A health survey conducted by McKinsey Health Institute in 2023 found that Indians had the highest rate of burnout symptoms (59 percent) from a surveyed pool of more than 30,000 workers across 30 countries. The global average was 22 percent. The statistics for India were telling: Indians reported the highest levels of exhaustion (62 percent), cognitive impairment (67 percent), emotional impairment (58 percent), and mental distance (59 percent).

Burnout does no one good, and if we want to eliminate the word from our work vocabulary, we may need to give that other word—sabbatical—more play. A sabbatical denotes paid or unpaid leave for a period, from a few weeks to several months.

The need for sabbaticals is especially important in the development sector where resources are perpetually stretched. Leaders feel the pressure more keenly as they often bear the weight of the organisation. When they burn out, it isn’t the organisation alone that caves in; the people they serve are also adversely affected. And yet, social sector leaders find it difficult to step away from their responsibilities and take a sabbatical.

Vishal Talreja knows this well. The co-founder and trustee of Dream a Dream grappled with burnout and was compelled to take sabbaticals to deal with it. Discovering first-hand the life-changing benefits of extended time off, and alert to the reasons that keep people from it, he designed The Cocoon Initiative—a programme that funds sabbaticals in the social sector. The initiative, which is supported by the Chintu Gudiya Foundation, offers financial assistance to leaders so they can take a minimum of three months off work. Time away is expected to help them reflect on their mission and return to work with renewed stamina and purpose.

In this interview, Vishal and Donald Lobo, executive director of the Chintu Gudiya Foundation, talk to Smarinita Shetty and Joeanna Rebello Fernandes about the value sabbaticals can bring to the social sector; why more funders should put their weight behind the policy; and what organisations can do to bridge policy and practice.

Why are sabbaticals important?

Vishal: I have two perspectives on this. The first is from my own experience as a social entrepreneur and leader. For the first 10 years of running Dream a Dream, I didn’t believe I would ever get exhausted or burned out. But then I did. A day came when I just didn’t want to go to work. I packed a few clothes, got into a bus and, eight hours later, landed in Coorg. I switched my phone off, slept, and went on long walks, all the while seeking answers to the question: Why did I not want to go to work?

In the nonprofit world, especially in India, the pace of work only keeps increasing.

Many entrepreneurs are feeling burdened quicker and reaching burnout faster.

In the pursuit of creating transformative change in the lives of young people, I had run myself aground physically, mentally, and emotionally. Time away from work helped me see the blind spots in my leadership; the way I was building the organisation, its culture, systems, and processes; and the way I was showing up for my team. This week-long self-enforced break and the subsequent year-long investment in honest self-reflection led to a fundamental shift in my approach to work and leadership.

This is the power of a sabbatical. It helped me rebuild the organisation into the high-impact, thriving nonprofit it is today. But it wouldn’t have happened had I not been forced to take that break. Stepping away gives you a different lens on the work, the organisation, and your own leadership style.

My second perspective has been framed by entrepreneurs I have met and mentored. The regulatory and governance environment in India has become very difficult for nonprofits over the last decade. At the same time, there has been a big push towards new ideas, innovations, and scaling big and fast. Many entrepreneurs are feeling burdened quicker and reaching burnout faster. But their organisations lack the support systems to bolster them; they recognise that they need to take time off and rest and recalibrate, yet they’re unable to do it because the organisation has not reached a level of stability to allow them to take that kind of break.

Donald: The importance of long breaks from work has been established for a while. It’s common for tech companies to give employees a paid sabbatical of three to six months after they’ve worked for five to seven years. In the nonprofit world, especially in India, the pace of work only keeps increasing. I’ve seen leaders struggling with it, but neither they nor their organisations had the capacity or the structure to allow them to take a break. In the few cases that people did take one, they also took a financial hit. So, getting funders to promote sabbaticals is also one of the key objectives of The Cocoon Initiative.

How can leaders identify and deal with early signs of burnout?

Vishal: Ideally, we shouldn’t reach the stage of burnout at all; that’s too late already. A sabbatical is something leaders should look forward to, rather than something they’re forced to take because they’re burned out. It should be an intentional, conscious break they take every few years to thrive, flourish, recalibrate, and rest.

Having said that, we don’t have the systems and mechanisms to support sabbaticals yet. I’ve taken three sabbaticals over 23 years. I was forced to take two of those because I fell extremely ill. My body reacted to the exhaustion and burnout. I had gut issues; I was dealing with depression. When your body starts responding adversely, that’s a clear sign you need a break.

I also took a sabbatical when I sensed I needed to play a different role in the organisation. I had done what I could as a leader, but if I had to leapfrog to the next level of personal and professional growth, I had to do something fundamentally different, either by upskilling or adopting a very different lens to the work and my approach to leadership. It was this realisation that pushed me to take the sabbatical.

You could also be driven to it when you realise you don’t find joy or purpose in your work anymore. Planned sabbaticals can give us the time and space for authentic reflections.

Donald: Once you burn out, the recovery period is much longer. We should instead treat sabbaticals as part and parcel of life. But people aren’t even taking enough holidays. I think the board and senior leadership should nudge people to take breaks on a continuous basis, rather than just when they’re burned out.

What support systems are needed to encourage sabbaticals, both within the organisation and in the larger social sector ecosystem?

Donald: A positive culture of approval should be built around breaks and vacations. Such a culture would also strengthen the organisation by creating a system where other people can step in and take the organisation forward when the leader takes a break. However, this is hard to achieve without the help of a funding ecosystem.

With initiatives like Cocoon, we’re saying here’s something to get it started, and hopefully, over time, more and more funders—perhaps even your existing funders—can help you establish a sabbatical policy. Ultimately, provisions like this should fall within a normal funding cycle. It should be part of your regular HR policy and organisation budget. You shouldn’t need a third funder. Programmes like ours should not exist forever. 

Vishal: From my own experience, in the early years of this work, there was a lot of guilt attached to taking a break, even a weekend off. This is due, in part, to the social and cultural norms in India, where we are constantly told we need to work hard because hard work will pay off in the long run. We are told to keep busy, so we won’t be depressed; to keep our minds occupied, because having free time is wrong.

The lack of financial stability that many leaders at the grassroots struggle with impacts their ability to take a break.

Now, that was probably true for a different generation. But in the fast-paced and complex world we live and work in today, hard work doesn’t necessarily lead to thriving; it could potentially lead to burnout and mental health challenges. It took me a while to understand this. There were months when I felt stuck at work, but I told myself, “Just keep doing the work, and you’ll get out of this phase. It’s just a phase.”

At the organisation level, as Lobo said, policies and budgets that can contribute to a culture of rest and rejuvenation are absent. And funders don’t necessarily take that approach to investment in leadership.

When I took my sabbaticals, I didn’t get a salary from the organisation. This meant that I didn’t have the funds to take care of a lot of my personal expenses. And I couldn’t support my parents with some of their expenses or medical emergencies. Our salaries are not high, and many of us do not have the savings to take care of anything unexpected that crops up. The lack of financial stability that many leaders at the grassroots struggle with impacts their ability to take a break, and they continue to function month on month because that monthly salary is critical for them.

What also holds leaders back from taking sabbaticals is the lack of second-line leadership. If there’s no one to take over in the leader’s absence, or if the organisation does not have the systems and processes needed to run the organisation and handle crises, the leader will keep getting pulled back to tackle urgent issues, and even mundane ones like sharing OTPs. All this brings the leader back into the organisation when what they need is a clean break.

The third problem is, in India, governance boards are typically advisory boards. This means they’re there to support the leader or the entrepreneur, but they don’t necessarily know what to do if the entrepreneur is not around. So, again, we need to build the leadership capacity of the board to take care of the organisation in the leader’s absence.  

How do you put these support systems in place?

Donald: Most organisations won’t get it right the first time around, or even the second or third time, but their approach could be, “OK, this person is going to be away for the next three months; let’s make sure that we can continue at 80 percent capacity and have systems in place so that we’re not compelled to get in touch with them. Setting up processes and improving systems to make this happen will build much stronger organisations.

How can organisations bridge the gap between policy and practice to enable employees to take breaks?

Vishal: At Dream a Dream, we had a policy called Learning Leave where any team member could take 10 days off every year and do whatever they wanted—a no-agenda leave. We realised that only approximately 25 percent of the team was availing it. This led us to wonder if there was something in our culture that was preventing people from taking this leave. One reason was the guilt attached to taking leave for personal growth, which comes from social conditioning. The second was that even though people wanted to take leave, they were worried that managers or team members might not appreciate it.

We had to work with our team for a couple of years to make the shift from eyebrow-raising to celebrating when someone takes a break. This meant that we, at the leadership level, had to role-model it and start taking that leave ourselves. Simply having a policy on paper does not help; it needs to be built into the culture of the organisation.

How can funders help?  

Vishal: Funders can proactively allocate funds for sabbaticals. If you’ve been funding an organisation for three to five years and have built a great relationship with the leaders and the team, why not extend an additional fund to help them create a sabbatical policy? In an ideal scenario, 5–7 percent of a funder’s allocation should go towards the team’s well-being, which could include sabbaticals.

Donald: What I tell nonprofits is, when you are given unrestricted funds, use them to invest in people, to make them happier at work, to increase salaries and benefits. Funders need to explicitly tell their grantees to spend 10–20 percent on their people, and paid sabbaticals and breaks could be a part of their allocation. We don’t do a very good job at that in the sector. That’s what our pitch to funders should be—give the nonprofit the flexibility to invest in what would make their workplace more fun and a lot safer and allow employees to experiment and learn for themselves. 

What will it take to convince funders to come on board this initiative and, over time, build sabbaticals into their normal funding cycles?

Vishal: My sense is, it’s too early to start talking to other funders. We need to have a few stories out there of senior leaders who have taken sabbaticals and been impacted by them. We can then use that to go to other funders and say, this is the kind of impact it can have on the leader and on the organisation and its work, so it makes good business sense to invest in the well-being of the senior leadership. It means that they can come back with more growth, ideas, and innovations and create a bigger impact. We’ll have to show that connection.

We’re not going to be able to change everyone’s minds immediately.

We don’t want The Cocoon Initiative to exist in perpetuity. What we’re hoping is that organisations themselves will start seeing the impact of this and put policies in place, and then ask their funders to invest in it. The initiative will give them the evidence and stories to help them talk to funders.

Donald: We’re not going to be able to change everyone’s minds immediately. There’ll always be the early adopters, the midterm adopters, and the large percentage who will come on board slowly. In addition to demonstrating how useful this is, we must also talk about it extensively with other funders.  

What kind of impact would you like to see this initiative have on the sector five years from now?  

Vishal: For me, it’s about creating an attitudinal shift in the sector. It’s about moving away from the mindset of scarcity—of guilt about investing in yourself and having to sacrifice and work till your last breath to create change—and towards a mindset of abundance. The work we’re trying to do in the sector is complex; we’re dealing with very difficult issues, and we witness more failure than success. So, it’s important that we operate from a space of abundance and celebrate the breaks along the way. One of the things social sector leaders struggle with is, as soon as we climb a summit, we’re looking at the next summit. We don’t pause to acknowledge past victories. We should celebrate milestones, celebrate rest, because it’s a necessary step to be able to do better.  

