In this conversation with IDR, Thenmozhi talks about failure as an opportunity to build power, how systems of oppression affect well-being, and what healing means for individuals and communities. This article is a transcript of a Failure Files podcast episode that was recorded as part of a special series, where we look at the intersection of failure and well-being, in partnership with The Wellbeing Project.

Tanaya: Most conversations around self-care focus on what individuals can do to cope with stress and improve their well-being. But this narrative puts the onus on the individual entirely, and ignores the role of a person’s social, political, and economic context. For instance, research shows that, in India, socio-economically disadvantaged communities, such as Muslims and scheduled castes, have significantly worse mental health outcomes when compared to upper-caste Hindus.

So, then, what does self-care mean for those who are fighting systems of oppression and discrimination, day in and day out? How do they prioritise their own well-being?

Joining me today to talk about all of this and more is transmedia artist and activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan. Thenmozhi, you’ve been at the forefront of movements for caste equity and racial justice both in the US and in India. Could you tell us a bit more about how this journey has been so far?

Thenmozhi: I’ve been an activist for many years, you know; my family was always active related to work around caste abolition. And I think that, you know, when I came into my own in college, I was really shaped by both the battles for racial justice and also my own experience of caste discrimination. And so as well as these issues, kind of facing, myself being a survivor of gender based violence. So I think that, in my time in college, it was really crucial for me to see how all of those threads are really formed and the need for an intersectional approach to caste equity. And a really important case that happened when I was in school was the Lucky Bali Reddy case in California, where a dominant caste landlord trafficked over 300 caste-depressed workers, including 20 young girls, some as young as 11 and 13, to be his sex slaves and to work his buildings in the city. And he’s the second largest landlord there. And so many of his buildings were student housing. And so it was so bizarre to me as a young, you know, as an adult young Dalit woman to know that you could see Dalit children who were working his buildings, instead of being in school, and nobody asked the question, because Dalit women and girls are invisible to almost every society that they’re in. So that really shaped my perspective as an activist and the need for there to be interventions, and also to go beyond the triage experience of structural discrimination, and look consistently at the systems that are failing and the ways that we can come up with systemic interventions.

Tanaya: Thanks, Thenmozhi. You mentioned how your parents were also actively working towards caste abolition, and how you started on this journey a while ago. And this just goes to show that when we’re working on issues of social change, we need to be ready for a long, arduous journey, and not quick turnarounds. Because social change is a slow, gradual process that may take years, even more so when one is trying to dismantle a system of oppression that is centuries old. So what does it take, both mentally and emotionally, to keep going against all odds, and to bring others along too?

Thenmozhi: I think one thing that’s very important is to recognise that you are part of a chain, a lineage of resilience. So it’s never about you at a singular point in time; there are ancestors that have fed you to get to this moment, and there are those that will follow you, for whom you are an ancestor in training. And when you recognise that you’re not the single hand that’s carrying the responsibility for freedom, it basically takes the burden off of you from imagining that you have to win it all right at this moment. And that’s why I always say that we’re fighting to end caste apartheid in our lifetime. And we live our lives as if we see that goalpost. So that means setting targets that are strategic and visionary. That means pushing ourselves to look and examine and unearth all the places that caste exists—in our bodies and our policies and our institutions and our relationships. But also that we need to fundamentally understand that you might sometimes win a battle or lose a battle. But we are really in the process of building leaders who can be autonomous and dream and fight and strategise on themselves in ways that are separate from how Brahmanism trains us to be. Brahmanism tells us that we have to give over our self-determination, the ways we process knowledge. And so to really create leaders that have de-Brahmanised themselves, that in and of itself is a political project. So I always look at every campaign as part of the larger arc of the freedom of our people. And every time you fight, you actually build power. You may not win that particular target, but you build power for the next challenge.

Tanaya: Could you tell us a little bit more about what that’s been like? While your work has been instrumental in bringing about significant change in a relatively short amount of time, it’s not easy. I’m sure you’ve also had to navigate a lot of backlash, setbacks, and failures in your journey.

Thenmozhi: So it’s okay, I think, to have setbacks, because, again, we are building leaders who will then come back stronger, smarter, and refined. But the end, I think, that long-term vision has actually been really useful, because we are one organisation that continuously delivers strategic wins. I won’t say that we win every engagement that we go into, but we have moved the ball very far in terms of caste equity in the diasporic space. Because I can certainly remember when we first started, people did not believe that caste existed at all, and it was very contentious. In the battle around California textbooks, where you had dominant caste forces trying to erase Dalit, not to, you know, teach the issue of caste and, you know, argue that, you know, Hinduism didn’t have patriarchy in it, all of this stuff. I remember talking to one of the board of ed people, and what their response was is that your stories are really compelling, but you don’t have any data. And so that taught me that, as a marginalised community, the way we tell our stories matter to people in power, and though those people of power don’t look at our bodies, don’t look at our spirits, don’t look at our stories, they only look at quantitative data, you know, to make their policy calls. That’s one of the reasons why we started out to do the caste survey. And the caste survey was very challenging, because again, even to conduct the survey, we face discrimination. People hurled caste slurs at us, they targeted us, they told us we were dividing the community, how could we, we were terrible people. There was even a board, an organisation that had to convene its board because they went into existential crisis. And they said if we deliver this survey, we will split our institution. And we had to go and present to the board that you’re not going to do that. Routinely, caste surveyed in our homelands. But actually your communities already split, because look, there’s caste-depressed members of your…your organisation, they’re asking for help. So based on all of that, we were able to make the right intervention. And, you know, and I think that data set really kind of changed the entire discourse, because for the first time, we had definitive proof caste existed in North America. And, you know, it went all the way. You know, we’ve had congressional briefings, we’ve seen institutions add caste as a protected category. And that data provided the platform for many of the litigation that’s coming forward now, because there’s proof that caste exists. And it empowers Dalits to be able to speak about their experiences of widespread discrimination across the country.

Failure can be really informative in terms of the pivots that you need to make.

And so what I saw in that, going back to your question, is that there is so much opportunity for transformation and growth when you can take a defeat, or take a challenge and a setback, and then problem solve, what’s the structural intervention we can make from that? So I think, you know, failure can be really informative in terms of the pivots that you need to make. And also that rarely are caste-oppressed people invested in to iterate around a problem. White people are always given the space. Savarnas are always given the space to like, iterate, move fast, break things, you know. In many ways, like you don’t solve complex structural problems and systems without many rounds of the go of it. But it’s very scary for Dalits to do those kinds of pivots, because we’re already held to a higher standard, people assume that we’re not as competent. And so, oftentimes, if a project that we’re working on doesn’t go in the right direction, then we’re immediately shut down. And that’s not how we have to operate. It’s like we really have to think in a very structural way, what are our opportunities in every point that we grow, you know. So I would say that what I have seen is that by keeping the eye on investing in leaders, making sure that leaders have an arc of development and experimentation so that they can keep learning with the right support in terms of Dalit feminist practices and ways—you see huge opportunities for people to then keep taking that work into their different domains and spheres.

Tanaya: You make a very important point about focusing on strategic wins, and using setbacks and failures as opportunities to problem solve and build a stronger movement. But, at the same time, caste-marginalised communities aren’t given this space to fail. In this context, what does failure mean for well-being both at an individual and collective level? Especially when we take into account the structural violence that caste-oppressed communities already face on a daily basis.

Thenmozhi: I don’t think that our community centres wellness. This is a big part of why I believe one of the processes of caste must really also include the healing from the trauma of caste. And, in fact, I’ve just written a book about this, because we understand caste as a political project, we understand it as an economic project. But we rarely examine the effects of long-term caste stress in the internal, interpersonal, and institutional realms on Dalit bodies and caste-privileged bodies. And I would say that, you know, Dalits have some of the worst health outcomes ever. You know, the average age of mortality for Dalit women is 39 years. We’re denied healthcare and access, and we’re not even given space to acknowledge that we have significant pain and stress from the impacts of structural caste itself. You have to have that foundational conversation first, before you can talk about, well, what’s the well-being in the context of facing constant pushbacks to your fight to dignity? Well, it sucks. And and many Dalit activists suffer from systemic conditions as a result, like anxiety, panic attacks, depression, institutional murder, and suicide. These things aren’t just because Dalits are having worse mental health outcomes just out of the blue. It’s because systems of oppression kill. You can’t fight for social justice and assume that an individual is responsible for their own well-being when there’s a failure of structural systems at every level. That’s probably the first mistake because you can’t. How are you supposed to take care of yourself when you don’t have health insurance? How are you supposed to take care of yourself in a country where people have to pay for access to the vaccine. And we have some of the highest child malnutrition rates. It’s cruel to say that that is an individual’s responsibility when it actually is reflective of institutional failure.

We also have to be able to have better boundaries, because we are people who are fighting numerous fires.

But I think that’s why we have to fight for just wages, that’s why we have to fight for proper healthcare benefits. We also have to be able to have better boundaries, because we are people who are fighting numerous fires. But we have to be able to create time for our minds and our bodies and spirits. And it requires a different way of movement building, and it can sound very, very hard to do, when you are an organiser, that’s a frontline organiser, dealing with the worst of everything. But the natural resource that we actually cannot replenish is ourselves, our life spirit, our bodies. And so when our bodies fails, when our life fails, there is no more work. So we have to defend our body’s needs, and our spiritual needs.

