Gift Caravan in Bengaluru offers free toys, clothes, and enables gadget swapping

It offers free toys, clothes and enables gadget swapping.

Soft toys, toasters, a sewing machine, bags and a humongous pile of clothes lay in the car trunk of Yogesh Suresh, the organiser of the Gift Caravan initiative with the Bengaluru Creative Circus (BCC), when he arrived at the L81 Cafe in Koramangala in Bengaluru. This was the fourth stop of the Gift Caravan on May 4.

The Gift Caravan travels around Bengaluru, across eight locations beginning at Hebbal and ending at the BCC in Yeshwantpur on the first Saturday of every month. Anyone can come and drop any usable item, from toys to sewing machines and cameras, and they can pick anything that catches their eye from the caravan. Besides clothes, vacuum cleaners, toasters, cameras and old Blackberry phones find space in the caravan, and they also leave the caravan pretty quickly due to high demand. 

The initiative began in December 2023 during Christmas. 

The route of the Gift Caravan is determined by people reaching out to them on Instagram or WhatsApp. 

“Initially, we relied on individual requests, but now we focus on apartments for a more sustainable approach. We simply map out the locations based on where we begin,” Yogesh said.

The inspiration for the Gift Caravan came from Charles Eisenstein’s book ‘Sacred Economics’. “People often hesitate to accept things for free, thinking, ‘Why should I take something without giving?’ Yet, when you do accept freely, your heart is filled with gratitude. The instinctive response is to give in return. This concept forms the essence of reciprocity,” he explained.

The Gift Caravan also focuses on the idea of de-cluttering, waste management and donating, creating a system of opening up resources to people to take things for free.