Donald: Even if we have 10–20 nonprofits instituting these policies, encouraging people to take time off, and investing in people much more than what we are doing today, and if we have three to five large funders supporting those nonprofits, that would be success to me. Having the sector take care of its own people proactively is essential, because you want them to recharge long before they come anywhere close to burnout, and in a way that’s financially, morally, ethically, and culturally acceptable to everyone.

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Know more

• Dive into this series for a panoramic perspective on the impact of well-being on social change work.
• Listen to this podcast to understand why more companies should design a sabbatical policy. 
• Read this first-person account to learn how a founder sabbatical can benefit an organisation.

It is the development sector that shoulders much of this work, raising and routing funds and human resources for the range of simmering problems the sector attempts to solve. But nonprofit resources are often limited and bound by red tape. India’s social sector has fewer than 10 lakh civil society organisations (CSOs), and only 11–12 percent of these are active (according to the Between Binaries report published last year by Centre for Social and Economic Progress). This means there is one active CSO for 11,000–12,000 people. In the poorest districts, this ratio could plummet to one organisation for a population of 25,000–50,000.

To make matters worse, the funding crunch that the sector is witnessing on account of legislative changes in the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) has resulted in staff downsizing and even closure, with hard-hitting consequences on service delivery. In light of these constraints, can nonprofits in India find alternate ways to sustain their programmes? Can a committed volunteer base help keep the engine running?

Where do volunteers fit in

While volunteers cannot replace trained social sector workers nor replicate their skills developed over years on the field, they can contribute significantly—and often in unexpected ways—to a nonprofit. But nonprofits don’t always see it this way. They fail to engage volunteers meaningfully in their work, or for an appreciable length of time, and this stems from a lack of vision for the role a volunteer can play in an organisation.

Nonprofits often look at volunteers as only a provisional resource for menial tasks such as helping with an event or conducting a survey—a stopgap that can be easily replaced with someone else. Sometimes, volunteers are not valued enough for their efforts or are treated discourteously. Disappointed, they may choose not to volunteer with the organisation again, costing the organisation an opportunity to build an army of allies for the long term (a devoted volunteer may later bring their family and friends along too).

Volunteer engagement requires dedicated effort, creative thinking, fierce networking, and strategic planning.

Some nonprofits, such as those involved in anti-trafficking operations or juvenile rehabilitation, undertake highly specialised and sometimes risky work that demands specific skills and long-term commitment. These organisations need volunteers too, but fear that inconsistency or complacency on the part of the volunteer could endanger the work. For example, an anti-trafficking nonprofit might need someone (who is unfamiliar with trafficking and policing and unknown to the sector’s circles) to act as a decoy customer to bait a trafficker—an assignment that would require long and rigorous training. Nonprofits often don’t know where to find volunteers for these missions.

In our experience, nonprofits haven’t yet discovered the true value a volunteer can bring to the table. Volunteer engagement requires dedicated effort, creative thinking, fierce networking, and strategic planning. It was to bring these resources to the table and connect nonprofits to volunteers in new and sustainable ways that The Movement India was set up in 2017. We are a platform that deploys citizens in volunteering opportunities in three social sectors: education, mental health, and anti-human trafficking. Our aim is to help nonprofits meet their short- and long-term goals and enable volunteers to find a sense of purpose through enriching experiences.

Here are some of the techniques and approaches we have adopted.

1. Engage volunteers affiliated with existing volunteer bodies

Nonprofits looking for volunteers can consider the National Service Scheme (NSS), a central sector scheme that enables school, college, and university students to participate in community service. Each student member is awarded a certificate on completion of 120 hours of service a year. Approximately 10–30 of these hours can be reserved for nonprofit work; the rest are earmarked for central and state-level social initiatives.

At present, 39 lakh students are enrolled in NSS units across the country. This is a substantial pool of human resources that nonprofits can tap. Working with CSOs also allows students to engage in varied and exciting projects, apart from the mandated beach clean-ups and tree-plantation drives. When young volunteers are co-opted into activities that excite them, volunteerism becomes more than just a certificate-centric task; it cultivates a sense of purpose and fosters social consciousness. These objectives also align with the spirit of the NSS, which aims to raise legions of socially responsible citizens in the country.

Volunteers can be found within large residential societies, schools, clubs like the Rotary, the National Cadet Corps, and religious institutions too. Nonprofits simply have to reach out to them. They can alternatively turn to volunteer aggregation platforms such as The Movement India, Chezuba, Goodera, ConnectFor, and ThoseinNeed that draw on these very resources, saving nonprofits the trouble of approaching volunteers directly and negotiating volunteering terms with them.  

2. Craft a strong pitch

In 2018—around the time Kerala was witnessing widespread floods—our team was out recruiting volunteers at St Andrew’s college in Mumbai. The principal told us it was going to be a hard sell. “I don’t think anyone is going to be interested; they’re already busy with classwork and internships,” she warned us. We often encounter such reluctance, and the way to overcome it is to build a strong pitch for our cause. 

One thing that organisations can do is convince citizens about the cause more compellingly. 

And so, we started our conversation with the students with a simple question: What’s everybody talking about these days? “The Kerala floods,” they shouted. We then asked them, “How many people have been affected by the floods?” They all made their guesses. Approximately 1 million, we confirmed. We prodded further, “Do you know of a problem that is eight times bigger, but that no one talks about?” This immediately grabbed their attention. They all wanted to know what the problem was. We said if they were keen to learn about it, they should sign up for the seminar we were going to conduct in their college. Three times the expected number of students turned up. The subject we were referring to was human trafficking in India. Getting people’s attention is half the work.

St Andrew’s college is now one of our top volunteer bases. We have even been invited to pitch volunteering as a mental well-being exercise during the induction and orientation of new batches there, and at other colleges such as Mithibai in Mumbai.

Nonprofits looking to build support for a campaign or a cause are often met with pushback and told, “People don’t care; what are you going to do about it?” One thing that organisations can do is convince citizens about the cause more compellingly. 

Unfortunately, many nonprofits struggle to articulate their value proposition, or sometimes the problem itself. Here value proposition refers to highlighting the value in what a nonprofit does and why citizens should care about it. For example, the value proposition of an educational nonprofit is more impactful when worded as, “We free children from exploitation by engaging them in education,” rather than just stating that they provide education for children in slum communities.

Nonprofits also find it hard to tell volunteers what is happening on the ground and what is expected of them. Volunteers need to hear compelling appeals such as “Help us get a child to school this summer. Join the Mission Admission squad!” or “Every form you fill today has the potential to change the future of a child, forever.” The ‘ask’ must be clear and specific.

Good communication is especially indispensable when it comes to causes that people hesitate to volunteer for. We once tried to schedule a volunteering session for corporate employees at a juvenile home, but many shied away from it because they were reluctant to engage with those who were in conflict with the law. In such cases, familiarising volunteers with the context of the mission, destigmatising the place, and assuring them of the safety protocols in place can help.

3. Make it easy for volunteers to serve

Many people want to lend their skills to a worthy cause, but not everyone has the time or resources for a big commitment. So, volunteering should be made as flexible and practical as possible. Enable people to volunteer from their homes, for perhaps a few hours a week or month, and refrain from asking for a long commitment upfront.

All organisations have a list of tasks that can be easily performed at home. For example, volunteers can create teaching material and record stories for children on their phones or laptops. They can be roped in for fundraising and to make slide decks, create jingles, run data analytics, write proposals (not every nonprofit has a good proposal writing or fundraising team), or design motifs for nonprofit products—all from the comfort of their own homes. Making it convenient for people to contribute their time and skills is one way to have more of volunteering. Just like tech platforms have benefitted retail giving, technology can be utilised to strengthen volunteering.

Nonprofits can tap additional services this way and build capacity without having to stretch their scant resources. A nonprofit that works with women’s self-help groups can market their products on social media without having to hire a social media marketer. Fashion design students can contribute designs to a small-scale tailoring unit run by vulnerable women.

There’s a lot that can be done even without pressing specialised skills into service. During the pandemic, for example, we had volunteers on phone duty, calling up former prisoners and women rescued from sex trafficking to check on them and remind them of COVID-19 protocols. A simple gesture like this not only helped spread awareness but also made those receiving these calls feel special and valued.

4. Engage with corporate employees

Not every nonprofit can access CSR funds. They may fall short of the company’s criteria for grants, or their proposals may fail to impress corporate decision-makers. Yet, if not money, companies can volunteer the skills and talents of their employees through CSO outreach programmes. They can conduct business skills training for women in skill development programmes, manage large-scale events, conduct online spoken English or content creation classes, or help job candidates polish their interview skills.

All it takes is one employee to convince their teammates to pitch in for a worthy cause.

We once brought a corporate team to a home for survivors of human trafficking. After the employees interacted with the children, we urged them to help raise the visibility of the organisation on LinkedIn by following their page and interacting with their posts, a simple action that would be noticed by their social media contacts. This would help the shelter’s own network grow and improve the likelihood of receiving funding in the long run. 

Sometimes, corporate volunteers can help raise funds for the nonprofits themselves, outside their company’s CSR remit. Their familiarity with the nonprofit and its work may even lead employees to recommend the organisation for future funding through formal CSR channels.

When seeking corporate volunteers, CSOs could also consider approaching individual departments within a company if they haven’t had success with the formal CSR route. We’ve experienced that in large organisations, such as Tata Consultancy Services, teams have enough autonomy to take on their own social impact projects; these decisions don’t always sit with higher-ups. Nonprofits could explore opportunities with employees directly. All it takes is one employee to convince their teammates to pitch in for a worthy cause.

5. Set up opportunities for self-reflection

At the end of every volunteering assignment, we ask our volunteers two simple questions: “What did you do?” and “What did you really do?” The first question draws a prompt response, where they recount the tasks they performed as volunteers. A person might say they visited a low-income community and surveyed 15 families. When asked the second question, they start to reflect on what they ‘really’ did. They then begin to appreciate the deeper implications of that action: “I didn’t just conduct a survey, I helped bridge a child’s access to education.”

When volunteers are made to see their role as transformative, it kindles a deeper commitment with the cause and drives them to prolong their engagement with the organisation. The simple truth is, volunteering is as much about helping others as it is about being able to appreciate our skills and talents in a new light and value ourselves in a new way.

The simple truth is, volunteering is as much about helping others as it is about valuing ourselves in a new way. It creates room for us to appreciate our skills and talents in a new light.

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Know more

• Read this article to learn about emerging trends and approaches in volunteering.
• Read this article to learn more about skill-based volunteering.

Do more

Connect with The Movement India at hello@themovementindia.com to design a volunteer engagement programme for your organisation.

