Hello and welcome to the profit meets Impact podcast, where we explore the intersection of doing well and doing good in the world. I'm your host, Morgan Bailey, and I'm excited to bring you the wisdom of entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are using business to create sustainable and meaningful change across the globe. All right, excited for this conversation with Krutika Rabhishankar, who is the co founder of Farmers for Forests, an organization that makes biodiverse forests financially viable for communities. They help farmers and communities protect standing forest or a forest land. They first incentivize and fund this work via cash transfers to communities, and they increase incomes in the long term by helping farmers sell forest produce from agroforesty forest, agroforestry, excuse me, and access to carbon revenue. Krutika has spent over a decade working in rural India and across sectors like the public distribution system, health, agriculture, and forest. She's deeply passionate about wildlife, forests, growing food, rural livelihood, and financial markets. Before co founding farmers for forest with two of her closest friends, she worked in the international development space in the equity markets.

She studied economics and environmental studies in college and continues to be fascinated with how the two can interact and intersect better. Krutika, lovely to have this conversation with you.

Thank you for having me, Morgan. I'm excited to be here.

All right, so, Kartika, you and I have known each other a little bit as we work together through the Miller center. So it's exciting to have this conversation because I feel like I really have a deep understanding of your business. But before we get into the business piece, one of the things I like to ask people is how did you actually start to get into the social impact space that led you to founding the company?

That's a great question. So I don't really have one answer for this, and I usually say different things depending on what I'm feeling. But my, the first memory I have about wanting to do something was when I was really small and I read this book about extinction, like, species going extinct, animals dying out, pollution. And I remember I must have been about five or six years old, and that kind of stayed with me. And it's still like, it's still somewhere in the back of my head. And I think that was one of the first really strong motivations that I had that I remember of for wanting to do something for the environment, for the community, and particularly in, like, rural areas, areas where there are forests, farms. So I sort of just had this, like, vague feeling of wanting to do something there. But then it took me a while to figure out what that should be.

How did you land specifically within the forestry or agroforestry space?

So I think I first went towards rural development. So when I was in college, I looked a lot at, like, community based models of rural development. I spent a while studying this social reformer called Anna Hazare, who did a lot of work on watershed management, reforestation, working with the community, village development, things like that. But then when I graduated from college, I had loans to pay, so I sort of worked in the private sector for a bit in the equity markets and business research. And then I was at J Pal, which is an organization that does a lot of economic research. And while I was at J Pal, I was working on a project that looked at giving cash transfers to people instead of giving them subsidized food through the public distribution system. And it was at that time that there was a paper, a randomized control trial that came out.

So you grew up in India and has most of your work been primarily focused on rural, like rural India?

Yes, that is correct.

Are there challenges you think are specific to India in terms of the rural areas?

I guess these were challenges, probably more like 1015 years ago, but just lack of access to resources, no electricity, bad roads. But I think all of that is changing quite rapidly now. But I think one of the biggest challenges in rural India that we see is just, like, lack of economic or job opportunities for people living there. And I think that continues to remain a challenge.