Project Prithvi

2025 research award & partnership

Sadhana NYC is collaborating with CUNY and New York Sea Grant to better understand the relationships between Hindu spirituality and environmental stewardship in Jamaica Bay. For this project, researchers Alejandro Garcia Lozano (John Jay College - CUNY) and Hannah Eisler Burnett (New York Sea Gratn) will be joining events to chat with attendees and help document what they learn at our clean-ups. They will conduct interviews, focus groups, and a dialogue session to hear from different grousps about marine debris and the spiritual and ecological importance of Jamaica Bay.

If you would like to participate in the project in the future and share your experiences, or if you have any questions, please reach out to Prof. Alejandro Garcia Lozano (agarcialozano@jjay.cuny.edu) or Dr. Hannah Eisler Burnett (heb84@cornell.edu). This work is funded by the Hudson River Foundation.

Seva

Since 2013, Sadhana has been organizing cleanups on the first Saturday of every month from April through November. This has been done in partnership with the Gateway National Recreation Area, local temples, and community-based organizations.

Advocacy

Sadhana was awarded the Citizen Committee for New York City's "Reduce, Reuse, and Repair" Grant for 2018. We hold workshops at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge to restore items collected from our cleanups which we find difficult to dispose of, like broken murthis and diyas. Local community members and the general public attend the workshops, which uplift various mediums of art and the awareness of Hindu religious practices.

In September 2014, Sadhana presented "Sacred Waters" at the Queens Museum, a display of Hindu religious offerings which Sadhana members and other volunteers collected from Jamaica Bay during our cleanups. We hoped to move devotees to worship in more eco-friendly ways and to raise awareness among the broader public that the items are religious offerings being made by devotees and not people who have no respect for nature. 

Community

Sadhana rallies religious community leaders who have already made efforts to keep the beaches clean and to work towards building dialogue about how to address this problem. Our hope is that priests help us make the point that, since our Hindu texts describe the Earth and the water as Goddesses, it does not honor them to pollute or destroy them.

Project Prithvi, furthermore, serves as a way for the children and youth of the community who either want or need to complete community service to come and honor the earth as they do so. In this way we hope to bring our community closer—both among itself and to the broader life and Earth around it.

If you would like to help our effort, your generous donation of $150 would fund the cleaning supplies and refreshments for one clean-up. If you would like to participate in a clean-up, come join us the first Saturday of every month April-October (with the exception of September) from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at "Crossbay Bridge North Channel Bridge Kayak Launch" in Jamaica Bay!

Project Prithvi Coordinators:

• Rohan Narine, Sadhana Co-Founder & Volunteer Coordinator

• Aminta Kilawan-Narine, Sadhana Co-Founder & Advisory Board Member

• Neha Savant, Sadhana Executive Board Member

Co-Sponsoring Partners Include:

Gateway National Recreation Area of the National Parks Service - through a partnership with Gateway, Sadhana has "adopted" areas of Jamaica Bay most frequented by Hindu worshippers. Gateway also provides supplies for our cleanups.