Now, however, a transformative shift is underway. Long-standing perceptions of volunteering as a certificate-centric activity or something reserved for those with abundant free time are fading. Young volunteers from schools and colleges are no longer content with being passive participants; they seek meaningful involvement where they can influence the direction of initiatives. This change in mindset has led to an environment where volunteers actively contribute to programme design, operations, and decision-making.

eivolve.org is an incubator for start-ups that primarily work with volunteers to drive social change. It was initiated by India Welfare Trust in 2022. Since then, it has incubated 14 entrepreneurs. Given our work, we have witnessed this transformation first-hand. Below, I outline emergent trends, approaches, and lessons in volunteering to help develop the robust volunteering ecosystem that the social sector deserves.

Trends shaping the volunteering landscape

1. Volunteering is central to many organisations’ work

Newer organisations are pioneering a paradigm shift in how volunteering is perceived and leveraged. Some are pivoting from being staff-driven organisations to volunteer-driven ones. For instance, Captains Social Foundation has harnessed the energy of volunteers to lead impactful projects. In a project for which they partnered with the Kerala Tourism Department, they mobilised volunteers to paint villages with images rooted in the villages’ histories and traditions.

Similarly, Kites Foundation encourages young volunteers to take charge by championing and leading projects themselves, thus fostering a sense of ownership and agency. In 2022, Kites incubated 23 successful volunteer-led initiatives under The Future Project. These initiatives include distributing 10,000 seed packets to farmers across several districts in Kerala to improve food security, cleaning beaches in Kerala’s Alappuzha district, and providing first-aid training and awareness sessions to the public, especially the youth.

2. The volunteer pool is diverse

Organisations are engaging a diverse pool of volunteers—from high school students to young corporate professionals—who are not only offering their time but also engaging in leadership activities.

Retired professionals and homemakers are other groups of volunteers who are both eager to engage in volunteer work and have the ability to spend more time and effort on their chosen cause. They make up a significant portion of the volunteer pool and are an asset to organisations today. Angel Xpress Foundation is an organisation that successfully engages a lot of volunteers from this demographic. Their volunteers contribute two–three hours a week to teach first-generation learners from underprivileged communities.

However, homemakers and retired professionals still represent an underutilised demographic in volunteering.

3. There is a shift towards skill-based volunteering

Traditional volunteering often involves generic tasks such as distributing pamphlets or simple administrative work, but there’s a growing trend of skill-based volunteering, where individuals contribute their specialised skills and expertise, such as building strategy for organisations, designing marketing plans, onboarding new technology platforms, and training community members in a specific skill. This can be highly beneficial for organisations seeking specific knowledge or services.

Taproot Foundation and WeDoGood connect skilled professionals such as marketers, HR experts, and graphic designers with nonprofits that need their expertise. Volunteers provide pro bono consulting to help these organisations achieve their missions more effectively.

4. Virtual volunteering is taking off, especially after COVID-19

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of virtual volunteering, allowing individuals to contribute remotely. This trend continues as people realise they can make a difference from the comfort of their homes. For instance, iVolunteer, an online platform, offers virtual volunteering opportunities in areas such as content writing, website development, and data analysis. Volunteers can help nonprofits across India without facing any geographical constraints.

These trends are indicative of the changing landscape of volunteering and the growing importance of volunteers in society.

Evidence of effective volunteering

Among the strategies that have proven successful, providing opportunities for volunteers to lead and shape projects has been transformative. Organisations such as Claylab Education Foundation have embraced the concept of ‘super mentors’—experienced volunteers who have been working consistently with the organisation for a while. Involving long-term volunteers in programme design and operations enriches both their experience as well as programme outcomes.

Initiatives such as Sampark Sathi Foundation allow volunteers to witness the immediate impact of their efforts. Community volunteers at Sampark Sathi scout cases in the local community that require attention. Once regular volunteers have verified these cases, they go about looking for solutions with partner nonprofits. Recently, some volunteer members arranged for a wheelchair for a young boy and helped conduct workshops for young women to become certified beauticians. This reinforces their connection with the cause.

Virtual opportunities and the emergence of ‘gig’ volunteering are further testament to the evolving dynamics. It enables volunteers to engage in micro-projects with tangible results within shorter time frames (one–three months).

What we’ve learned

While the potential for impactful volunteering is immense, organisations must consider the following to effectively harness this potential:

• Insisting on long-term commitments before volunteers experience the ‘joy’ of volunteering can deter potential contributors. We live in a world of instant gratification, so it’s important to design short-term opportunities, including ‘gig’ opportunities that can be completed in as little as one week and display immediate impact to some extent. This helps keep volunteers engaged and motivated as they start out.
• Volunteering can help reduce costs, which can make a significant difference for organisations that aren’t well resourced. For instance, the cost per hour of teaching is considerably lower for volunteers when compared to hiring paid staff. It cost Santhusta Foundation approximately INR 45 per hour to deploy volunteer teachers in 2022–23. However, hiring a paid teacher would cost them INR 250–300 per hour.
• Volunteer engagement can also serve as a substantial source of fundraising for organisations, as demonstrated by the success of Claylab Foundation, Team Everest, Bhumi, U&I, and Make A Difference. These organisations raise more than 20–50 percent of their operational expenses through volunteers. This is because having participated in organisational building, volunteers develop a strong sense of ownership and often become advocates for the cause. Many become retail funders for long periods of time and inspire their own networks to fund these organisations.  
• Creating a separate department for volunteering outside of HR, hiring a full-time volunteer manager, and integrating volunteering into core programme strategy are effective ways through which organisations have been able to meaningfully engage volunteers and drive impact.
• It is vital to involve volunteers in designing, leading, planning, and decision-making, and treat them as valued members of the team rather than as spare pairs of hands.

Supporting the volunteer ecosystem

Creating a supportive environment for volunteering requires collaboration and commitment from multiple stakeholders. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives can align projects with employee engagement, leading to improved retention, skill development, and overall well-being, as evidenced by several studies.

Funders have a role to play in encouraging organisations to invest in volunteer management capacity. This includes funding full-time volunteer managers, training and development, technology tools, marketing, and process development to engage volunteers more meaningfully and at scale.

As volunteering continues to evolve and grow, larger institutional funders must help build a robust volunteering infrastructure. Key infrastructural requirements include creating and certifying a cadre of volunteer managers, building consulting capacity to help organisations design effective volunteer strategies and integrate them into their overall programme and strategies, creating ‘volunteer pipelines’ by demographic, and supporting targeted initiatives that work with schools, colleges, corporates, seniors, and homemakers.

By supporting young volunteering organisations, aligning stakeholders, and fostering a culture of purposeful engagement, we can collectively create a future where volunteering plays a central role in shaping a more inclusive and compassionate society.

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Know more

• Read this report on the state of corporate volunteering in India.
• Read this article on getting volunteer engagement right.

These strategies are the equivalent of turning a single powerful gorilla into a herd of nimble deer, with the organisation acting as a life-giving oasis. Let’s explore how leadership can guide this transformation using the idea of fractals.

Fractals are shapes in geometry that repeat the same pattern on different scales. Leadership is much like this. It’s not a one-way journey but a process that needs constant refining and adjusting, just like a fractal shape that keeps refining itself. Small changes in the beginning can lead to a significant difference later. Similarly, in a community, small decisions can create large effects.

Consider an instance where a leader’s values differ slightly from the organisation’s. At first, it may not be a reason for concern, causing only small ripples. But as this difference is repeated, it can create larger problems in the organisation, leading to confusion and inefficiencies. Over time, this slight difference can become a big issue, leading to the failure of the organisation.

I’ve learned from my experiences that leadership is like a fractal. It starts with one person making a change, which then affects those around them. Here are six ways in which leaders can help their communities grow and make a bigger impact.

1. Sharing core values

Community building begins with identifying and articulating your organisation’s core values. These values serve as the lifeblood that guides the community’s interactions, behaviours, and goals. It’s essential to understand that these core values aren’t merely imposed from the top but rather emerge naturally as an embodiment of the team’s shared beliefs, experiences, and aspirations.

The values thus formed become the common thread that connects diverse individuals, magnetically attracting those with similar beliefs and instilling a sense of camaraderie and shared identity within the community.

These values also give everyone a common language and frame of reference, guiding their actions towards achieving collective goals. This process is not a one-off event but a continuous exercise requiring constant introspection, mutual conversations, and a deep understanding of the community’s mission and vision.

Each member must live and breathe these values, and not just pay lip service to them. This can only happen when they are shared openly, regularly, and with conviction. Leaders for their part should incorporate these values in all communications and demonstrate them through actions.

Socratus, an organisation that works towards arriving at political solutions by bringing together all key agents who are the proponents of competing schools of thought, undertook an exhaustive process of reformulating and crystallising its core values, involving everyone from the senior management to all levels of the organisation. This process aimed to ingrain these values in the organisation’s collective conscience and is consistently revisited in weekly meetings.

The aim is not to achieve a fixed set of values but to nurture a living ethos that resonates with the community.

Similarly, Agami, a nonprofit that works towards innovation in law and justice, has integrated service leadership into their operations and community interactions, reflecting the organisation’s core values. Arghyam uses its mission of providing ‘safe, sustainable water for all’ as a guiding star, helping them discern whether their actions mitigate or aggravate issues. By conducting regular dialogues with stakeholders and beneficiaries, Arghyam ensures alignment with its mission of water security.

Articulating and sharing core values is an ongoing journey. The aim is not to achieve a fixed set of values but to nurture a living ethos that resonates with the community, evolves with it, and guides it towards a shared vision.

2. Encouraging unexpected connections

Serendipity—the occurrence of beneficial events by chance—can fuel innovation and foster deep connections within the community. It is the impromptu conversation at a networking event, the unexpected collaboration from a casual chat, or the innovative idea sparked by a chance meeting. Serendipity brings novelty and spontaneity, allowing diverse ideas and perspectives to mingle and generate unique solutions.

As leaders, the task is to architect an environment that nurtures these moments and promotes open dialogue and cooperation.

Creating ‘collision spaces’ where members can cross paths, interact, and collaborate is essential in fostering this culture of serendipity. These are not necessarily physical spaces but occasions, platforms, or environments that encourage and facilitate unexpected interactions and exchanges among community members. This could take shape in various forms—community meetups, workshops, online discussion forums, virtual coffee breaks, or social gatherings.

As leaders, the task is to architect an environment that nurtures these moments and promotes open dialogue and cooperation. This involves striking a delicate balance between structure and freedom—enough structure to provide a sense of order and coherence, and enough freedom for members to explore, express, and experiment. It also includes crafting an atmosphere of psychological safety where members feel seen, heard, and valued—spaces where they find it safe to voice their ideas and concerns, take risks, and make mistakes.

3. Building trust in the community

Building culture transcends merely assembling individuals around common interests or goals. Instead, it is rooted in creating an environment where care and trust are the foundations of every interaction, relationship, and initiative.

