Feature: Aaboo Varghese, Founder & Executive Director of Purnata
Purnata means wholeness or completeness in Sanskrit. In Mumbai and West Bengal, India, the nonprofit that goes by this name is built around a simple, radical belief: that every person, no matter where they come from or what has been done to them, deserves to be made whole.
Aaboo Varghese’s path to founding Purnata was shaped by years of working alongside government and civil society organizations focused on trafficking. He saw what worked, but also saw the gaps, the ways that efforts to stop trafficking remained siloed, reactive, or spread too thin to address the root conditions that made communities vulnerable in the first place. He envisioned something different: an organization that would tackle trafficking at every stage of the pipeline, from source communities to transit routes to destination cities, and that would invest as deeply in healing as in rescue.
If you’re interested in learning more about Purnata and Aaboo’s journey, check out https://pir.org/for-orgs/org-in-action/wholeness-for-all-the-story-of-purnata/