Because the commitment to heal and looking at caste abolition, as both a healing project is about what does the world look like if Dalits were allowed to be human? Not like we’re stretched thin and trying to fight for survival over that last scrap or defending ourselves from massive atrocity? What does it really look like if we were to have healing, and joy and pleasure and ease? And that could feel as far away as a science fiction project of trying to colonise Mars. But that’s the ambition we need to have. And sometimes it’s just even having starting with like, two hours of no screen time, two hours of doing some collective care, like maybe oiling your hair, or reading a book, things that give you time to kind of nourish your soul, as well as your body and your heart. And when you’re in a state of constant emergency and violence in crisis, and your nervous system is consistently desettled, you may have lost the path or the thread for how to return back to that. And I think that the best way to do that is to go back and begin again, and start slowly, keeping a journal that kind of documents your reconnection to those things that nourish you, and bring you pleasure. The natural state of our body is to be alive, you know, and joy, you know, and its oppression, that kind of really takes us off.

Tanaya: I’m taking back so much from our conversation today, Thenmozhi. What you’ve articulated so well is that individuals alone cannot create social change. There is more power, more strength, and more care when people come together in solidarity. That is truly such a powerful message.

You’ve also highlighted how in this process of sustaining social movements, it is important to keep our long-term vision and goal in mind, and accept that every time we fight, we may not win. What one can do instead is use each failure as an opportunity to build power for the next challenge that comes their way.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, you’ve reminded us that we don’t need to lose ourselves in the pursuit of a cause—taking time out to care for yourself does more for a movement in the long run than burning out.

In many developed countries, there has been a process of normalisation of failure in the course of business. In the nonprofit world, however—and particularly in India—things are different. Even though most leaders recognise the inevitability of failure and the valuable lessons it can teach us, they are not ready to admit it. This holds true across nonprofit organisations, corporate foundations, and philanthropies.

In 2020, our organisation India Development Review launched an initiative called Failure Files. Our ambition was to create a space where conversations around failure in the pursuit of social impact are more open and commonplace; where other players can learn from the experiences of their peers, so as to not repeat the same mistakes. Two years in, we have learned a lot about the perception of failure among nonprofits and philanthropies in India, the barriers to openly discussing setbacks, and what needs to happen in order to build a conducive environment for sharing vulnerabilities and challenges.

What are the barriers when it comes to speaking openly about failing?

1. Reputation risk

In India, from a young age, we are brought up worrying about ‘log kya kahenge’ (what will people say). In other words, culturally, we pay close attention to what our neighbours and friends approve of. This often guides our actions, or what we are comfortable communicating about our actions. And it naturally shows up in the social sector too.

Given that nonprofit leaders are attempting to solve complex problems of social change—most of which have moving goalposts—they are reticent to admit when things aren’t working. There is a legitimate concern around how they will be perceived, and what it might suggest about the capability of the leader. Abbas Dadla, ex-Programme Lead at Acumen Academy India, put it well: ‘I think the reasons (for not admitting failure) are the simplest and yet hardest to overcome: the need to be seen or perceived in a certain way, and one’s self-image, which is partly driven by the self and partly reinforced by society. In the social sector, we constantly feed into and reinforce a behaviour that celebrates achievements, awards, and recognitions. Even if we understand how others might benefit from us sharing our failures publicly, we don’t see the upsides for ourselves, only the downsides.’

2. Organisational culture

The culture of an organisation also plays a big role in determining how much failure is spoken about, how frequently, and in whose presence. Within any organisational setup, the way incentives and rewards are designed impacts how individuals and teams function. If the leader does not encourage a culture of learning and openness, it will percolate throughout the organisation.

Shruthi Iyer, CEO of the Foundation for Mother and Child Health, talked about the challenges that come with speaking publicly about failing, as a woman. ‘Gender plays a role. As a woman leader, there is an added hesitancy to talk about failures because people already believe that you’re ‘soft’ and ‘vulnerable’. And so, if you talk about failure, you worry that it’s yet another reason why you won’t be taken seriously as a leader.’

It’s important to create a culture of learning within organisations, so that teams feel comfortable to candidly talk about their failures.

In 2020, Shruthi wrote an article for Failure Files, that chronicles a year where, in spite of achieving the outward markers of success, she failed as a leader, colleague, daughter, friend, and partner. She admits that it was easier to talk about the failure publicly after having moved on from the organisation, and after having built an ecosystem of support around herself. In particular, she found it helpful to look at examples of other women leaders who had failed to know that she was not alone. While she continues to work on this, she believes that it’s also important to create a culture of learning within organisations, so that teams feel comfortable to candidly talk about their failures.

‘Even after I open up about my own failure, I often ask myself: what is the culture that my organisation has around failure? Does my team understand that it’s okay to fail? Am I able to actively communicate with them that we failed? And beyond the team, will I be able to have these conversations with my board, donors, and other stakeholders?’

3. Skewed funder-nonprofit power dynamic

India reportedly has 3.5 million nonprofit organisations, spread across 30 states, and more than 600 districts, serving hundreds of millions of people. All of them end up competing for the same insufficient pool of funds from individual philanthropists, corporate social responsibility budgets, bilateral and multilateral agencies, and foundations. The resulting gap between demand and supply in a highly resource-constrained sector accentuates the already uneven power dynamic between funders and grantees.

What complicates matters further is that often, funders want a majority of their grant (if not all of it) to go towards the programme and the community being served. This leaves little room for operating expenses, let alone experimentation and innovation. In other words, the appetite for failure is negligible. And so, nonprofit leaders play it safe, afraid that admitting failure might endanger subsequent grants.

The entire ecosystem, by upholding this façade of success and impact, is inadvertently maintaining a status quo of silence around failure.

Huda Jaffer, Director of SELCO Foundation, caveats this by adding that this is not set in stone and that there is room for nonprofits to manoeuvre, based on the kind of funder. ‘Whether or not funders are open to learning from failure also depends on the kind of funder and their mandate. In our experience, it is much harder for bilateral and multilateral funding agencies to create efficient feedback and learning loops with their partners, because their structures may only allow for change over a period of time. In contrast, we found philanthropists and family foundations can have more of a continuous learning mindset and be better candidates for funding failure. The kind of capital source, i.e, whether it’s taxpayer or public monies versus private capital does also drive the room that the leadership would have to revise priorities and consistently mirror learnings from the ground.’

The responsibility, however, doesn’t lie on funders or nonprofits alone. Somehow the entire ecosystem, by upholding this façade of success and impact, is inadvertently maintaining a status quo of silence around failure.

Anish Kumar, Co-lead at Transform Rural India Foundation, believes that we cannot effectively do development work if we aren’t talking about our failures, because there is no way to pursue social impact without risk-taking and innovation.

‘Given the externalities that the development sector grapples with our rate of failure should be higher than that of for-profit enterprises or start-ups. And yet, everyone is complicit, in a sense, of maintaining this charade and not talking about this fundamental truth of our work. The pressure on everyone—from programme officers at funding organisations to grantee partners—to have to report impact has implications for how honest we are, and what we can learn from things that don’t work. And so we see a tendency to downplay the real risks of a project and frame it in such a way that allows the proposal and grant to get approved.’

What needs to change

1. We need a new narrative around failure

We need a mindset and narrative shift when it comes to failure. Making it more neutral and framing the language around ‘lessons’ rather than ‘failure’ could help people articulate what not to do and how to do better next time. We took this approach when we started Failure Files and have found that it has made a difference in how people tell their stories, and how they are received by the ecosystem.

For instance, Manjot Kaur reflected on how she learned to be a braver and more compassionate leader after her organisation failed to meet its goals in part due to her authoritative leadership style. Similarly, after getting caught in an unhealthy power dynamic with a funder, Dilip Pattubala wrote about how he learnt the importance of taking difficult decisions and staying true to his organisation’s vision—lessons that helped his organisation successfully navigate the Covid-19 pandemic.

We also need to recognise that failure is highly contextual; it’s time-dependent (programmes that may appear to be failing at one juncture could end up being successful at a later point); and closely related to the benchmarks of success we ascribe ourselves. Just because we failed at achieving those benchmarks, doesn’t mean there wasn’t progress on other measures.

2. We need to create safe spaces for honest conversations

SELCO Foundation hosts a conclave focused on celebrating lessons that emerge from failures in development work. According to Rachita Misra, Associate Director for Knowledge and Advocacy at SELCO Foundation, ‘While closed-door conversations help you accept your failure, they don’t lead to larger changes within the ecosystem. For learning to happen, the dissecting of what worked and what didn’t need to happen effectively and shared publicly.’ Shruthi adds, ‘It’s important that these spaces practice non-judgmental listening and that there are fewer people mansplaining what I did wrong. Instead, I see these as opportunities to listen to and learn from other people’s failures, particularly the failures of established leaders.’

The Acumen Academy fellowship has also been doing this with their cohort of leaders for a few years now. Every year, they work with a new cohort to build an environment of trust and community, so that their fellows can openly share their challenges, and what’s not working. ‘We help Fellows unpack their beliefs that are no longer serving them, [the] assumptions and behaviours that are holding them back, and we help them reset after setbacks,’ says Abbas.