Leaders play a crucial role in this process. Their task extends beyond simply setting rules or defining boundaries; they must embody and model the behaviours they wish to see reflected within the community. This means constantly demonstrating empathy, practising active listening, offering support, and extending kindness and respect to all members. Furthermore, leaders must reinforce these behaviours through effective policies, constructive practices, and responsive feedback mechanisms.

Investing in trust is equally essential. Building trust is not an overnight process; it requires persistent and earnest efforts, transparent and open communication, and a willingness to face conflicts respectfully and constructively. Trust is built and sustained through consistent actions that validate the words spoken. And as trust grows, members become more willing to contribute, collaborate, and take risks, knowing they are in a safe and supportive environment.

At Agami, camaraderie and trust between colleagues and external partners is built through activities such as retreats, offsites, and informal meetups. Responsiveness to user needs and addressing issues respectfully, even when they can’t be resolved, are part of the leadership’s approach at Pratham Books to cultivate user loyalty.

4. Developing a platform for engagement

Platforms serve as a communal space or ‘watering hole’ for your community, where members gather, interact, learn, and collaborate.

These platforms often emerge organically from the needs and aspirations of the community rather than being predetermined structures. Therefore, they must not merely be technical solutions, but instead offer a space that nurtures a sense of belonging and encourages co-creation.

Community members should feel empowered to contribute to, innovate within, and take responsibility of the platform’s development and governance. This active participation deepens engagement and creates a stronger sense of ownership and accountability. It results in a platform that evolves with its users, ensuring its relevance, utility, and longevity.

Pratham Books developed StoryWeaver by observing how translators work offline and replicating this process online, making the platform intuitive and responsive to the needs of marginalised users. Arghyam amplified community capabilities by creating digital spaces to make skills training data visible and reusable at scale. This approach also fostered collaboration between government departments previously operating in silos.

5. Getting ready for decentralisation

The journey towards a community-centric model is a significant transformational process that involves rethinking and reorienting traditional organisational structures. It necessitates the shift from a hierarchical, control-based approach to a more collaborative, decentralised model, embracing shared ownership and governance.

This shift is not just operational but also cultural. It requires a change in mindset among the leadership and individual team members. It’s about redefining power structures and creating an environment that allows community members to shape the organisation.

A shift towards real decentralisation makes the organisation more resilient and adaptable in the face of change.

Indus Action, for instance, is working towards a future where regional teams operate autonomously and are independently funded, while the central team focuses on specialised functions such as technology. Pratham Books has adopted a light-touch governance approach for their StoryWeaver platform, employing mechanisms such as red flagging to maintain quality while encouraging open contribution. The organisation believes in collective stewardship, allowing the community to control the platform with minimal gatekeeping.

Such a shift towards real decentralisation—handing over ownership and agency to the community members—makes the organisation more resilient and adaptable in the face of change. By embracing decentralisation, the organisation truly becomes a platform that is of the community, by the community, and for the community.

6. Becoming a gardener

In a community-focused model, leaders transition from being the central authority to adopting the role of a ‘gardener’, often both within the host organisation and in the larger community.

Much like a gardener who cultivates a thriving ecosystem, leaders provide the necessary resources, conditions, and support for growth but also step back to allow the community to take the lead and evolve organically. This means creating opportunities for members to spearhead initiatives, mentor others, and even make mistakes from which to learn and grow.

But it’s more than just stepping back. It’s also about being attuned to the changing needs and dynamics of the community. It involves listening, observing, and offering targeted interventions when necessary, not unlike a gardener who prunes a tree or enriches the soil. Leaders need to maintain a hands-off, eyes-on approach, nurturing the environment while respecting the autonomy and individuality of its members.

Ashoka recognises individuals in the ecosystem who spotlight others’ needs without pushing their own agendas. Ashoka believes it serves as magnets, bringing together different stakeholders. At CIVIS, the leadership encourages organisations to cultivate volunteers’ passions, encouraging them to take ownership of the work rather than focusing on internal scaling.

Building communities is a journey of learning, adapting, and growing. The most successful organisations are those that enrich and are enriched by their communities. By embracing this fractal approach, leaders can help their communities become more resilient, creative, and impactful.

So, what patterns will you adopt to grow a thriving community? What new possibilities could your leadership unlock?

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Know more

• Read this article on what it takes to be an abundant leader.
• Read this study to learn more about fractal leadership.
• Read this article to learn how the the open-source software movement has fostered communities in the tech industry.

People centricity is relevant for social purpose organisations (SPOs), but how it manifests depends on the unique ecosystem in which an SPO operates, and the structures and challenges it works with. For example:

• U&I is a Bangalore-based nonprofit that provides non-formal education to underprivileged children in 25 cities across India. For U&I, which largely works with volunteers, people centricity implies making the journey and the work rewarding and engaging.
• Community Development Centre (CDC) is a community-based organisation in Madhya Pradesh that works with people from the Baiga tribe of Central India. For CDC, people centricity means prioritising local youth for jobs as they possess an understanding of the tribal language, community dynamics, and context; don’t require any training in the local context; and tend to stay with the organisation longer. By leveraging local expertise, they are also able to carry out their work effectively and in a resource-efficient manner. Retrofitting existing people frameworks may not work for CDC or its mission.

Although recent, a myriad of global research has been done to understand people centricity more thoroughly. A paper on developing a people-centric strategy in organisations suggests that there are various indications of deeper interest in this area—consultancies are publishing emerging insights on people centricity, terms such as ‘people management’ are gaining currency, and organisations have started adopting practices such as capturing employee experience.

However, there still isn’t enough research available on people centricity from the nonprofit lens. To take a step in this direction, Indian School of Development Management (ISDM) and Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy (CSIP) at Ashoka University conducted a study on talent management practices as well as compensation and benefits in SPOs. The study employed a mixed methods approach and drew upon primary data collected through surveys, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews with nonprofit professionals. Some of its key findings are:

• There are disparities in compensation within the social sector as well as between the social sector and general industry.
• While compensation isn’t the predominant motivator for individuals working in the Indian social sector, resource constraints do act as a significant obstacle in attracting and retaining talent.
• Organisational culture is a prominent factor influencing talent motivation.

The study also yielded a people-centric talent management framework that enables SPOs to attract and retain talent, and develop teams that are committed to achieving the mission and vision of the organisation and self. The people-centric talent management framework recognises that employees are an organisation’s asset and that their skills, abilities, motivation, and well-being are critical to achieving organisational goals. The three components of this framework are:

• Talent development, growth, and leadership styles
• Meaningful performance recognition
• Talent well-being and workplace environment

This article draws from our framework and lists people-centric practices that can be adopted by nonprofit leadership relatively easily.

1. Focusing on talent development and growth

Talent development and growth is all about providing opportunities to employees so that they can learn new skills and competencies. For 86 percent of those who responded to our survey, learning and personal growth emerged as a crucial element influencing job choices in Indian SPOs. Furthermore, 71 percent said that the availability of learning opportunities impacts their continued commitment to the organisation. Additionally, for 66 percent of the respondents, possibilities for advancement and skill development motivated them to stay committed to the Indian social sector. People’s tenure also depends on the learning and growth opportunities that they have—it is an ongoing expectation.

Here are some interesting strategies that SPOs are using to enable development and growth while keeping in mind the unique needs of the sector.

• Designing career mapping exercises for employees: This involves a one-on-one conversation between the organisation and a team member, where the team member talks about the kind of skills they want to develop and their career goals. Since this activity is resource-efficient (human and monetary), it is feasible for small and big SPOs.
  
  Career mapping can enable organisations to set up roles and responsibilities and project timelines and create learning and development (L&D) programmes that cater to the needs of the organisation and the team members—a win-win situation for both parties. SPOs that have implemented career mapping are a testament to the success of this strategy as it fosters commitment and motivation among talent.

• Providing job enrichment opportunities: To grow in an organisation is an innate need of any team member. Spending a long time doing the same work without growth or change in sight can be discouraging. It is not unusual for people working with nonprofits to take on a variety of roles—61 percent of the participants said that their jobs allow them to perform different kinds of activities and use a variety of talents and abilities.
  
  SPOs are mostly lean in terms of vertical structures, which limits the chances for growth in the conventional sense of designation upgrade or remuneration. To counter this, team members can be offered horizontal growth opportunities in the form of job enrichment. This means giving team members the opportunity and in-job training required to handle bigger responsibilities such as working in or leading multiple projects.
  
  Job enrichment has two main goals: diversifying employees’ skill sets and efficient succession planning. As a result of their understanding of numerous organisational roles and duties, employees who have worked in a variety of divisions within the company become prospective candidates for leadership positions. This also saves monetary assets (required for recruiting and training new talent), which can be reallocated towards more pressing requirements.
  
• Introducing job rotation: While job enrichment allows people to work across a diverse range of projects within the same team, job rotation enables them to work across different departments, generally in the areas of their interest. For example, someone in programmes can work in people management or resource mobilisation for a while. As a strategy tried by SPOs, job rotation breaks monotony, builds new skills, makes teams stronger, and enables succession planning while being easy on the need for resources.
  
  However, job rotation should be implemented carefully. Open communication with team members is essential, as is ensuring that the employees are open to job rotation, otherwise it can lead to counterproductive outcomes. For instance, someone who may not be comfortable with job rotation can end up becoming demotivated or uninterested in their core job as well. Moreover, job rotation may have restricted applicability especially in cases where employees offer a very specific technical skill set. A way to mitigate this challenge would be to align job rotation with career mapping wherein employees are allocated new roles based on the outcomes of the career-mapping exercise.

2. Adopting a positive leadership style

When it comes to managing people, a positive leadership style in an SPO becomes essential to onboard the best talent and retain them. In application, a positive leadership style is:

• Participative: Listening to people and teams, allowing disagreement, and taking collective decisions
• Trusting: Believing in the capability of talent
• Accessible: Being available for mentorship and resolution of conflicts and to answer queries
• Appreciative: Acknowledging of efforts
• Supportive: Allowing employees to take initiative

In our study, 24 percent of SPO employees reported that leadership methods influence their continuous engagement and retention. SPOs are privy to this requirement and share a few ways to inculcate a participative and trusting leadership style.

• Demonstrating trust through delegation: SPOs practising delegation liberally facilitate talent to take decisions by providing adequate autonomy and support. As a result, the talent feels trusted and more driven to deliver higher impact. Delegation also offers opportunities for team members to learn and grow on the go and is a practical manifestation of mutual respect and trust. Additionally, it contributes towards reducing micromanagement—when leaders trust their talent, the need to minutely oversee their work diminishes.

• Being empathetic: Nonprofit employees work on pressing social issues and humanitarian crises, which makes them vulnerable to various issues such as burnout and mental exhaustion. To empower their teams, the leadership must be empathetic and supportive. Encouraging feedback, being open to discussions at all levels, and taking decisions collaboratively goes a long way in making team members feel supported and a part of the decision-making process—this creates a workplace they would like to stay in.
  
  However, an offset could be excessive time and energy spent on reaching a decision, so this approach needs to be executed carefully. Training in active listening and other essential skills is a great way to facilitate positive leadership while ensuring that the risks associated with it are duly combated.

