The co-founders of Avayaranya are from the 80s and 90s. We grew up in a different Bangladesh- a Bangladesh where we picked wild fruits from the roadside while walked home from school and. Jaam, lotkon, chalta, gab, dumur – they were just there, lining the roads, filling the air with smell and colour. We didn’t think about it. It was just how life was. It made our childhood colorful. It was our heritage, our culture, the taste of the land we belonged to.

But those trees are not there anymore. The roadsides we walked as children – they look nothing like they used to. The old trees were cut, or just slowly disappeared, and nobody planted them back. And when the trees went, the birds went too. The birds that depended on those fruits, those branches, those hollows – they are getting lost because the food is gone, the habitat is gone. Season by season, the landscape we grew up in is being erased.

That is why we started Avayaranya. Not because of a policy paper or a funding call – because we felt the loss personally. We could see it. The trees of our childhood were vanishing, and with them, something that made this land ours. So our core focus is simple: restore the native trees and biodiversity that reflect our heritage. Not exotic species, not ornamental plantings – the trees that were always here. The ones that fed us, sheltered the birds, and connected us to the place we come from. We plant them, we tag them, we map where the endangered ones still survive, and we try to make sure the next generation gets to know them too – not from a textbook, but from the roadside, the way we did.