Lastly, within organisations too, it is the leadership’s responsibility to foster a culture of learning and reflection, so mistakes can be identified, and rectified quickly.

3. It needs to be a collective effort, and funders have a big role to play

Huda believes that ‘When a funder brings openness, flexibility, and transparency to the table, it allows the nonprofit to not only share their learning but also to capture them and build processes for that feedback to get incorporated into their work.’

Rachita adds that starting conversations on failure is a joint responsibility of the funder and the nonprofit partner’s leadership. ‘Leaders also need to make sure that there is a diversity of funders and take steps towards ensuring that the culture of the organisation is not defined by any one type of funder. Initiating conversations on failure needs to come equally from both parties; one-sided conversations are not sustainable.’

Finally, acknowledging and openly discussing failures cannot be a singular pursuit by one entity. It needs to be a collective effort, so that lessons that emerge can benefit a range of stakeholders across the ecosystem, and most importantly, the communities that they exist to serve.

This article was originally published in Alliance magazine.

Vishal Talreja co-founded Dream a Dream with 11 other people. He is an Ashoka Fellow, an Eisenhower Fellow, a Kamalnayan Bajaj (Aspen) Fellow, a Salzburg Global Fellow, and a board member at Goonj. Vishal was also the founder-director of UnLtd India and a board member of PYE Global and India Cares Foundation. He has been recognised as an ‘Architect of the Future’ by the Waldzell Institute in Austria and as ‘Innovator of the Year’ in 2019 by HundrED.

In Part II of this conversation, Suchetha and Vishal talk about what it took to rebuild an organisation in crisis, and how that led to discovering a new kind of leadership—one that the world needs more of. This article is an edited transcript of a Failure Files podcast episode that was recorded as part of a special series, where we look at the intersection of failure and well-being, in partnership with The Wellbeing Project.

Rachita: Previously, Vishal Talreja told me about the many failures he experienced as the CEO of Dream a Dream, a nonprofit based in Bangalore that helps young people from disadvantaged backgrounds overcome adversity by developing life skills. He opened up about his leadership style, his persistent self-doubt as an ambitious 20-something CEO. He shared what burning out felt like to him, and what it did to the organisation he was leading.

Coming up on a decade of leading Dream a Dream, Vishal discovered that he was completely burned out. He bought a bus ticket in Bangalore one day, with no destination in mind. Nine hours later, he found himself in Coorg, where he checked into a homestay and slept—for seven days straight. He knew something had to change within the organisation, and that what he had built was somehow very different from the vision he had had starting out. Around this time, when things seemed to have hit rock bottom, Suchetha joined. It was a mess, she told me. But slowly, and together, they began to rebuild Dream a Dream. And I got to talk to both of them about what that process looked and felt like.

And, Suchetha, you joined to look at strategy, but very soon your role became somewhat of a bridge between Vishal and the team. And then there were several steps that I believe you took to get the organisation’s emotional health, if you will, back up. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Suchetha: Sure, that’s how I saw my role as this bridge and to build these pathways. So some of the initial steps I took was to actually separate the day-to-day from Vishal, right, which I just said. “Let’s just separate that out; you don’t get involved.” So there was a period of time for a few years where we had a deal; Vishal and I literally had a deal that while he would handle the board and the fundraising and all of that, he would not talk to the teams directly, without me being present, or you know, in a setting where even I was there. Because, invariably, it would lead to confusion; either he would be confused about what people are doing, or people would be confused about what he’s expecting. And then we would have to have this big clean-up and all of that.

The second was that then I actually did push him. I pushed Vishal to articulate and give words—what is it that he really wanted? Because it’s nice to say, I’m not happy here, or I want an organisation that, you know, trusts everybody. But what does that really mean, right? Like, help us understand it, give us a sense of what that is. So just take those half-formed ideas in his head and help us convert them into policies, practices, role definition, so kind of helping myself understand him and helping him convert that into things that are more tangible. And also asking him to articulate what are the non-negotiables that led to his burnout. What is the culture that he needs that he can be proud of? So that’s kind of what, you know, were the first few years as I came—how to build that culture that he also aspires to, that everybody can feel proud of, and how the team could relate their day-to-day roles towards this big vision.

So these were at the person-to-person level, but there are certain organisational steps also that we took, for example, the strategy itself. When I came in, Vishal had this idea that in the next three years, we will work with 2,40,000 children; at that time we were working with 3,000. And how do you go from 3,000 to 2,40,000? In three years, right? And he said, I don’t know. But we just have to do it. And I realised that’s where he is operating from. He’s again, you know, he’s driven, he’s passionate, he almost feels guilty that we’re not impacting more children. So again there was this whole realignment—where is the team at, what can we realistically do while managing Vishal’s guilt, and, you know, we will do this, it’s just not in the next three years. So managing that at the strategy level.

We also rejigged the entire culture. We put in something called the people philosophy. So we have this philosophy at Dream a Dream now. It is really a set of guiding values, a set of principles about how we want to operate as a team that builds a culture of trust, accountability, dignity amongst us and, more importantly, is a role model for the world that we want to see outside. Because that’s what I heard from Vishal—that children should be able to see us and see a microcosm of the world that we are saying we want to offer.

Rachita: So what does that look like?

Suchetha: So the values we had defined then were around trust, that we’ll all trust each other. And we trust every person to make the best decisions for the organisation. Accountability, that every person is doing this because they want to be here. So they take accountability for their role. And they are committed to contributing more and taking on more responsibilities as they grow and evolve in the organisation. And dignity, that every person will be treated with equal dignity, irrespective of what their role is, or, you know, where they are in the hierarchy, so to say, because there was still a hierarchy. So that’s, you know, the set of values. And this then translated into policies. For example, we used to have this attendance register, everybody had to come and sign. And if we were late, we were trying to let go of that; it was trust about when you come in, you just put in the work to be done.

And there’s a broad guideline around the number of hours; we put in casual leaves. Even today, we have unlimited casual leaves, which basically means if you need to take a day off, you don’t have to apply for it. There’s no formal process; you can just say I need to take a day off. And it’s not counted. There’s no fixed number of these days off that you can take. So, again, an indication of trust.

And the big piece was our performance management. Because this is where I found that most people would be upset, because till then, every time we did our performance appraisals, in March, we would go through this whole process—everybody’s done the reflections, the managers have given the feedback, everything, and then it’ll come to Vishal, and then Vishal would go decide who would actually get promoted, who will get the bonuses, and it used to lead to, you know, chaos and mess and just so much anger. And he had his own logic for decision-making, which nobody really understood.

So we let that whole thing go. And, even today, we have a self-reflection-based appraisal system, or a performance management system where each person decides on their own whether they are ready to move or not to the next level. And if you feel you’re ready, you can take feedback from your peers, from your managers, but your it’s your decision. And we have really created that environment that if you make that decision, sometimes we need to create roles for you. I mean, there might be some delay in doing that. But you are the decision maker, and you will decide when you’re ready to move. And that is again something that has really helped us grow and evolve as an organisation. So those are some of the practices then that we put in place that converted this idea that Vishal had, the kind of culture he was aspiring for but that we didn’t necessarily have, you know, the systems for.

Rachita: How long did it actually take to get the organisation back to a steady state, and what was it like for you because you clearly came in and you suddenly became this well for people. And so you were absorbing a lot of the negativity, the discontent, but then also offering solace, fixing things. What was that emotional journey for you?

Suchetha: At that time it was definitely stressful, a lot of sleepless nights and all of that. But at the core sense of…you know…when I think back today or when I think about what I was going through, it was an accelerated journey. It moved me and pushed me in ways that I didn’t think was possible. Because I did then and I continue to believe today that Vishal is a uniquely gifted person; he has an intuitive sense of what is needed and what is necessary for the future that we imagine and, you know, he believes that’s possible, right? It comes from a deep sense of belief that’s possible, much before maybe many of us have even processed what’s going on. So, to have him as a mentor, and through this journey of helping him articulate and all of that…it grounded me in my transition.

My strength is organisation building, my strength is holding people, holding space for conflict, you know, working through difficult situations.

Till then I was just a pre-sales consultant in IBM, one of two lakh employees in the country, literally a cog in the wheel. And suddenly I got this opportunity to test my own boundaries, what I am capable of, what my strengths are. I had never thought I could do organisation building; it was not even remotely close to the pre-sales job I was doing till then. So for me, too, it became this almost testing phase of how much can I do. What is my capacity, what is the potential that I lost out on in the 10 years that I said I was in the corporate sector? Because this is my strength.

My strength is organisation building, my strength is holding people, holding space for conflict, you know, working through difficult situations. And it was almost like discovering my own gifts and discovering, you know, what I could be. And that journey has continued, I think, for the first…I joined in 2010…for the six, seven years, I think it took us to really stabilise and make this transition.

The biggest transition for me through those six, seven years is moving from the idea that ‘Vishal is Dream a Dream, Dream a Dream is Vishal’ to actually expanding what Dream a Dream is way beyond Vishal. We even did a whole rebranding to support that. Where earlier we had just one logo that was the brand, there was Vishal and one logo, and we put that logo on every stationery. And that was kind of what the Dream a Dream brand stood for. And we got this great branding consultant who made us realise that it was really just a synonym for Vishal, that logo. So we changed the logo, we did this whole rethink, you know, what is the messaging? What is the work? So that, you know, along with the people philosophy, building the capacity of the team, and changing this narrative we had of ourselves and what the world had of us, from beyond Vishal, took about six, seven years.