Inculcating a culture where team members feel valued, seen, and essential to the organisation can fast-track the SPO’s vision and mission. Hence, people centricity as part of the organisational fabric is imperative. These strategies do not demonstrate a one-size-fits-all approach, but should be implemented or considered as per the needs and context of the organisation.

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Know more

• Read ISDM’s ‘Talent Management in the Social Sector’ report here.
• Learn how organisational culture affects talent retention.

Grassroots Nation is a podcast by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies that deep dives into the life and work of some of our country’s greatest leaders of social change. In this episode, Sanjit Roy, better known as Bunker Roy, traces the story of the Social Work and Research Centre, now called the Barefoot College. In conversation with host Rajni Bakshi, Roy outlines the challenges he encountered in this journey and the lessons he has learned.

Here are some edited excerpts from their conversation:

2.50

Building Barefoot

Bunker: I went to the Bihar famine in 1965. And that was out of sheer curiosity because I didn’t know what Bharat was like. Had no idea, I wasn’t exposed to anything like that. And I had felt I had sort of a closeted existence. I didn’t know what really India was like. So at that time, Suman Dubey said, “Why don’t we go down to Bihar?”

It was a very traumatic experience for me, very traumatic. I still think about those days in the Bihar famine. And I said, “What am I doing here? I’m getting the best, so-called best education and I can’t do something in the villages of India.” So that’s when it sort of sparked in my mind- I would like to do something…

The first donation I got was from Tata Trust of 20,000. So we started doing the groundwater survey and we covered 110 villages. But then you know every organisation must go through a series of crises. You can’t have an organisation that has no crisis.

We started in 1972. Aruna[Roy] resigned from the service in 1974 and joined me. And with her administrative experience, she wanted to bring in some systems and management systems into place which all these professionals hated. They didn’t think this was a good idea because you know it will be a bit more professional. So that was the first crisis—when Aruna came and tried to bring in some systems into place and lots of people resented it. So most of them left.

First lesson, never depend on professionals from outside, urban professionals from outside. Always develop the capacity and competence of people from within the organisation first because they are the ones who will be there to stay forever and ever. So that was the first lesson I received and it’s helped me up to now. Because I think we must develop the grassroot leadership. And and depend on them to carry the organisations.

The second thing I learnt was that there was a difference between literacy and education. You know what Mark Twain said, “Never let school interfere with your education.” School is where you learned to read and write. Education is what you learned from a family environment and your community. So I felt that we must distinguish the two, we must not put them because when people say, “Arey Saab they are uneducated.” I said, “No, please, they are illiterate, but they are not uneducated.”

23.50

Choosing the right people

Rajni: But Bunker, is it, when you say that you have become stronger as a result, could it be that the second and third tier of your organisation were also involved in overcoming and addressing these crises? You are in a leadership role and yet there’s a very palpable sense that I get when I observe the people around you, your team. Of everyone feeling very much an authority in their own right. So how did this whole dynamic come about? 

Bunker: You are jumping twenty years, Rajni, because at that time in 1979 when we went through this crisis, we were a very small organisation, but the selection of the people who worked with us was deliberate. We only choose schedule caste, schedule tribes, OBCs and they were not powerful enough to buck the higher castes and the Rajputs and the Brahmins and Jats. So when it came to a crisis that we were facing, they were in the background. They would help us quietly, but they wouldn’t come out in front and shout and scream against them, because that was a completely different situation there. And as a result of us investing in such people, it’s been a great leveller for us because those people stood by us even after the crisis all along.

Rajni: What was that value frame which you applied when you selected such people or, you know, build this team? What were some of the key values that you looked for?

Bunker: Definitely anyone working with us in Tilonia would have to work on minimum wage. And the highest and the lowest ratio would be 1:2–the highest and the lowest. And we would self-evaluate that time–not anymore–but that time when we were growing, we would self evaluate ourselves about our performance and about our contribution to the organisation and we would give each other points– honesty, integrity, cooperation, innovation. Out of hundred points, three was given to your educational qualification. It didn’t matter whether you are illiterate or not, but this is your contribution to the organisation. 

30.35

The power of solar

Rajni: So Bunker, going back now to Tilonia and the next phase which emerged which I think we can call the “Solar Mama” phase, I mean, you did it long before solar was fashionable. And what are the key takeaways from that experience which you would highlight here that give us a sense of what are the possibilities going forward on the positive side of the technology story? Technology and people and democracy all three together.

Bunker: We have two campuses in Tilonia, both are fully solar electrified. We have three-hundred kilowatts of panels on the roof for the next twenty-five years. I have no problem with power as long as the sun shines. I have visited about sixty countries around the world–over sixty–and thirty-six of them in Africa. And what do you see? You see very old men, very old women and very young kids in the village. All the youth have gone. They’ve all left looking for jobs in cities. So… brainwave! Why not train women to be solar engineers from these very villages which are inaccessible? Away from the grid and there is no… and they are wasting $10 a month on kerosene, candles.

Rajni: What year was this Bunker? This brainwave?

Bunker: 1997 maybe. So I said, “Why not train women? And even if they are illiterate, so what? Let’s see if we can train them to be solar engineers.” So we started with Afghanistan.

I went to Afghanistan. And we chose three women to come to Tilonia. And the women said, “I can’t go without the men because they won’t allow us.” So three men also came with them. Six months of hell for them because it was in the heat of summer, but they became solar engineers. How did we make them solar engines? By sight and sound. No written or spoken word. We have a manual, which is only pictorial, where you can learn how to be a solar engineer just by following the manual in six months. Which means that you can fabricate, install, repair and maintain solar systems and solar lanterns in six months. And the beauty is that anybody from anywhere in the world who is illiterate woman between thirty-five and forty-five can become a solar engineer.

Rajni: What was the secret to your success in carrying the work across the world?

Bunker: Faith. You have to have faith in the people to be able to do it. You have to show it…It takes me two days to speak to the whole community in Africa, to send a woman to India. First of all, there is resentment, there’s hostility, there is anger saying why are you wasting your time taking a woman all the way to India? And that convincing…That was the process of which convincing people that fears they have–they are going to be sold to the Arabs or they are not going to come back–all these absolutely genuine fears. But I see the woman having guts, absolute guts to be able to go there. Can you imagine nineteen hours on a plane? Never been on a plane in her life. Can you imagine her coming to India and not being able to speak the language for six months?

Rajni: So in a sense it became a commitment formation exercise because you could easily have taken teachers from India and sent them across the world, but you choose to do the opposite.

48.10

Finding bottom-up solutions

Rajni: Bunker, what is then, if we now think of the larger society India as a whole, what is the possible theory of change that emerges from all this experience? I think one of the underlying assumptions of your work was that at least it looked like that to all of us from the outside, was that this should automatically start being copied, and as you have just described, it did in several places. Yet, these approaches have not informed and transformed the country as a whole, and I’m saying the collective voluntary sector. So how will that happen?

Bunker: Rajni, a simple solution is the most difficult to implement. There is no urban solution to a rural problem. There is a rural solution to a rural problem. We haven’t even explored that. We are always thinking that has to be someone from outside to actually bring in a solution, which is a myth. It has to be from below. 

Gandhi has to be bottom up, has to be summoned from below to be able to carry this through, which you have to take the people into confidence to well to make it work. And we haven’t immediately to do that. We have shown what is possible, but we haven’t been able to do that. Why is it not possible that just because you come up with the idea because there is a… I think you know the biggest threat to development today is the literate man and woman.

Rajni: Explain?

Bunker: They have come up with some ideas from the educational system which is damaging, which is out of control. The biggest problem with the educational system today is that you have taken courage away from the young people. They don’t want to take a risk. They don’t want to do something out of the box. They don’t want to fail as if that is going to be a reflection on them. This is the biggest problem today.

Listen to the full episode here.

In this episode of The Workwise Pod, hosts Sujatha Rao and Deepak Menon speak to Ravi Sreedharan about what for-profits can learn from nonprofits. Ravi is the founder and director of Indian School of Development Management (ISDM); he spent 24 years in the corporate sector before switching over to the social sector in 2011. In this conversation, Sujatha, Deepak, and Ravi talk about what complexity means in the business world versus in the social sector, the future of social entrepreneurship, and why it can be hard for individual for-profit enterprises to change without a systemwide shift.

Here are some excerpts from the conversation.

7:10

What can the social sector teach businesses about complexity?

Deepak: Can you just explain a little bit more about the leadership quality that you saw in the social sector, and the complexity of the problems that you saw?

Ravi: In [the] corporate world, there was always a formula to solve a problem. Here [in the social sector], there was no formula; there was a starting point. There are diverse aspirations, complex needs, forces that [have] exist[ed] for thousands of years. And you’re dealing with real [problems].

First of all, I don’t think a manager in the commercial world would recognise the complexity because there is a myth that ‘my corporate job was very complex, because it involved 80 countries, it involved a balance sheet of so many billion dollars’—a numerical complexity. Here, there was a social complexity, and the moment it’s social, it’s [to do with] human being[s], which is very, very complex. There it was a balance sheet, and it was a process that was far more problematisable and solvable. So that is one complexity that I don’t think we recognise at all when we come from one side.

The second side is, there is a belief that everything can be captured in a data point. And thereby it’s easier to solve a math problem. Because once I have data, I can solve the problem. And if I don’t have data, I can’t solve the problem right here. And thereby there’s a tendency to use data a little excessively when you come in as a corporate guy. [I’m] not saying you shouldn’t, but it’s not easy to capture data for what does it mean to be a mother who ties a towel around her child while she goes to sleep hungry at night?¹ What data is going to capture that? I remember talking to [this person called] Periodi (in Yadgir). For six years in Yadgir, our work didn’t show any change in the results. And in the sixth year we are having a conversation with Periodi, asking him how things are going. “It’s going really well.” “How are you saying it’s going really well? Because the data shows there is no change at all.” He says, “No, the children are very happy.” “How do you know children are very happy?” “They’re playing, they come and talk to me. They are running around. They are burping”—that was a data point he gave. Now, I can’t imagine saying in the corporate world that my customer burped. But these are important things to understand. It is completely different. It is so complex, and you have to figure that out.

How do you operate in a pluralistic society, where you respect everybody’s opinion, desires, and aspirations?

The third thing is, how do you work in a system that is democratic? We know that a good society is driven by liberty, equality, and fraternity. The corporate world has completely avoided that. And how that is happening in today’s society is a wonder for me. Samaaj, sarkar, bazaar—these are the three pillars for any good society. How do you operate in a democratic society, in a pluralistic society, where you respect everybody’s opinion, desires, and aspirations?

17:55

Why should social complexity matter to the commercial sector?

Sujatha Rao: I’m imagining myself as the CEO of a commercial organisation, and let’s say I’ve been manufacturing furniture…I’ve been doing this for a significant period of time. I might sit back and ask myself the question, is my space as complex as the social space that Ravi is talking about? And while I acknowledge that the social space complexity requires me to pause and not jump into solutions, or to collaborate, or to look at my people quite differently, does it make sense for me in my context?

