On the outskirts of Karachi, across 2.25 acres of land shaped carefully around trees, wind, and light, a new kind of landmark is rising.
Not a mall. Not a housing development. Not another stretch of concrete forcing nature to adapt. But a sanctuary.
The Ayesha Chundrigar Foundation’s new facility – expected to open in April or May – has been designed as something radical for Pakistan: a space where animals live in dignity, safety, and contentment. A place built around nature rather than over it. A place that does not treat rescue as temporary survival, but as a right to peace.
And perhaps most strikingly, a place where humans are visitors…not the center.
The scale of the ACF project is ambitious. Construction has unfolded alongside full-scale rescue operations that continue to bring in 15 to 25 animals every single day. In just the past two months, between 15 and 22 animals have been dropped off daily — injured, abandoned, abused, or discarded because they grew old or ill. Today, over 2,000 animals are under the foundation’s care.
Building this sanctuary has meant learning architecture from scratch. Working hands-on with engineers, labourers, and contractors. Studying how systems function – and how they fail – in order to redesign them to be calmer, more sustainable, more resilient. This was never a pause from the work. It was a recalibration of it.
To understand how this sanctuary came to be, you have to go back to a child sitting in the backseat of a car.
Ayesha Chundrigar, ACF’s founder, remembers staring out of the window on the way to school, watching donkeys being beaten on busy roads, dogs limping through traffic, cats curled on sidewalks — injured and invisible. What unsettled her most was not just the suffering, but the indifference. The way no one seemed to stop. The way cruelty blended seamlessly into daily life.
That discomfort never left.
At ten, she spent her summers volunteering at orphanages. At seventeen, after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, she helped care for 700 refugees daily after school. Compassion, for her, was never an event. It was consistency…showing up long after the headlines faded.
There was no singular career plan. Instead, there was curiosity. Seventeen internships across media, film, publishing, and advocacy. A degree in English Literature and Philosophy in the UK. A Master’s in International Broadcast Journalism. Training in Humanistic Psychotherapy and Counseling. Ayesha chased the stories most people avoid: documentaries about women’s prisons in Pakistan, films exploring the link between child sexual abuse and heroin addiction on the streets of Peshawar, projects confronting death and social stigma. Again and again, she moved toward pain, not away from it.
When she formally founded ACF at 25, it was not a sudden pivot. It was the culmination of years of witnessing injustice and feeling a quiet, persistent ache to respond — especially for animals, who had almost no structured advocacy in Pakistan’s landscape.
In the early days, there was no funding, no roadmap, no operational manual. She was the rescuer, feeder, HR department, legal advisor, operations manager, stock controller, call handler, content creator, and fundraiser…all while working five other jobs to keep the mission alive.
What began as one person refusing to do nothing has since grown into a 24-department organization.
Among the earliest initiatives were donkey medical camps. The logic was simple but transformative: how could a city depend so heavily on working animals and have nowhere to treat them? It was like having roads full of cars and no mechanics. That first intervention grew into broader community engagement, social mobilization, and capacity-building efforts to improve both animal welfare and the livelihoods of their owners.
Today, ACF’s programs extend across Karachi: TNVR (trap-neuter-vaccinate-release) campaigns to protect stray dogs and improve public safety; medical camps in animal markets where cruelty is routine; beachside veterinary care for horses and camels used for rides; hospice and end-of-life care that offers warmth, pain relief, and dignity to critically injured animals in their final days.
But beyond services and departments, ACF represents something more difficult to quantify: a shift in narrative.
Psychologists have long observed that cruelty toward animals can desensitize empathy, especially in children. When suffering is normalized, compassion weakens. Conversely, when societies model kindness toward animals, they reinforce empathy as a shared value. The way we treat the most vulnerable shapes who we become.
The new sanctuary, then, is not just infrastructure. It is education without a lecture. Awareness without accusation. It is proof – visible, physical proof – that animals deserve homes designed specifically for them.
In a country where animal welfare once existed largely on the margins, this space aims to raise their value in the public imagination. To challenge indifference not through outrage, but through example. Nearly thirteen years after its founding, ACF stands on the brink of opening its most ambitious chapter yet. A sanctuary built not from strategy decks or initial capital, but from discomfort turned into action. From exhaustion met with persistence. From a refusal to look away.
If it succeeds, and all signs suggest it will, the 2.25-acre stretch of land will be more than a rescue facility. It will be a statement about who we are capable of becoming.
For more information about The Ayesha Chundrigar Foundation (ACF), visit their website here!