And that is where I found my passion, my vision, who I want to be, what my imagined future is. Beyond Vishal, what do I see? And why did I make this change? And what is my contribution to how I want to impact the lives of young people. So in 2016–17 is when we said, maybe it’s time for the CEO transition as well. So we started talking about moving from the COO role that I was playing then to a more CEO role. I’m really today when I think back, I’m just grateful. And, yeah, just discovering what I can offer has been a big part of this journey. And I’m really grateful for that opportunity.

Rachita: Vishal, what was it like for you when Suchetha stepped into your role, as CEO?

Vishal: 2018 is when Suchetha took over as the CEO of the organisation. The board and Suchetha gave me a free hand, saying if you want to move on from the organisation, go ahead; if you want to try other things, you know, go ahead. If you want to stay in the organisation, why don’t you find your own role, create your own role? And I did that—I went out and explored, talked to many other entrepreneurs, other organisations, spent a year seeing what else I could do.

I’m contributing to that vision rather than taking the burden of having to try to achieve that vision myself.

And, interestingly, I came back to Dream a Dream. And I said, you know what, Suchetha is trying to achieve this vision she has for change in the world; it seems to be the most powerful vision out there. So if there’s any leader I want to work with today, it’s her. And this was without bias, that we’re married, and we have this special relationship with each other. Because I really did go out there.

So today, almost four years later, I’m glad I made that decision. Because every day I see the vision that I had 20 years back come alive. So I had the vision, but I didn’t know how to make it come alive. And that’s what’s amazing about the way Suchetha has built the organisation. She’s built an amazing leadership team, she’s broken down hierarchies; we have a flatter structure now. And I’m contributing to that vision rather than taking the burden of having to try to achieve that vision myself, which was how I used to operate earlier. So again that has been a journey of letting go of the ego as well.

Rachita: So what has letting go been like for you?

Vishal: In many parts very difficult as a process and in many parts very liberating. What was difficult was to let go of decision-making in many aspects of how the organisation is run. What is liberating is that I could now focus decision-making on things that are most important, such as strategy, culture, and I could truly let go of operations. What was difficult was to give away decision-making to other people in the organisation. But what is liberating was to learn to trust. Learn to trust my team, learn to trust Suchetha.

Also having grown up in a deeply patriarchal home environment, I have grown up with messages of me being special, of me being the hero as the boy, to now becoming part of a team where I’m no longer the hero but I’m one of many was very, very difficult. What was difficult was to now sit in team meetings and stay silent and have other voices come in and to listen to other ideas. But what is liberating is to realise that there are people out there who have much better ideas than I do. So it was a difficult journey to let go. And I feel I’m still in the journey; I’m still learning to let go. There are many other aspects in my personality that I hold on to. But what I’ve really enjoyed is the liberation of it. And I am really now focusing on the larger narrative in the sector, about how young people need to be supported to thrive, and playing that role and really thriving in that role. So that has been very fascinating. These are just some aspects. There’s a 10-year journey of fights and struggles and conflicts that Suchetha and I’ve had, and other team members have had through this journey.

Rachita: Is there something you would do differently, Vishal?

Vishal: I think many things I wouldn’t do differently. Because I think this was part of my own learning journey. As a human being, as an entrepreneur. I needed to experience some failures. Again, you know, having grown up in a household where you’re treated special, where you’re constantly given messages that you’re God’s gift to mankind, and you’re going to do great things in life just by virtue of being a man. It was important for me to let go of that message, that narrative. Failing, failing at something that I was so passionate and committed to, was important for me to then reimagine myself in a whole different way, as a different leader.

What I would probably do differently is I wish I had more self-awareness along the way, along this journey. I wish I could have apologised to the people that I hurt in the process. Even today, I know there are people that I haven’t reached out to and said sorry for the way I treated them, my colleagues, my co-founders. And I’m very scared to do that. So I wish I could do that. That continues to be one of my life goals; someday I can find the courage within me to reach out to them and say, “Hey, I’m sorry, sorry for the way I treated you.”

When the new people philosophy was launched, I was the last person to totally take it in. Because I had the most to lose in terms of identity.

When we made this shift in 2010 to a whole new organisation building journey, I did it very drastically. I came back from my break and said we need to change the culture of the organisation. I called the whole team into the room and said, “We’re going to throw out all our policies and processes and we’re going to rebuild from today.” Which was very much my style as an entrepreneur then. But looking back I wish I had more empathy and more mindfulness. And understanding of the impact this had on people, which it did. Many people were very confused and felt let down and left the organisation. I wish I had been a bit more mindful in recognising the implications of such big changes in the organisation on people, and people’s capacity to accept this kind of massive change so suddenly. Rather than again taking people along through this journey, you can come in and say I’m going on this journey, and you choose whether you want to join or not. So I think that I would do differently.

Lastly, I would say I wish I’d resisted less. Suchetha is aware and the rest of the team is aware that I resisted and when the new people philosophy was launched, I was the last person to totally take it in. Because I had the most to lose in terms of identity. So I wish I had resisted less and embraced it faster.

One thing we are careful about is that the narrative does not shift from one hero to the next hero, that the narrative does not move to now Suchetha being the hero, that today the narrative is truly about the cause, about young people. And that’s been a constant journey for us, and whenever we recognise that it is possibly becoming more person-centric again, we step back and try to break it. Yeah, those are some of the things I probably do differently.

Rachita: What about you, Suchetha? What would you do differently?

Suchetha: So I’m very aware that the way the story comes across and the way I say it is of someone who saw themselves and their role as something in the background, right? You’re somebody who quietly makes this possible by allowing the hero to take their place in the sun. And so for me it has been a journey of unpacking that, because that is how I perceived myself.

I did pursue…I always saw myself as, you know, nobody will know it was me, but I was there in the background supporting this man. And through this journey, we also, you know, we got involved, Vishal and I, we got married in 2013. And through that, while building Dream a Dream, and through the marriage, the first few years, that’s really how I saw myself. Because that was the narrative I had internalised, the patriarchy I had internalised that the hero is always the man. And the woman is the silent force, that no one never really knows about.

So I won’t say differently, because I think it’s a natural evolution. But that is, you know, what I feel I must caveat here, that by listening to the story, if it’s pulling on your, you know, instinct, especially the women to find the man that you can save, and you can rescue and, you know, be the quiet, silent force, and to really examine that, because I didn’t at that time. And today I see my whole, you know, approach to it differently.

I’m a big proponent today that can we as women actually take the lead, can we lead from the front, taking everyone along?

I think as a world itself, we need a very different kind of leadership; we need a non-hero, a take-everyone-along kind of facilitative leadership that comes more naturally to women. So I’m a big proponent today that can we as women actually take the lead, can we move, you know, lead from the front, taking everyone along, and really being generous with what we have to offer and the style that we can bring in. And it doesn’t always have to be to make the man’s dreams possible, or to make somebody else successful. So I might have taken, you know, even today, I might do many of the steps, maybe the same steps that I took. But I would not perceive myself as in the background, but as a unique, equally gifted, visionary, and operationally skilled leader who has something to offer. And I would do this more as a partnership, which we’re, you know, we’re kind of moving into today, versus a more held back approach in terms of who I am.

Rachita: There is so much to unpack in both Vishal’s and Suchetha’s accounts of their time at Dream a Dream. Listening to them share their failures and lessons, it struck me how each one of us can perhaps find so many parallels in our own lives, whether it’s about compensating for our own insecurities, coping with fatigue and burnout in the workplace, or watching our heroes let us down. What I am walking away with, and what I’d like to leave you with, is this. One, it takes courage to acknowledge that the one thing you care most about is the thing you’re also failing miserably at. And it takes a hell of a lot of courage to talk about it openly, courage that can only come with doing the hard work of self-reflection and looking inward. Two, trust is a sacred pact. Honouring it stubbornly, even in the face of resistance, can create space for big change. Dream a Dream’s path to recovery was embedded in trust, even if it took time for everyone to see that. And, finally, identity and leadership are closely linked—only when we truly meet ourselves, warts and all, can we grow into our full potential as leaders.

Suchetha Bhat is the CEO of Dream a Dream, a nonprofit that empowers children from vulnerable backgrounds. Since starting her career in 2001, she has worked both in the corporate and social sectors. Under her leadership, Dream a Dream has grown from working with 10,000 young people in Bengaluru to more than one million children across five states. NITI Aayog has listed Suchetha among the 75 Women Entrepreneurs Transforming India in 2021.

In Part I of this conversation with IDR, Vishal and Suchetha share the story of the organisation’s implosion, Vishal’s burnout, and how owning up to failure was the first step in figuring out the way to build back up. This article is an edited transcript of a Failure Files podcast episode that was recorded as part of a special series, where we look at the intersection of failure and well-being, in partnership with The Wellbeing Project.

Rachita: Today I am in conversation with Vishal Talreja and Suchetha Bhat. For close to a decade, Vishal led the nonprofit Dream a Dream, which has been working with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds since 1999 to help them overcome adversity by developing life skills. The organisation has impacted 1.5 million children through state partnerships in Delhi, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Telangana, and Karnataka. 