Ravi: That’s a beautiful question, Sujatha. And I’ll be honest. Initially, I used to think that it’s fine to be that way. Today I have come to the point, it’s not fine to be that way. And it’s almost like climate change. Can I keep producing something at the risk of the climate getting destroyed in, let’s say, 100 years from now, when I’m not alive?… Earlier, because I didn’t have that 100-year vision, I used to say, how does it matter? I’m not breaking the law… I am now completely convinced that you don’t have a choice but to accept the complexity. What the corporate world has done is to conveniently define their system in a very narrow sense—I follow the laws of the land. Don’t now say that I’m not doing anything.

I’ll give you a very interesting example…and it can apply to a furniture start-up also. So [this guy is] starting some venture where he wants to organise the car cleaners of the city because he believes that’s a huge opportunity. Every rich guy in this country, in the city, has a car; one thing they all need to do is to have the car cleaned. So I’m now going to uberise. And ‘uberise’ has become this new English word, which is, I will organise them, I will create an app, I will create access, and I will learn, etc. And I’m thinking, this is the classic capitalist mindset. You’re trying to make money. You’re not trying to solve anyone’s problems. Even if you’re trying to solve the problem, you’re trying to solve the problem of the person who doesn’t really have a problem, because that person can find ways of paying. You need to solve the problem of the car cleaners versus the car owners. That mindset doesn’t exist.

Now, if you agree that all of us are part of the citizenry, whether I’m in the corporate [sector], the social [sector], whether I’m in the state—if we have to agree on what is a desirable or an aspirational society, and if that definition revolves around just, equitable, humane [systems], or justice, equality, fraternity, then that has to guide what you’re doing. Today, unfortunately, that has been conveniently kept aside.

27:06

Is social entrepreneurship the future of all businesses?

Deepak: This new trend of social entrepreneurship is trying to balance a business model with a social problem. Do you see that, over time, all businesses will become social enterprises? Right now, we see that there is a commercial world, there is a nonprofit world, and there is a social entrepreneurship world. But essentially all businesses are social enterprises any way.

Ravi: So social enterprise is a good thing. There’s no doubt about that. But enterprise management, the way it is [done], is a bad thing. If you manage a social enterprise, the way your business is traditionally managed, where you narrow your boundaries, and you have a very narrow view of what success is, you have a serious problem. And that’s the biggest danger to social enterprise. And today, that force of the management view is not easy to run against, because that’s a huge tide. And some small enterprises claim that ‘I will go against that’, I think you’re fooling yourself—it’s like, you try to push the waves back, but you’re just going to finally give up and tire yourself. So management has to change.

If you don’t bring a healthy respect for human beings and the planet, you will have a serious problem.

Now, social enterprise, impact investment, pay for performance, social stock exchange—these are all newfangled ideas to figure out how to bring the money. So the objective is good. But if the way you do it is not correct, it can turbocharge a bad thing. And that’s the risk you have with social enterprise, impact investing, and all this sort of newfangled stuff that’s happening. You’re all good intentions. But if you don’t bring that transformational nature of management, the collaborative nature of work, a healthy respect for human beings and the planet, respect for the ideas of justice, equality, and fraternity, you will have a serious problem. But if we can figure out how the management itself can change, then social enterprises can be a very, very powerful way [to create change].

33:09

How can for-profits that are willing to change take a more equitable approach?

Sujatha Rao: Let’s talk about a commercial enterprise CEO or manager, who has begun to realise that the way that they had been operating and the techno-managerial systems that they had put in place are not right. And they do want to make this change. Looking at the nonprofit world, what could be one or two things that could kick-start these little levers [so] that we begin to change, that could help them move closer towards the kinds of organisations and workspaces we are looking at—just, equitable, flourishing?

Ravi: There is no easy answer to that question, Sujatha, because I’m in a system, and you’re telling me to change while the system remains the same. I as an organisation can’t change because there’s no way I [can] succeed, all I will do is I’ll set myself up for failure. So what can I learn from the social sector’s structures? It’s very simple. How do I ensure that there is a voice of the common man in any business that is done?

Now, in the democratic system, we have created a way to get the voice of every person in the state. In the market space, we haven’t figured that out. But the principle of, how do I involve human beings in deciding whether I’m doing a good job or not, in the reward structures that I get [is fundamental to a democratic system]. There are ideas that are talked about in the corporate world. How do I give a lower cost of funds for somebody who’s great on ESG (environmental, social, and governance) guidelines? Now, those are [some] ways of doing it—and there must be more ways of doing this sort of stuff—but that’s the principle that we have to follow.

39:20

In the absence of a systemic shift, can individuals exercise agency?

Deepak: Ravi, the system’s not going to change. But we also know that humans have a power to change the system. If you were to go back to a bank, let’s say HSBC, having spent the last 10–12 years in the nonprofit sector, and having [had] these complex thoughts and experiences, how would you be different as a manager?

Ravi: This is a very personal question for me.

The first thing is, I had a certain arrogance when I was in the corporate world, and I lost the humility that I had as a lower-middle-class child. [I thought,] I’m in control, I know what’s going on, I can make things happen. I need to lead people, I need to show the way, so there’s an arrogance. So if I were to go back, I would resort to humility. I think somewhere the business world has forgotten or lost that understanding of how a Gandhian idea can be very powerful in leading change-making… and so on and so forth. It’s become very techno-managerial.

The second thing is that I think businesses will…I hate to use the word ‘profit’…but will derive a lot of value if they believe in the agency of the people versus creating pigeon holes for people to say, this is your job. And I don’t need you to comment on anything other than that. In fact, there are business processes (such as the quality circles used in Japanese manufacturing) built on the idea that the greatest ideas can come from anywhere. In fact, more likely from the field rather than from the conference rooms and chambers that we sit in. So how do you create some frameworks and systems to believe in that agency and bring those ideas to bear on the work that you do? That will be the second thing.

The third is that, and this is the one that is very personal to me, you don’t realise that when you’re in a job, that job defines the person that you are. And eventually, you become a person who is a function of all the jobs that you did over a 10-year, 20-year period. And I try and say this to youngsters, and I’m not sure I’m able to communicate, that the career path you choose will make you a certain [kind of] person when you’re 50. And if I had somebody who had explained this to me in a manner that I would have understood when I was 20, my career choice would have been very different.

You can listen to the full episode here.

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Footnotes:

1. People facing poverty see stomach binding as a way to deal with hunger pangs. In the 2022 Global Hunger Index (GHI), India ranks 107th out of the 121 countries with sufficient data to calculate 2022 GHI scores. With a score of 29.1, India has a level of hunger that is serious.

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Know more

• Listen to this podcast to learn more about what social impact means and how it is measured.
• Read this article to learn how business leaders can build a more equitable workforce.
• Read this article to learn how an ethical business can also be a profitable one.

Over the last seven years, we at Koita Foundation have worked closely with more than 15 nonprofit organisations on a vast range of tech-enabled solutions including building applications for on-the-ground workers to manage their operations, developing business intelligence (BI) analytics platforms, and deploying project management tools.

Here are some steps that can serve as a guide for building what we call tech capacity in an organisation.

1. Talk to peers who have done this

Reach out to other organisations that are doing similar work and have successfully implemented technology. Talking to other leaders helps one understand the complexities and advantages of adopting technology and allows leadership to get comfortable with the idea of tech within one’s organisation. 

2. Scope the right focus areas to use technology

Most organisations have several pain points that can be addressed with the use of technology. It is very important for the leadership to identify areas where tech implementation is likely to be most beneficial. Over the years, we have found that the highest return on effort and investment is in helping organisations use technology for their ‘front-end’ processes (for instance, how the organisation engages with the communities that it works with) rather than ‘back-end’ processes (for instance, finance and HR). The optimisation of front-end processes drives overall operational efficiencies, quality, and scalability. This in turn creates a virtuous cycle with communities, donors, and other stakeholders.

3. Ensure that this is a high priority for the CEO and senior leadership

This is critical. For an organisation looking to go digital, the single most important prerequisite is the commitment of the CEO and the leadership to the idea. The second most important criterion is buy-in from the team.

Digital transformation demands a great deal of change management. It requires perseverance, and the process can be highly uneven and full of ups and downs. Without wholehearted support from and navigation by the CEO and senior leadership, such a transformation is unlikely to be successful.

While it might be easier if the leadership has some form of tech background or experience, it is more important for them to commit some time to engage with the technology team or external vendors and get involved in the process.

4. Bring on a tech adviser

Most organisations would benefit from having a tech adviser who can help them navigate this journey. Board members are usually a good source to tap into the technology network when looking to hire tech consultants.

The adviser can help with key aspects such as identifying the right focus area for using technology, streamlining business requirements, building a road map to completion, thinking of build vs buy options, and identifying suitable tech vendors.

If one just approaches a vendor, they don’t have the ability to identify the right focus area for the organisation or rationalise requirements, and will deliver whatever you ask them to. This is similar to bringing a building contractor to start work without having a clear design from an architect. This can create a lot of rework later, which is both costly and time-consuming.

5. Form a core team

In addition to leadership buy-in, organisations need to put together a small core team that will take ownership of this process of business transformation. The team can comprise two to three people, including the head of the particular programme for which tech is to be implemented.

This core team does not need to have tech experience, but senior leadership should look for people who have the aptitude and inclination required for problem-solving and quality/process improvement. Being able to think from the users’ perspective and knowing how to persuade field teams to work with technology are also useful skills to have.

6. Engage with the end users of the technology

Part of building tech capacity is engaging and training users (such as the field teams) who need to use the technology tools correctly and consistently. In addition, the organisation should provide relevant tech support during the roll-out of the tools. Vipla Foundation, a nonprofit we worked closely with, ran donor and volunteer campaigns to source smartphones for their balwadi teachers. They made sure that the teachers had working mobile phones and then created a structured training plan so that all the balwadi teachers understood the value of the overall programme, why it was important for students and teachers, and how digitisation would benefit them, in addition to taking them through all the features of the app including offline functionality. This approach helped the balwadi teachers see the big picture and subsequently support the initiative, although it did take some additional effort from them to learn and use a new technology tool.

This sustained support is important to make sure that all your teams—from the head office all the way to the field—feel comfortable around the technology, and to remove any misconceptions they may have about why the organisation is moving towards digitisation.

7. Find the people to do this

There are a couple of ways to do this. One is to look for people internally. While a person with a programme or product management background is a suitable choice for leading this digitisation, many nonprofits might not have these people in-house. This has happened at Antarang Foundation as well as at Vipla Foundation where operations managers with a tech bent of mind have acted as the point of contact and translated the nonprofit’s requirements to the software developer.

Another approach is to look for this talent externally. It can be hard to recruit a CTO for a nonprofit set-up unless the leadership and/or board members know of people who would like to cross over into the development sector. Location plays a role too—in large cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore, finding a tech adviser may be easier than in Tier-II or Tier-III cities.  

