Impact · Project Breathe Foundation
Children first.
The expeditions are the loud part. This is the quiet part, and it matters more.
The direction
Adventure gives us a platform. This is where we point it.
Everything here runs under Project Breathe Foundation, and every project on this page is carried in collaboration with it.
The aim is not to be needed. It is to build the water, the power and the equipment well enough that a place runs on its own for the next fifteen years, and nobody has to come back and do it again.
That measure decides everything else on this page — the grade of steel we buy, the way a system is handed over, and where the money comes from in the first place.
How this started
We went to help for a few weeks.
In 2025 we travelled to Bright English Medium School in Loliondo, northern Tanzania, to volunteer. We stayed because the problem we found was not the problem we came for.
The school had no water. Everything else sat on top of that — the food, the illness, the hours children lost carrying buckets across a dry field before a lesson had even started.
Project Breathe Foundation exists because of that school. The water project was the first thing we ever finished, and it gave us the only rule we have kept since.
The rule
Build the foundation. Then leave.
We would rather be forgotten than needed.
Everywhere we work, one measure decides whether a project is finished: can this place stand without us?
Equipment is chosen to outlive the decision to buy it. Systems are handed over with a maintenance schedule the people there run themselves. The money goes into the thing underneath — the water, the power, the structure — and not into the thing that runs out and has to be bought again next year.
A school that depends on volunteers has not been helped. It has been made dependent.
How this is paid for
Everything the book earns goes to the school.
Every rupee UNFAILING earns, up to ten thousand copies, goes to Bright English Medium School — whether or not a single person donates.
A plan that depends on somebody else saying yes is not a plan. Donations come and they go, and some years they do not come at all. The book is the floor underneath this work, and it is the one part of it we control.
Three copies buy one child a steel plate and tumbler she will still be eating off in 2046 — seven, if you are buying in India. Not a donation. A book you keep, and equipment that outlives the decision to buy it.
Giving directly is open too, and it makes the work go faster. It is not what the work rests on.
Amazon takes its cut before anything reaches us — roughly ₹65 of every ₹99, and about $1.94 of every $2.99. All of that goes to the school.
The projects
Everything we take on lives here.
One school so far, since 2025. The second goes here when it exists, and not before.
Bright English Medium School
Water reached at 150 metres in January 2026. The borehole and pump are finished. The elevated tank, the solar array and the filtration are open.
Running alongside, and not waiting on the tank: 750 sets of steel plates and tumblers, and the plumbing repairs to both hostels. Being raised separately, in discussion now.
We would rather finish one thing than begin three.
Tell us what is broken
The method does not care which country it is in.
We will not always be able to say yes. We will always come back with something.
A borehole in Tanzania and a borehole anywhere else are the same engineering and the same rule.
We do not run a grant programme and we will not pretend to. What we have is two people, a method that has been tested once and finished, and the willingness to look at a problem properly before saying anything about it.
If you run a school, a clinic or a village water point — or you know one — write to us. Tell us what is broken, how many people it affects, what has already been tried, and who would look after it afterwards.
We read it ourselves. Every message.
If it is something we can do, we research it — the cost, the engineering, and who maintains it once we are gone.
We come back with a plan and an honest answer: whether we can fund it, part-fund it, or only help you build the case to put to somebody else.
Who does this
Two names on the work.
Project Breathe Foundation is led by Anurag Nallavelli. It holds the work, the accounts and the continuity.
Every project on this page is carried in collaboration with the Foundation. Venky and Anu — between us we bring the platform, the fundraising and the time on the ground.
We supervise every project at the site, in person.
The standard
The same four promises on every project.
Nothing here is decided case by case. These four hold on every project we take on, from the first rupee to the closing account.
Every contribution goes to the work described, and to nothing else.
At the close of each phase we publish the account, with photographs, and records available on request.
Surplus goes to the remaining work in strict order of priority. Nothing is diverted and nothing is spent twice.
When a phase is closed, we do not go back to the people who funded it.
Every project in collaboration with Project Breathe Foundation
Children first is not a campaign. It is the direction.
निर्ममो निरहङ्कारः
nirmamo nirahaṅkāraḥ
No “mine.” No “I.”
Only then, peace.
Bhagavad Gita · 2.71