Dream a Dream has seen a lot of growth and success. But not without its fair share of failure.

So here’s what happened. One day Vishal woke up to the realisation that Dream a Dream had, in fact, become an organisation that was quite different from what he had envisioned and what he thought he was building. He was burnt out and had lost confidence in himself as a leader. It was only the recovery from this failure, the building back up, that helped him find a new, different kind of leadership model. And that’s where his partnership with Suchetha comes in. She went on to become the CEO of Dream a Dream, and the two of them along with their team have now built an organisation that they feel proud to stand behind.

But enough from me. Let’s hear from Vishal and Suchetha on what went wrong and why, and what the path to recovery looked like.

Vishal, you joined Dream a Dream as a volunteer in 1999. And, a few years later, you took over as CEO. You’ve been an inspiring and a visionary leader. And yet, 10 years later, you faced burnout. There was discontent within the team, which eventually led to Suchetha stepping into your role. So can you walk us through that journey and what led to this point?

Vishal: So Dream a Dream started in 1999 and 11 of us—friends and friends of friends—came together to start the organisation. We all started as volunteers, and we had no intention of moving in full time when we started. But as the organisation grew, and we started creating impact on the ground, we felt there was a need for one of us to move in full time. A couple of our co-founders initially spent time, full time, trying to build the organisation. And then I reached a point in my personal journey where I said, this is what I needed to do. And I came in full time in 2002.

I was about 23 years old then, with no prior experience of having ever built an organisation or a team. So, for me, everything was trial and error. One of the first challenges that we faced was some of the co-founders moving on to the board as trustees, including myself, and I also worked full time with the organisation. The relationship changed between us from being equal co-founders and volunteers in the organisation to now having a board and an executive director. It also changed the dynamics of relationships, which led to a lot of mistrust, to not being clear on where decisions are taken, who takes decisions, how decisions are taken. So some of us were really good friends as we started the organisation. We’re not such good friends any more, because of this changed dynamic within the organisation, which led to a lot of conflict between us. And that was the first point when I realised that maybe I don’t know how to build an organisation. I need to learn the ropes of that.

We couldn’t resolve our conflicts and issues on our own. So we brought in an external facilitator to help us talk through some of these issues, which led to some pretty drastic decisions, one of which was that all of us as co-founders who were trustees stepped down from the board. As trustees, we brought in a professional board. And then I became the executive director, reporting to the board.

What was good through this entire journey was that the work didn’t get impacted; the work with children continued to do well and thrive, and we continued to build our programmes and approaches. And I continued to be very driven with the work we were doing. The challenges were really around organisation building. And then as the organisation started to grow, and we started to hire more people, and scale the impact of our work, the organisation needed systems processes as any growing organisation needs—HR policies to finance processes to anti-fraud policies and a whole host of things.

What we were losing out on was a core set of values, which makes a nonprofit different from any other organisation.

And because I didn’t know how to do a lot of these things, budgets were growing, and so we needed a professional finance team, an accounting team. The next best thing I did was bring in people who had more experience than me, from different industries, from different fields to guide me. So at one level, I would listen to what they had to offer, because they knew better. At another level, intuitively, I didn’t feel right about the kind of organisation we were building. Because what we were losing out on was a core set of values, which makes a nonprofit different from any other organisation. Values of trust, authenticity, dignity, diversity, inclusion, which were values that were all there in my head, but I didn’t have the ability to articulate them and put them down, translate them into systems and processes or policies of the organisation. So that led to a gap between what I wanted Dream a Dream to be, and what Dream a Dream was becoming.

Rachita: Clearly, in terms of what you’ve articulated, there were issues of self-doubt, internal miscommunication. There was also a great deal of passion and energy; there was a demanding work culture. It’s clear that the process of burning out was something that kind of lay beneath the surface all of these years, right? It sounds to me like it was a slow burn over a long time, until it wasn’t. So was there a moment when you realised that you had had enough? And that was your breaking point? And also, looking back now, why do you think you may have missed some of the warning signals?

Vishal: Yeah. That’s an important observation, Rachita; I do believe it was a build-up. One thing I would keep telling myself is that I can’t burn out. And I used to feel very proud telling my friends who worked in the corporate sector, saying, you know, I look forward to Monday mornings. And I really did; I used to work seven days a week. I completely ignored family time, personal time. There would be days when I’d get up at three in the morning and have this brilliant idea. And I needed to talk about it. So I would shoot an e-mail to the team. I was really pushing myself.

Second, because I was so unsure of myself and my decision-making, they were high levels of micromanagement, which meant a lot of things came to my table. So if you’re making an annual report, I am the one saying this is the font we need to use, this is the colour we need to use, I’m not happy with this design. There was a point in time, I think 2006–07/08, when I was doing the bookkeeping for the organisation—literally putting entries in tally—because I didn’t trust anyone else to do a good job and I was a stickler for getting it right and for high levels of transparency. So it was a build-up. I was doing it to myself.

The culture had become toxic; there were high levels of mistrust.

And then, in 2009, I had a breakdown where I burnt out. And the realisation that I had is that I wouldn’t want to work in an organisation like Dream a Dream any more. It had become highly bureaucratic as an organisation. The culture had become toxic; there were high levels of mistrust. And I’ll give you an example of how that mistrust showed up. On a particular day, one of my colleagues lost their phone, and I was not in office; I was outside. So the team just decided that we’re going to check everyone’s bags to see who who might have taken the phone. And our team consisted of people who are highly educated, came from privilege, and young people who are alumni from our programmes—so people from the community itself. And that decision to check everyone’s bags was highly undignified. It broke the culture of the organisation in that moment.

The moment for me, when I kind of realised that I had had enough. I remember getting up on a Monday morning, getting ready for work, and having this thought just emerge—that I don’t feel like going to work, which had never happened in nine years of being at Dream a Dream. And that thought scared me. So that was a moment I knew that something had completely broken apart, and I needed to do something about.

Rachita: So what did you do?

Vishal: So I just called up the office and said I’m going to go away–didn’t tell them where. I said I’m not available. I called home and I said, I’m going away for a conference for a few days. Landed up at the Bangalore bus stop early morning and just literally took the first bus getting out of this bus stop not knowing where it’s going. Eight hours, nine hours later, landed up in Coorg. Since I’m here, might as well stay here for a few days, checked into a homestay. And for a week, I just slept. Didn’t switch on my phone, didn’t switch on my laptop, just slept. And I realised my body needed that rest; my body was exhausted. And all I needed was a space where I could sleep. And then, a week later, I came back and I knew that I had to change something, something fundamentally within myself, but also in the way the organisation is run.

Rachita: Suchetha, I’d love to bring you in here, because this was around the time that you joined Dream a Dream, right? What was it like coming into a set-up that was in crisis? How did it feel initially?

Suchetha: So it was a mixed bag for me because at that time I was working in the corporate sector making this big transition in life and career to move into the social sector. And I did that because I had been a volunteer at Dream a Dream and I had been so inspired by the work. And the volunteering journey is what made me realise that, you know, I don’t want to be an engineer, I don’t want to be in sales. I want to work with people, I want to work on life skills. I saw myself as a psychologist, so it was a journey of discovering myself. I came in with so much hope and, you know, this idea of everything that I will do. So that way it was a bit disappointing.

Like Vishal said, decision-making was a bit of a mess, a big mess. For some decisions, you just had to go to Vishal and ask, “What is the snack we will have at this event?” At other times he would say, “Why are you asking me? It’s your role; you take the decision.” So it was very inconsistent. And we kind of, you know, didn’t know how to navigate that as a team.

All the operational things that actually make you function in your role and make you feel satisfied, those were not there. So it led to a lot of frustration.

But, at the cultural level, I realised that a lot of people, to some extent, even me, we had joined Dream a Dream because we were enamoured by Vishal—by his vision, you know, listening to this TED Talks, having met him, having heard what he wants to create in the world. So you join in thinking you’re joining, you know, this, being part of this big change. But then you realise that you don’t really know what to do on a day-to-day basis. What is your role? What is the expectation? How do you measure yourself? How do you even know you’re making progress? So all the operational things that actually make you function in your role and make you feel satisfied, those were not there. So it led to a lot of frustration. And in the way it was set up, this frustration was then always projected on Vishal. So everybody in the team, including the board, it was always Vishal’s problem, right, something that Vishal was not doing right, something that he needed to change.

And for a lot of time, I also bought that narrative—that it’s his leadership style, he is not investing in his well-being, he’s not investing in putting in processes, he’s not prioritising right. So I also bought into the narrative that it is Vishal, till I spent time with him and I realised that some things are his problem, but it’s not necessarily just him. There is a much bigger challenge here. And, for me, that challenge was that Vishal is really a visionary kind of leader. He’s a very different visionary leader, who’s always seeing the future, and almost always dissatisfied with everything that’s happening, because he has this big idea of where we should be. And if you take that on as a norm, then you will be left, you know, forever feeling guilty and inadequate. So that’s when I realised that it’s not just that he has to change, because you want that—the quality is of his ability to see the future, the qualities of his passion and his commitment to this is what you want in a social entrepreneur. And what we also need in Dream a Dream. But we also needed a bridge, something that builds the capacity of the team to understand where they are at, and what are the steps that we need to take to really make this vision possible and move in that direction.

