. Now imagine having access to the water you so desperately need but know that drinking it would sentence you to a painful death. Grosche is saving people from making the difficult decision to drink water and perish, or not drink water and still perish. It’s a fact that everyone on Earth should have access to clean drinking water and Grosche is taking us one step closer to that dream.
The heart of Grosche's business is to do good in the world and believes that knowledge is the greatest thing you can pass on to someone. Through the profit of its home hardware business selling tea and coffee products, Grosche is able to support the values that their business holds to the highest standards.
New opportunities arose in partnerships within the Southern Ontario community such as volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity, Lakeside Hope House, House of Friendship and many more from the basis of their global efforts. Making a difference globally has astonishing impacts yet when local issues are addressed it hits closer to home and can help those around us, which is what Grosche strives to do in its local efforts.
Grosche prides itself in the well-being of its employee and believes that every employee deserves more then what minimum wage can provide them with. Which is why each and every employee is paid a living wage, which is defined as "A wage that is high enough to maintain a normal standard of living" by the Oxford Dictionary. Grosche strive to do more then what is expected of a family run business and most of all strives to put people before profit.
Almost every place on planet Earth is populated with the human species, and regardless of the race or where they came from every human being needs to drink water to survive. Approximately 70% of our being is water, that good old H20 that we depend on every single day. However without clean water we cannot guarantee the safety of the people consuming it. Grosche is helping to remove those fears of unclean drinking water and providing society with the ability to flourish and live on where it couldn't safely before
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Grosche International Inc is a company started out of the basement of Helmi and Mehree Ansari, in Cambridge Ontario. After a life changing scare when their daughter caught Cholera while travelling which resulted in almost losing her, they wanted to make a change in the world by assuring people could have access to clean filtered, safe drinking water. “(We’ve) always wanted to help make the world a better place” Helmi tells us when we asked how the business started. Grosche is a house hardware company that is both for profit and for change, with a goal of providing clean filtered drinking water to people around the world. Helmi and Mehree realized the problem with the water in other countries was not access to water but simply the lack of filtration they had for the water.