While it is hard to get a CTO on board, nonprofits can hire for junior positions to handle the technical aspects of the programme, such as testing and maintenance. These junior employees can then report to the tech-literate operations or programme manager.

8. Finally, find money to fund this

Raising funds for tech is hard especially when your donors are more interested in funding programmes. This is especially true for nonprofits that struggle with reporting impact to donors—how do you ask for funds for tech when you do not have the very data (that tech can help you acquire) to prove that you need digitisation to run your programmes better?

What we have seen often is that once nonprofits have some tech tools in place, the data from those tools can be used to build the case and convince donors for additional funding. Hence, it is important to start technology initiatives conservatively with very clear objectives and ensure high focus on their success.

We need to start looking at technology as a strategic tool that can help the organisation evolve from manual, non-standard operations to a data-driven culture based on standardised processes and reliable data collection through appropriate tools. As leaders build strategy, technology should be an integral part of it, and not an afterthought.

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Know more

• Read this article to learn more about the challenges of building technology teams in nonprofits.
• Read this article to learn whether your nonprofit should invest in custom-built or pre-existing tech solutions.
• Read this article to learn about a nonprofit that is using tech to bring education to marginalised girls.

Therefore, it is imperative for organisations to prioritise the mental health of their employees. But they must move beyond their current tokenistic approach, shifting the focus from yoga retreats and workshops to thinking of mental wellness as a person’s right. Organisations must focus on developing robust policies and creating safe spaces that encourage conversations on mental wellbeing among employees.

However, does the onus of an employee’s mental well-being lie entirely with the organisation? What role can the employee play in their own well-being? Where does the organisation’s responsibility end and the individual’s begin?

On our podcast On the Contrary by IDR, we sat down with Raj Mariwala, director at Mariwala Health Initiative, and Santrupt Misra, director of Group HR at Aditya Birla Group, to discuss how workplaces can impact an individual’s well-being and productivity, and why mental health policies in the workplace need to be more inclusive.

Below is an edited transcript that provides an overview of the guests’ perspectives on the show.    

We need to rethink the current approach to mental health in the workplace

Raj: Mental health within the country is largely seen in the biomedical paradigm. What this means is that just like physical health, mental health is assumed to be a set of symptoms. There’s a certain kind of treatment given, which could be allopathic medication, or talk therapy at most. And then what is expected is that there [will be] a reduction in symptoms, and then the person [will be] cured. Now this is a very limiting narrative, because what it ends up doing is [focusing] only on a symptom reduction approach. What we’ve seen in COVID-19 is that people are coming to realise that mental health is also very deeply connected to our lives and the environments we inhabit. It’s not enough for one to say, ‘I will provide a psychiatrist or a counsellor,’ especially when it comes to workplace mental health. This is a piecemeal approach. Instead, we should look at our workplace and see the stressors that are born out of this environment.

Santrupt: An organisation’s performance would always be unsustainable and short-term if the [employees] are not at ease. And all evolved organisations realise that. Well-run organisations realise and understand that they are productive because their people are in a state of equanimity, where they are able to bring their best to the job. There isn’t a dichotomy between mental health and productivity. Yes, there will always be tension between the two in terms of how much you need to account for an employee’s mental health and how much you need to meet your obligation to other stakeholders. But [the minute] you integrate well-being and productivity, you start seeing them as two sides of the same coin, not two parallel lines.

It is crucial that the leadership views mental health as a matter of concern.

The challenge is that for far too long, we have refused to recognise mental health as an issue… And it is crucial that the leadership [views] mental health as a matter of concern. You can always provide a yoga instructor, a counsellor, and a supportive infrastructure [at the workplace]. But those can be the icing on the cake, they cannot be the cake. The cake has to be a big commitment for the management, [and they must have] the willingness to understand mental health, and [be capable of seeing the need for creating a] supportive environment to [deal] with these issues.

What can organisations do better?

1. Recognise mental health as an issue of disability rights

Raj: [It is] the organisation’s responsibility to look at the environment [and] to address the structural barriers in society that exclude persons with disabilities. What that means in a larger sense is that your whole workplace, your whole work ecosystem should be accessible to everyone. And you’re not looking at it as a privilege, you’re looking at it as a right.

The focus should be on providing ‘reasonable accommodation’. According to this principle, necessary and appropriate modifications and adjustments, that do not excessively burden the organisation, must be made to ensure that all employees get an equal opportunity to enjoy or exercise their responsibilities and their privileges.

[For example], historically and [even now], employers wouldn’t hire women because they didn’t want to give pregnancy leave. Now, due to advocacy, that has shifted [and] pregnancy and maternity leave are considered an employee’s rights. So what’s stopping us from giving similar mental health accommodation? If your employee breaks a leg, you’re going to make sure the lift is working. Maybe get a nicer chair. That’s what reasonable accommodation is.

2. Enable senior leadership to talk about their mental health

Santrupt: During the course of their work, people can develop many kinds of problems. And employers do have a responsibility to find ways to notice that and help create a sensitive culture. Role modelling [then becomes important]. Most often, senior managers and successful people seem to believe [that] there is a compulsion to always show that you are invincible. [But] if senior leadership can display authenticity and vulnerability, it makes people around them more comfortable to share similar experiences. 

Raj: At Mariwala Health Initiative, we [published] this research on mental well-being in the workplace in 2020. During our research we found that just like anyone else, leaders face certain unique stressors. But they never share this with their co-workers or their peers. If the head of the organisation or the senior leadership of the organisation doesn’t feel safe talking about [mental health], how are you going to expect your employees to talk about it?

3. Develop policies keeping in mind different socio-economic contexts

Raj: Part of this is also looking at your workplace and recognising that it actually mirrors the larger prejudices of society. Workspaces are largely engineered in a way that may be more distressing to women, to LGBTQ persons, to Dalit and Adivasi persons, or to Muslim persons. Does this mean that when we look at mental health, when we look at distress, we are going to be able to treat everyone equally? If the answer is ‘we are not sure’, then we need to look at our different policies. It’s not just about looking at mental health policies, it’s also looking at other comprehensive anti-discrimination policies. It’s also having grievance mechanisms up and running and in place. It’s also having supportive spaces at work.

And you need to look at it under all three categories—the ecosystem, the workplace, and the individual. At the workplace, it could be work hours, it could be toxic supervisors or toxic peers. Second is the individuals themselves. If there’s an individual who undergoes anxiety, and suddenly the job requires, public speaking, what sort of accommodations are you going to make? And third is industry. What are you doing as a larger ecosystem, in terms of policy, to negotiate with unions? How about pushing for mental health within insurance policies?

Employees must also take responsibility for their well-being

Raj: [Employees need to] communicate to the supervisor that they will require an accommodation. A safe space has to be created in order to do that. People often think that this will mean compromising on performance. That is not reasonable accommodation. Everyone who wants reasonable accommodation still requires to be accountable for their work. And that’s as per your negotiations. Also, the employee must realise that if they’re unable to do certain things, it’s likely that another team member would have to do it for them. So, the responsibility for the employee is to communicate [these needs] very clearly, and many employees do not for a variety of reasons.

Santrupt: The health of an employee, whether mental or physical, is primarily the responsibility of that employee. You cannot suddenly become a paternalistic state or company. But having said that, given the fact that you have a larger responsibility to society and your employees are also part of the larger society, if you find that there are issues there, you have a responsibility to help them both.

You can listen to the full episode here.

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Know more

• Read this report by MHI to learn more about structural inequalities and mental health.
• Read this to learn more about mental health in the workplace.
• Listen to this podcast to learn about how leaders can navigate mental well-being.

Arpan is a nonprofit organisation based out of Mumbai that works on the prevention of child sexual abuse. When they started 15 years ago (in 2007), the team comprised three people. For the first six years (up until 2013), the team had 18 people and no firm HR processes or policies in place. Over the last 10 years, however, they have added another 120 members (bringing the team strength close to 140) and increased their budget 14-fold—from INR 1.2 crore in 2013 to approximately INR 16.5 crore in 2023.

At the heart of this growth is their intentional and continuous investment in people.

Pooja Taparia (Founder, CEO) says that some of the drive to think about HR came from the team itself. “We had started loosely thinking about HR in 2011 when the team began to grow. We sort of recognised the need to put some processes in place; the team was asking questions, but we didn’t have any answers. I don’t think we even had a proper appraisal system at that time.”

This is where Hemesh Sheth (Director, Support Operations) came in. He joined the organisation in 2013 and started looking at HR and finance seriously. Until then Pooja had mostly worked on these functions alone, sometimes with the help of consultants but never with a full-time dedicated team member. Having Hemesh join has allowed the team to grow, processes to become more structured, policies to become more robust, and ultimately impact to happen at a scale that would not have otherwise been possible. (In fact, Arpan has been awarded the Great Place to Work Certificate for five years in a row.)

Here’s how they did it.

Covering the basics and starting early

At a foundational level, Arpan made sure that they kept up with all the laws in the country. Pooja says that as the laws in the country changed, the organisation incorporated all of them. For instance, when the laws around pregnancy and parenthood were amended—with paid maternity leave increasing from three months to six months, and the introduction of paternity leave and miscarriage benefits law—Arpan included the changes in their HR policies. The organisation also has a POSH committee and child protection policy, which are both legally mandated and critical for a team doing the kind of work that Arpan is engaged in.

However, in addition to following the laws around HR, what sets Arpan apart is the discretionary benefits they provide their team members. All staff are given an annual training allowance so that they can upskill, and a therapeutic allowance, which permits them to invest in their own well-being. Both these provisions have been in place for over a decade now, much before it became standard practice at most other organisations.

Given the difficult nature of the work Arpan does, there are high chances of burnout—which is why they offer the therapeutic allowance.

Hemesh says that this focus on team well-being and skill building is a result of Pooja’s belief in the importance of mental health. “She keeps promoting counselling, even in our quarterly reviews. Now, on a quarterly basis, we have started tracking how many people are availing this allowance and how it is benefiting them, while respecting their privacy of course.” Arpan provides INR 1,500 per month as therapeutic allowance to every team member.

Pooja says that given the difficult nature of the work Arpan does, there are high chances of burnout—which is why they offer the therapeutic allowance. Despite this, not everybody takes it. People don’t understand the need for self-care. “I guess it’s a cultural thing, and especially because the majority of us at Arpan are women, we don’t take care of ourselves as individuals. It’s always the children, the family, everything else becomes more important, and then eventually burnout happens,” she says.

Building a second line of leaders and investing in a leadership pipeline

Unlike many other organisations, Arpan started building out a second line/director level early on in their journey. In 2014, the organisation brought on senior leaders to look at programmatic as well as support functions such as HR, finance, and monitoring and evaluation. The organogram changed as a result.

With a senior leadership team came in hierarchy. While for the first four years Arpan maintained a flat organisation structure, they soon had to think about who would report to whom and what was the best way to organise the team. And as the organisation has grown, the organogram has continued to change.