Rachita: The next few years were not easy at Dream a Dream. Half the team had left the organisation by this point. As they began to rebuild from the ground up, Suchetha would soon discover that her role needed to be much larger than what she had been recruited for.

Read Part II to know what happened next, how the process of recovery unfolded, and what changes were needed in order to rebuild the organisation.    

Despite this I did get a great job at a company in Pune, where I had mentors who saw my potential and built me up personally and professionally. Importantly, it was here that I became aware of how much I liked training and coaching young people who joined my team.

Eventually, I realised that corporate culture was not for me. I left Pune in 2011, and returned to Lucknow in search of other opportunities. That is when I met Chris and Byomkesh, founders of Medha, a nonprofit that helps young people improve employability skills and employment outcomes. They were looking for someone to help them with curriculum development. Although I had no background in, and no understanding of, curriculum, I could immediately relate to the work they were trying to do as well as their vision. And so, I agreed to join them.

Early days at Medha

I was the first employee at Medha, and in the initial days Chris, Byomkesh, and I spent hours developing the curriculum, building college and corporate partnerships, figuring out marketing strategies, and hiring people to take our vision forward.

We didn’t want to create yet another parallel education system, a practice that is so prevalent in Uttar Pradesh (UP). Even today, across the state, you’ll find thousands of coaching institutes that teach English or prepare students for government jobs. We believed that these skills should be taught on campus itself. We wanted our students to pick up abilities that would make the transition from education to employment a smooth one.

As a result, we focused on communication skills, building confidence, and industry exposure through talks, visits, and internships to better prepare them for their first job. We wanted young people to know what they were getting into—what a BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) job looks like, what sales entails, and so on—and what soft skills they would need to excel in those environments.

We kept testing and refining our programme for the first two years, preparing ourselves for the right opportunity. And then it came along. We got a chance to present our experiential learning model to the chief secretary of UP, along with the principal secretaries of higher education and technical education, and 10 district magistrates. We were given the go-ahead to pilot our programme with 10 degree colleges and five polytechnics across six districts in the state. We were excited to expand from one district to six districts, from three colleges to 18, and from 300 students to our potential 5,000+ students.

(Attempting to) scale the Medha model

The opportunity we had been given was huge, but so was the challenge. When we began preparing for scale, we made our first mistake—we based our decisions on assumptions. Here are some of the assumptions we made, and the reasons they didn’t work:

1. Students and their families wanted what we had to offer

We had tested our model in Lucknow, and it had worked. However, the colleges we had worked with were urban institutions, where the students had more exposure and were already motivated. We didn’t realise that government colleges in remote parts of UP had their own unique set of demands.

We found that while we got student registrations from government colleges, on campus attendance was very low. This was because the colleges were in remote locations and our students, many of whom were from low-income households, couldn’t afford to make the trip on a daily basis. This meant that on different days of the week, different students were coming in. Thus, we were unable to have a fixed set of students who could complete their training, which was basically a 30-hour career advancement boot camp programme.

Overall, it seemed like our model was falling apart. Our team understandably began to get demotivated and frustrated.

Our team tried everything. They were all young people—college educated, passionate, and highly motivated. When faced with low attendance, they tried approaching the parents to convince them to send their wards to college. Parents had their own compulsions—they needed their children around to help with agricultural activities at home. Their motivation for sending their children to college was only the degree, as it would help their daughters get married and their sons apply for government jobs.

Even the students we were able to place in internships were having a hard time. If their company was in the city and didn’t compensate for their transport costs, the students couldn’t show up for work. Overall, it seemed like our model was falling apart. Our team understandably began to get demotivated and frustrated, and with each new thing we tried, our programme costs kept shooting up.

2. Industry will be keen to hire young people with life skills

Since we were essentially a students’ organisation, we had not invested our energies in working with companies. However, our students ultimately needed to get absorbed by industry. Soon we realised that industry either wasn’t interested or didn’t have the capacity to take these students on.

While the companies we approached thought our students had better aptitude than other young people in the market, none of them felt our students were better skilled. While Medha’s programme equipped young people with soft skills, we realised that they could not get jobs based on their confidence and communication abilities alone. The reality was that our students didn’t have hard skills, such as computer proficiency, that they needed to get jobs. Even those graduating from technical colleges did not know the basics of engineering.

3. Talent will solve everything

To work with students at this scale, we created two pillars to our programme: student training and industry interface. Separate teams were created for each, and we tried to hire what we thought was the best talent for the job.

 The number of students in our programmes kept growing rapidly. However, opportunities with industry were limited.

The employer relations team, which interacted with industry, comprised senior business development professionals who had worked in corporates before. We hired them because we thought they would be best positioned to talk to companies and get our students placed in them. However, we didn’t realise that people from a corporate background have a different mindset, with many only focused on achieving the numbers.

Initially I spent time with them, mentoring them, telling them about our values and what we wanted to achieve. But as we grew, the pressure of numbers followed, and we passed on that pressure to them. The number of students in our programmes kept growing rapidly. However, opportunities with industry were limited, and the quality of employers became a big concern. This meant that even after internships and exposure visits, our students were not learning anything.

Our core value—student centrism—was at stake, and the organisational culture was becoming like that of a sales company where everyone was running after numbers. Employment outcomes dipped, and our team’s morale was affected. The employer relations team couldn’t survive, and there were mass resignations.

Needless to say, all this affected me badly. I spent a lot of time reflecting on what went wrong and talking about it. And this is what I learned.

Our learnings

1. Prepare for growth—do the research

The mistake we made was growing the programme based on assumptions about growth, stakeholder behaviour, skills required, and so on. We did not do any detailed analysis on how we would achieve this growth and what it would take, how many industries were out there, what kind of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) we needed to target, and the hurdles we would face in the process.

At the crux of it, we just hadn’t planned for scale. We were only solving problems as they came up. And as a result, we lost out on almost two years of work at Medha. On the other hand, it also taught us what we know now. Today we are aware of the importance of building a long-term strategy based on an analysis of market opportunity, stakeholder appetite, drivers, and barriers. And implementing what we learned has allowed us to rework our model and keep the essence of Medha alive.

2. Build around the core values of the organisation

Medha was conceptualised as a student-centric model. When we began to scale, however, we found that it was not possible for our student relation managers (SRMs) to keep up with training, handholding, and placing such a large volume of youngsters. The model wasn’t feasible as one sought to scale. In order to make it work, while staying true to our core values, we had to narrow our scope of work. Therefore, we decided to work with only active colleges, focus on final-year students first, and create regional career centres for better connectivity.

3. Compliance is hard but extremely important

Monitoring the work of a large, remote team was difficult. When we began to do random checks by calling 50–100 students to ask what they had learned in their sessions, we found that students weren’t attending the sessions they were supposed to.

It wasn’t long before we realised that we would have to create processes for compliance, data collection, and analysis. And our existing team wasn’t equipped to do any of this. Consequently, we set up a knowledge branch in our team. These were the people who looked at monitoring and impact, compliance, and data. They told us what was working and what wasn’t, and allowed us to make informed decisions for future action.

4. Having a strategy is critical, but communicating it is even more so

Not having a clear long-term strategy creates a disconnect internally. Our vision was always strong; however, we didn’t have as much clarity on our organisation strategy. We also didn’t communicate it across the organisation.

If people on the ground do not know how they are contributing to the bigger objective, they act based on their motivation alone. For example, if someone is motivated by money, they might falsify attendance, take poor quality internships, and so on. If you don’t have a clear vision and strategy at the top and it doesn’t percolate down to the field, there will always be problems.

If I have to sum up this experience, I can say that we missed critical elements while planning for scale. Our assumptions failed, the organisational restructuring backfired, and we lost the essence of our student connect—our core value. This journey reconfirmed our belief that better employment outcomes need a holistic and human-centric approach, and that we have to be thoughtful and strategic about it.

This article was published with UnLtd India, a strategic partner in Failure Files, a special series on IDR where social change leaders chronicle their failures and lessons learnt.

“But, at what cost?”

Voices rose. Tense moments passed. Fatigue was evident in everyone’s voice. It was five months into the national lockdown and COVID-19 pandemic, and two months into the online learning programme that our organisation, Kanavu, had launched. Though my co-founders and I sat together in the room, we had never felt further apart as we questioned our choice to start online learning in rural communities. We were questioning everything: how we were doing it, how much time was being invested, and how that connected to the purpose of our organisation. 

Two years ago, in 2018, a small team of four with a dream of a ‘transformed’ rural India came together to set up Kanavu. Kanavu works with 55 teachers, five school principals, and more than 20 women from local communities, who together serve about 1,300 children. As a team, we focus on training teachers—on content, pedagogy, and leadership skills. We also run a leadership programme for principals to build a strong school culture. 

Shifting gears to navigate the pandemic

In March 2020, as we stepped into what seemed like a stable quarter of our second year in existence, the pandemic happened. Shortly after the lockdown was announced, we found ourselves shifting gears. At first, we began responding to community needs by fundraising for cash transfers and distributing dry rations to the families we worked with. With schools remaining shut, we felt a growing conviction that children must continue learning. Thus, Kathir (meaning ‘ray’) was born: a project that supported our teachers and students with continued learning opportunities, despite the pandemic. This, in the current context, meant remote and asynchronous learning. Simply put, we sent children videos to learn from, which they could access at their convenience based on when they could access a mobile phone. The expectation was that they would learn by watching the video, complete the task given, and share it back with the teacher via WhatsApp. 

