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History
Beginning as neighborhood-level mentoring, growing into a network of waste banks, and now being formalized as a legal entity with its own digital system.
The beginning
Tambah Tumbuh was born from a simple observation in the field: waste that residents had sorted often ended up mixed again because no one collected it regularly, and waste banks launched with fanfare stopped transacting a few months later. Since [year activities began], [founder's name] together with a group of community organizers in Surakarta began working on the point most often abandoned: the last link between households and industry.
From mentoring to a network
Over more than ten years, the work grew from sorting training at the neighborhood level into forming and mentoring hundreds of Waste Bank Units at the neighborhood and village level. Alongside that grew three networks that today are the Foundation's main strength: a community network, a local government network, and an industry buyer network.
That experience also carried an expensive lesson. Waste banks don't fail because residents are lazy — they fail because collection is unreliable, payment is delayed, and manual record-keeping burdens the unit's caretakers too much. Those three things are what got redesigned.
Formalization and Sirkula
In [month, year] the Articles of Association and Bylaws of Yayasan Tambah Tumbuh Indonesia were drafted, referring to Law Number 16 of 2001 as amended by Law Number 28 of 2004 on Foundations. At the same time, Sirkula was designed — a digital platform that records transactions from resident deposits through to sale to industry, complete with photo evidence and an audit trail.
Sirkula isn't an add-on at the end of the program. It's the operational reason this work can be financed and its impact can be proven.