Having seven to eight people at the director level is critical to building resilience in an organisation.

“We’ve worked towards making the senior leadership stronger. Usually at a team size of 140 people, most nonprofits will have a maximum of two to three people [at the director/senior level]. We have seven to eight people at any point in time. This is critical if we are to build resilience in an organisation, so that if one person leaves there’s another who can take on the role in the interim and make sure that nothing drops. We also realised that when we have senior people focused on a specific vertical, the amount of time invested in it is far greater. This explains our exponential growth over the last decade,” says Pooja.

From 2009 to 2018, Arpan grew their personal safety education programme 20x to reach 40,000 children, parents, and teachers. The number of cases they dealt with increased by 30x, and they started providing training and capacity building for teachers and nonprofit professionals throughout India. From working with 1,000 people in 2015, they now train 35,000 people across the country.

Both Pooja and Hemesh say that Arpan’s ability to do many things simultaneously without diluting quality was possible because it had such a strong leadership team. Investing in team members with significant years of experience allowed them to monitor their work thoroughly, think critically, and invest in building the capacities of people who deliver on the ground. For example:

• Arpan’s content and curriculum now has a team of its own, which allows them to build the right, age- appropriate pedagogy for delivering personal safety education to children.
• Research, monitoring, and evaluation is a separate team as well. “We brought in a person at the director level about six years ago. And today, our research, monitoring, and evaluation team has 13 members. Earlier, this was a part of the programme team; we separated that out. Now, as a result, we have continuous evidence being generated to support programme strategy. This helps us make sure we’re on the right path in trying to solve the issue of child sexual abuse.” 
• In addition, in 2019, Arpan brought on a fundraising director. Prior to this, Pooja was doing all the fundraising with support from Hemesh. But with the director on board, they have been able to focus on better donor management and getting new funders. As a result, their budget has doubled.

Pooja says that all of this has been possible because they have different people leading focused and diverse aspects. “Everyone is concentrating on just one or two things and not trying to do everything, because you just can’t do everything.”

Both Pooja and Hemesh talk about how important it is to make the right senior hires. “Cultural fit is important as we recruit across levels but it is even more critical when we are hiring senior people. In their case, the recruitment process is intense and takes time,” says Hemesh. The board is involved, the candidates have to take tests and interact with both the team and their future peers. “It’s a lengthy process, and sometimes we have gone wrong, but largely we’ve been fortunate with the senior people we’ve hired,” says Pooja. At Arpan, recruitment takes an average of two to three weeks for a junior team member and six to eight weeks for a senior team member.

Providing learning opportunities

Arpan has an annual training allowance (INR 5,000 for the first year of joining, and this amount increases every year) that encourages team members to continually invest in skill building. This can be used by individuals to upskill themselves in any area that is relevant to their role in the organisation.

In addition, Arpan creates several learning opportunities within the organisation. One of these is getting the team to do case study discussions. Pooja facilitates the HBR case studies from Dasra’s leadership programme (DSILP), using these to expose the team to a range of learnings and insights from other organisations on leadership, talent management, strategy, and more. “We really believe that we can’t do good work without building people’s capacities. Additionally, this will enable them to grow into the next leadership position that they are aspiring for,” says Pooja.

Senior leaders conduct capacity-building sessions for the entire organisation on diverse topics.

The organisation also provides coaching to managers and senior leaders. Pooja says it helps them handle the day-to-day issues around people, conflict, etc. Senior leaders in turn conduct capacity-building sessions for the entire organisation on topics as diverse as finance and advocacy with the government to fundraising and monitoring and evaluation. These are open to the whole organisation and aimed at helping them understand areas they don’t work on.

Lastly, Arpan uses a number of strategies to boost team morale. Some of these include an annual Appreciation Day (where team members acknowledge and appreciate one another’s contributions), rewarding good performance through awards, and reimbursing all team members (both in the field and in office) for expenses related to travelling to and from work.

Recognising that culture is critical

Arpan’s culture is built on team values. Hemesh and Pooja both highlight how important it is to be clear on your organisational values and to ensure that they are constantly reiterated. At Arpan, they organise a teamwide session on culture, values, and philosophy every year. This session is not just a PowerPoint presentation. “We divide people into groups and take on practical real-life challenges. And we use these to see what values people exhibit while working,” says Hemesh. In addition, the conversation around values gets reinforced at the time of induction when a new person joins, and then again during quarterly reviews.

“The real test for organisational values is whether you are demonstrating them in your day-to-day actions and decisions. Do they form the principal basis of your work? Constantly communicating this and reiterating it to the team is critical. That’s why an employee’s alignment to Arpan’s value culture is also incorporated in the organisation’s performance management metrics,” Hemesh adds.

Facing the challenges

Investing in people is not without its challenges. According to Pooja and Hemesh, the two biggest ones Arpan has faced, and continues to face, are managing individual growth and compensation.

1. Employee growth

A challenge that many organisations encounter as they grow is, what happens when people who were part of the initial team—the pillars of the organisation who carry the legacy—are unable to skill up as the organisation expands?

These are the employees who are dedicated, loyal, and very passionate about the cause and the organisation. However, as the organisation grows, while some manage to learn the new skills needed to grow in their careers and move up to become managers, there are several others who struggle, and a career path within the organisation becomes difficult to envision. This can be frustrating for both the employees and the leaders. “They want to move to the next level, but are not able to because whatever potential they have might be exhausted, or they are not willing to upgrade themselves. So you’re not able to give them the next jump in grade because they don’t have the skills to function there,” says Hemesh.

“We’ve tried giving people options. One is to work in different teams, so that there is a change in role—it helps break the monotony. Sometimes we realise that while a person might not be able to scale up to be a manager, they can contribute very well individually. So we carve out roles that allow them to do that. We try all these things because we really want to retain them since they are absolute assets. But we can’t always manage it,” says Pooja.

Hemesh says they also encourage these team members to use their annual training allowance to build skills. “It’s tricky. You don’t want to lose them but it’s also partly an individual’s responsibility to gear up for organisational growth and opportunities.”

2. Compensation

Benchmarking salaries in the sector is difficult. There are some compensation studies, but Pooja points out that it’s difficult to refer to them because salaries in the sector vary significantly based on the work organisations do, their location, team and budget size, and more.

“Finding a benchmark to see where you are on the compensation spectrum has been difficult. There are always some employees who are unhappy because they think other organisations are paying more. Arpan pays really well, and we’ve tried to be on the high end of the spectrum because our area of work is difficult, but this has been a constant challenge,” says Pooja.

Hemesh says that they try to benchmark themselves with organisations who work on child protection as they probably have a similar structure, despite the fact that most of these organisations aren’t as large as Arpan. “Because we can’t compare ourselves to funding organisations or CSR salaries,” he says. Despite this, Arpan has faced pushback on the need to have so many senior leaders, and ‘high’ salaries across the board. “They compare us to nonprofits doing other work and say our leadership salaries are very high. A CSR funder even used that as a reason not to fund us this year,” says Pooja.

Arpan’s advice to nonprofits

1. Recognise that people are your biggest assets

Pooja says that taking care of people in your organisation should be the number one priority. “When you take care of your team, the work that they go out and do is also better. This culture of care passes on to the people you serve. If you want to do quality work on the ground, make sure that your team feels respected and cared for.”

2. Invest in senior leadership

Getting the right people on board, even if they come at a higher cost, is absolutely critical. Pooja says that senior leadership salaries (for example, that of programme director) should be built into the programme budget. “Yes, it might rock the boat a little bit with different people being paid different amounts, but a market correction can be made for current employees in the next financial year to bring them up to par. Your programme expenses will increase but if you want impact, it has to be done. Skilled people with experience are necessary.”

Once these senior leaders are on board, the organisation has to invest time in integrating them with the rest of the team, supporting them to make decisions, and giving them what they need to carry out their roles successfully.

3. Create open communication channels, seek feedback, and act on it

Having feedback processes in place, hearing what employees have to say, and taking their inputs seriously is critical. “We are constantly asking our team what we can do better. If the intent of a nonprofit is to make it a great place to work and retain people, we need to make sure that the environment is such that people enjoy working in your organisation. Equally important is constant communication with the team, telling them that ‘these were suggestions you made and this is what we’ve put in place’.  Arpan has done this in different ways.”

Just like the Great Place to Work initiative has an anonymous suggestion/feedback form, Pooja administers an anonymous feedback form separately at Arpan. Moreover, she does skip levels with the entire team once a year. “Last year our HR consultant also did a feedback process at the manager and director levels. So constant feedback mechanisms are introduced and we are continuously hearing from the team.” 

4. Put HR processes and policies in place

In smaller organisations, things work even if there isn’t much structure to activities and work. But Pooja says that the minute you start growing and hit the 20-employee number, it’s important to put HR policies and communication processes in place.

“I feel the biggest angst employees can have is ‘this is not fair to me’. But when you have set processes and policies, the message that goes out is that ‘this is for everybody’. That clarity is really important. Whether it’s about induction, recruitment, or termination, whether it’s about leaves or compensation—everything must be documented in a structured HR document that everyone has access to, and it should be reviewed periodically and communicated.”

Arpan’s advice for donors

1. Look at the work, and not the salaries

Pooja says that funders must look at the work that an organisation is doing instead of nitpicking salaries, questioning why they have so many senior leaders, or why they need to spend on training and capacity building. “We’ve been lucky as we’ve not had many funders question our salaries. But I see it happening more and more, especially with CSR funders. I want to tell them, ‘Don’t question the salaries. Instead, look at the work that’s happening. And if you think there’s a mismatch, that the work is not good or impactful but the organisation is still paying well, then you have every reason to question. But otherwise please trust the organisation.’ Also, for an organisation to continue to do the good work they’ve been doing at a larger scale, the team’s skills and capabilities need to grow. So investing in building the capacity of the team is critical as well.  Which means that donors must not second-guess their grantees’ costs on training and capacity building.”

2. Invest in long-term funding

Once donors have worked with a nonprofit and seen the impact of their work, they should actively consider long-term and core funding because it helps plan capacity and expenses better. This is especially important when an organisation is building a strong leadership team.

“If you want to get a senior person on board, one-year funding isn’t helpful. Funders must be willing to commit for three years. This allows us to hire leaders with experience who can take the organisation to the next level,” says Pooja.

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About Pooja and Hemesh

Pooja Taparia is the founder and chief executive at Arpan, a nonprofit working towards the elimination of child sexual abuse in India. She is also on the board of Sol’s ARC, which addresses the challenges experienced by struggling learners and works towards improving their life outcomes.

Hemesh Sheth is a senior management professional with more than 25 years of experience in establishing strong sales and distribution networks, team management, business development, leadership, and building organisations. He has hands-on experience in business planning, operations, and team building. He has been associated with Arpan for more than a decade and leads the support operations team, which consists of finance, human resources, administration, and IT functions.

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Know more

• Read this study to understand the challenges of talent management in the social sector.
• Read this article to learn how organisational culture affects talent retention.