In June 2020, we decided to focus on bridging the technology gap among teachers, many of whom were not comfortable using technology-based solutions to teach. We would then move on to create content that could reach students through WhatsApp. And so, we began raising funds for recharging mobile data plans and securing used digital devices for our teachers. We were also generating learning videos for every grade on a daily basis. With all four founders being Teach for India alumni, the ‘teachers’ within us rose to the occasion.

We made grand plans for age-specific content. Students and parents were now using local materials to learn; children’s science experiments could employ materials found at home, and stones and shells were being used as math aids. Parents learnt child development theory through short videos that helped them facilitate learning for children in kindergarten classes. Learning videos and completed worksheet photos started pouring in. Our phones were buzzing with teachers seeking help to figure out WhatsApp—most of them had never used a smartphone before. And, we were also simultaneously working with principals to increase student access to online learning—a massive challenge in the rural communities that we were working with.

Our seemingly perfect pivot failed

Everything we were doing seemed like a perfect mix for feeling both a sense of satisfaction and achievement. Except it did not feel that way. Exhaustion and a feeling of inadequacy quickly crept in. Sending tasks to students every morning meant that we began working as early as 5 AM on most days. This was necessary because it allowed us to record videos, create worksheets, send out tasks, and spend most parts of the morning problem-solving so that we could reach more students. 

Our stakeholders—teachers and principals—were fighting their own battles as well, ‘work from home’ being among the toughest. There was constant fire fighting to help teachers build routines so they could sail through a day of online learning while continuing to meet the demands of running a rural household during a pandemic. Given the increase in challenges in online learning and uncertainties of the pandemic, we became shock absorbers for the teachers’ rising stress levels. 

Efforts to build the organisation, raise funds, and connect to different networks were only made based on need. There was a growing inability to do what was important; we only did what was urgent. We kept telling ourselves that these were teething problems and that we would soon settle into a routine. Except we didn’t.

In about two months, we became sure that we were failing. Keeping a project like Kathir alive, while meeting the demands of running an organisation and trying to do it all was a perfect recipe for failure. 

We asked ourselves if we could do this well, rather than asking whether we were the only people who could do it well.

Upon taking a step back and exploring what was going wrong, we saw different themes emerge. We had signed up to do way more than the four of us could handle. We weren’t focusing enough on Kanavu as an organisation. We were exhausted; and, we hadn’t focused on fundraising. The bulk of the time invested in creating tasks left us with little time to engage directly with our teachers and principals. This left them struggling to cope with the daily demands of dwindling student numbers, or sometimes, poorly understanding the task sent to students. This also led to a drop in motivation and a culture of negativity among our teachers. Doing calls with school teams helped us see how much our teachers wanted us to engage with them and handhold them through the learning process. As a team, we were waiting on a funding renewal, without which we would have run out of all funding for Kanavu by the end of 2020. This put immense pressure on us, making us question how we were spending our time. Some of us were hopeful about the funding renewal, while others believed that we needed a backup plan. As a result of this singular focus on ‘Kathir’ as a programme, we wondered if our very existence was in question. 

We agreed that we were failing and that it was costing us our own well-being, as well as that of our team and organisation. Not to mention, our sustainability was at risk. 

Yet, we had differing opinions on how to solve this problem. Would we stop running the programme in this manner? Would we build skills in our teachers to create content? Would we hire more consultants? What would the implications be for our budget? 

In hindsight, we realise that we went down this path recognising a need, and also recognising our own ability to fill that need. And so, we asked ourselves if we could do this well, rather than asking whether we were the only people who could do it well. Yes, we had roped in volunteers who created about 20 percent of our videos for us, but that wasn’t enough to give us the time and bandwidth to focus on Kanavu.

My journey through this failure

Personally, this failure wreaked havoc across my life and work. I found myself struggling to meet the demands of being a mother to a 3-year-old and a dog, an entrepreneur aiming to run a sustainable organisation, and a leader aspiring to learn and grow. I found myself feeling a greater sense of inadequacy. 

I was in overdrive, trying to speed up the time it would take me to complete different tasks in an attempt to conquer my to-do list. I was unavailable to people in any way, at work or in life. I wasn’t listening deeply enough to the school principal who was sharing her concerns about online teaching, or to the teacher who was facing a similar struggle as mine in trying to balance her role as a mother and an online teacher. I was looking for quick solutions that got us past that day. I didn’t listen deeply enough to my co-founders who were sharing opinions that differed from mine or solutions that I hadn’t imagined. Not listening deeply enough created a disconnect and a growing sense that we weren’t designing creative and empathetic solutions.

While we continued to be present in learning spaces and applied for a renewal grant, we knew that both partnerships and funding had taken a hit.

For the first time in a decade of working with people, I wondered if I wasn’t cut out for a role that involved working with people. I found myself not having any energy to think creatively about the problems at hand. I allowed myself to believe that creating content myself saved me the time that I would otherwise have to invest in checking the quality of volunteer-created content. So my to-do list grew, and I wasn’t making time to tap into an existing support system or build a new one.  

All of this affected both me and the team deeply. It showed up as exhaustion, disconnect, avoiding difficult conversations, slower decision-making, and less joy at the workplace. While we continued to be present in learning spaces and applied for a renewal grant, we knew that both partnerships and funding had taken a hit. For a two-year-old organisation, this could hurt us in the long run. 

Our teachers, school principals, and partners experienced us as being ‘busy’ and hence, ‘did not want to trouble us further’. This meant that we weren’t in touch with what was happening with them. This realisation finally brought us to a point of acceptance: “we could not go on like this”.

What we learned

1. The big “f” word

This difficult period shattered our belief that passion meeting purpose alone could carry us through any challenge. It has since introduced the big ‘f’ word into our decision-making: feasibility. As part of our working process, we have started to ask ourselves: Is this feasible? How do we make this feasible? Just asking this seemingly simple question is helping us declutter. We are able to look at what’s a ‘good to do’ and a ‘must do’. It has helped us think critically about how we spend our resources and time. 

2. Collective reflective spaces

This failure underlined the fact that reflective individuals coming together alone doesn’t necessarily result in a reflective team. While each one of us grows aware by reflecting, we also need spaces to come together as a team to reflect and articulate those reflections. Doing this will help us get on the same page, make tweaks accordingly, and move on. 

3. Anchor in joy

A big lesson has been that focusing on the founding team’s well-being and joy ensures the organisation’s sustainability, especially in its early years. Creating spaces for celebration, acknowledging efforts, and sharing impact give people the energy to move forward. 

We know that in the journey of a young organisation, there is no happily ever after, but we are grateful for the wisdom that comes from failing spectacularly.

These three insights have helped us imagine what’s next. We have brought on a consultant who can support content creation for student tasks. We are instating a rigorous process to find and invest in the right people to volunteer with us. And, we are focusing on orienting them, sharing feedback on their work, and building quality in the content generation process.

We are still struggling with reducing the scope of our work in order to balance the ‘feasibility’ question with our ambition to fulfil our vision. Then, there are moments when we see one of our volunteers grow more confident, or when we’re able to invest time in what we think will help move Kanavu to a stronger space in five years. 

We know that in the journey of a young organisation, there is no ‘happily ever after’, but we are grateful for the wisdom that comes from failing spectacularly.

This article was published with EduMentum, a strategic partner in Failure Files, a special series on IDR where social change leaders chronicle their failures and lessons learnt.

And so, my journey as a fellow began. I was assigned to teach sixth to eighth-grade students, and in the first two weeks itself I started to observe that the children in the school were not doing well. Their grades were low and they were far behind the expected learning outcomes for their age.

I noted down my observations. Of the many I had, one significant observation was that the children did not form a strong relationship with the teachers. They did not ask the teachers any questions, nor did they respond when asked questions by the teachers. I also noted that there were several teachers for each class and therefore it seemed like no single teacher was responsible for the performance of their students.

To address these issues, I sent a proposal for a ‘One Class One Teacher’ project to my mentor at the organisation where I was placed. The idea behind the project was to assign one teacher to one classroom, who would teach all the subjects. In doing this, I believed that the concerned teacher would take ownership of their class, thereby improving the learning levels of the students. My mentor gave me the go-ahead and agreed to run this project as a pilot to see its effectiveness. As part of the pilot, my mentor and I decided that I would teach one of the classes, and it would be my responsibility to improve the learning levels of students in that class.

Initially, the students were excited because everything was new and interesting.

I started the project feeling positive and with the idea that ‘I will bring change’. We started with Grade 6—the lowest-performing grade in the school. From seating arrangements to teaching strategy, I changed everything in the class. I wanted to start working on the foundational skills of the students, so I started teaching basics like alphabets, numbers, place values, and grammar. Initially, the students were excited because everything was new and interesting; they were eager to learn everything I asked them to.

After one month of the programme, the school administrators paid a visit to my classroom. They were not pleased with the idea that I was teaching Grade 6 students the curriculum of second graders. And so, they also asked me to show improvements in the mid-semester examination which was a month away.

Being confident that the changes I had made would be effective, I did not say anything to them. I accepted the challenge. However, with the looming deadline, I shifted the pressure onto my students and expected them to perform better regardless of where they were on the learning curve. I started giving them more homework, asking them to attend extra classes, and much more. Almost immediately, I saw the students get less interested in learning. They also started rote learning again, which they saw as the quickest way to pass exams.

From having bulletproof self-esteem, I was shattered because I could not show the results I had promised.

When the results came in, only 10 out of the 60 students in Grade 6 had cleared their exams in all subjects—a clear indicator of my failure. Naturally, I couldn’t convince the school administration to continue the project, and ‘One Class One Teacher’ was shut forever. My ideas clearly did not match with what the school wanted. From having bulletproof self-esteem, I was shattered because I could not show the results I had promised. I started doubting my ability to bring about change.

I sat down with my mentor to reflect and understand what went wrong, and when. I realised that it was right in front of my eyes and yet something that I had totally missed. In my plan to change the system, I had not involved the major stakeholders—the teachers. I had internalised the idea that I knew better than others (especially in this case, because my father is a teacher). Since I had been observing his way of teaching, classroom arrangement, and school leadership from a young age, I thought I had a fair idea of how things work in classrooms—without ever having been a teacher myself. And so, when implementing a completely new system in a school, I failed to talk to the people who knew more about the school and the children than anybody else.

After some reflection, I noted a few things that I could have done differently with the whole project:

1. When I started designing the project, I included and addressed issues that I had observed. I never asked the other teachers about the problems they faced in the classroom. Also, I never asked the students if they were comfortable being taught by only one teacher. I was so engrossed with the original idea, that I did not take the time to think about the probable issues. I learnt that the needs and interests of the stakeholders are very important aspects to consider in designing any project. Without fully understanding what was expected of a project—in this case, the outcomes that the school authority wanted me to show—a good idea may not only go nowhere, but actually worsen the situation.
2. I was also under the impression that changing teachers, teaching-learning materials, or teaching methods were the only ways to improve the learning outcomes of the students. I overlooked many other important factors, such as the involvement of the community, for example. Many students who were part of the project were from marginalised communities. Their parents practised agriculture and were often busy in the fields, and so they didn’t have time to focus on their children’s studies. Children also had to go to the field after school to help their parents, and thus, they had very less time to practise the lessons taught in the classroom.
3. Change is not possible in a very short span of time. In a month (or any specified period of time), it is unrealistic to expect the students to learn everything. Change does not happen overnight, especially when you are working in the development space. There are many factors that affect educational outcomes—teachers, parents, teaching materials, classroom arrangement, peers. Improving educational outcomes is much more complicated than simply changing teachers, and requires work on each of these factors.
4. There was a huge communication gap between me and the school authorities. I was able to convince the authorities about what I wanted to do but was unable to communicate why I wanted to do this and why this was important. Even if the project was meant to fail because it was not designed well, I would have had a little more room to experiment had the outcome of the project not been dependent on the exams conducted by the school.

For the rest of the fellowship year, I decided to help rather than change. After speaking with the teachers, I made a list of things I could support them on. Over the next few months we held a number of workshops for children, teachers, and parents as well. We used these to understand the areas of interest among the children and then started implementing different types of teaching methodologies in classroom to make learning interesting and fun.

I joined the fellowship with the idea of ‘me’ changing the world, but now I have strike out ‘me’ and believe in ‘we’. I have become more empathetic, but my biggest takeaway has been that in order to learn, you first need to unlearn your biases.  

This article was published with India Fellow Social Leadership Programme, a strategic partner in Failure Files, a special series on IDR where social change leaders chronicle their failures and lessons learnt.

Setting the scene

The primary objective with which SOL was founded was to facilitate a future where children, no matter who they are or where they come from, have the opportunity to find their voice. By leveraging the power of art forms like storytelling, poetry, visual art, and theatre, we work towards fostering ‘creative confidence’ skills such as communication, empathy, collaboration, and self-esteem in children from vulnerable communities. With this clear mission in our minds, Jigyasa and I began with something of a flourish, starting two projects with separate objectives—the Jijivisha Fellowship (which brought professional artists into low-income classrooms for art-based learning interventions) and Voice for All (which aimed at building art-based self-learning resources for children in rural India). These projects were the lifeblood of our organisation in its early days and we devoted all our resources to them.

Listen to this article instead.

Simultaneously, both Jigyasa and I were passionate about bringing about change in the Kashmir Valley. A Kashmiri herself, and having interned in Srinagar a few years prior, Jigyasa strongly felt that children in Jammu and Kashmir could benefit from an art-based intervention. The valley has been an epicentre of violence and conflict since time immemorial, and we believed our organisation could make a difference. With this in mind, we began to envision an intervention that would engage community youth artists to work with children, towards building socio-emotional learning and conflict management skills.

At the time of this envisioning, our organisation had two active programmes, and, being relatively new still, we were trying to meet other deadlines such as applying for our 12A and 80G certificates which would give us the benefits of tax exemption. In addition, both Jigyasa and I were part of an incubation programme where we were learning the nuances of setting up an organisation. To say there was a lot going on would be an understatement.

Nevertheless, we were hopeful and driven to create a story of change for children in the conflict-ridden valley. So, in the summer of 2018, Jigyasa travelled to Kashmir to submit our proposal to the education body.

The stumbling blocks

When we pitched our idea to the government, we had done so via our one contact in the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in Kashmir. This contact was our only point of contact in the state, and they were a high ranking official in the government. This was the first mistake we made.

A few weeks after submitting our proposal, the education body responded positively. However, by the time they gave us a timeline for the work, we were already stretching ourselves terribly thin. Physical distance (our office was based in Delhi at that time), poor distribution of work (amongst existing projects and deadlines), and the leanness of our team (four permanent employees and a few interns) further compounded our troubles.

During this time, we were trying to form on-ground relationships with community members in Kashmir but kept coming up short.

During this time, we were trying to form on-ground relationships with community members in Kashmir but kept coming up short—primarily because the same people travelling back and forth from the Valley also had to set up day-to-day systems, run our ongoing programmes, and do the compliance work for government certificates. To complicate matters further, our timelines for the Kashmir intervention coincided with the scaling of the Voice for All programme (from 1,500 to 50,000 children) and the recruitment and induction period for the Jijivisha Fellowship.

Needless to say, we were stretched very thin. Our work timetables became immensely chaotic, resulting us being burnt out and unable to focus on the things that needed the most attention, both in Kashmir and in Delhi.

Losing the project in Kashmir

Whilst our team gave it our best, we still did not have the capacity to be in all places at once. There were certain paperwork requirements that were integral to this project moving forward, and oversaturation and carelessness led us to miss the deadline to submit them. This happened in tandem with our point of contact in the state being transferred, and we paid dearly for not cultivating a professional relationship with other authority figures.

To make matters worse, we hadn’t yet managed to form meaningful relationships with the community, as a result of which we were unaware of the wants and needs of the people that we were trying to bring this intervention to.

In the end, we had appeared unreliable, disorganised, and possibly unmotivated—all of which was very far from how we intended to approach this project.

The combination of these factors resulted in us losing the interest of the education body in Kashmir, and subsequently the contract for our work. In the end, we had appeared unreliable, disorganised, and possibly unmotivated—all of which was very far from how we intended to approach this project. In fact, in an attempt to please all stakeholders, ready to grab at whatever they offered us, we came across as an organisation that does not take its own vision seriously.

 A month down the line, when we reached out to make amends, the education body had already closed their partnerships for the year. Perhaps there is some truth to the saying that first impressions are always the last. Because no matter how much we followed up later, we never received a response from the government body.

Losing the contract meant that we could not be a part of a programme that was very close to our hearts, and that we had envisioned since the inception of our organisation. Coming to terms with this was perhaps the toughest phase we had to go through as a team, with Jigyasa and I constantly looking back on how things could have been different.

What we learned

It has been more than two years since this event played out and till date, we have been unable to salvage a relationship that was crucial to achieving our vision. While SOL has grown since then, we revisit this story and the lessons it left us with. The key learnings from this experience that we reiterate to ourselves often are:

1. As leaders in an organisation, we must pause to take stock of what is at-hand before making further commitments. This also means learning the art of forecasting what existing programmes will look like in the future once they are running in full force. It’s also vital that time between tasks is distributed effectively in order to reach an optimal level of efficiency.
2. Our experience with attempting to launch a programme in Kashmir taught us the necessity for transparent communication with existing or potential partners. Thinking back, we realise how hiccups and setbacks are part and parcel of any professional space. They translate into dire mistakes only when one is unable to clearly communicate them.
3. We also learnt about the importance of forming on-ground relationships. Actively involved stakeholders who resonate with your cause can be the difference between success or disappointment. In addition, while authorities may support us in smoothly executing programmes, to understand what a community really requires, social changemakers must get involved and spark a conversation.

The experiences, whilst being heartbreaking, taught us some very valuable lessons which have in turn enabled us to continue our work towards serving the purpose of amplifying children’s voices. And while this may not be the first or the last failure that we as an organisation will grapple with; it has shown us the power of making meaning out of failures.

This article was published with UnLtd India, a strategic partner in Failure Files, a special series on IDR where social change leaders chronicle their failures and lessons learnt.

A committed philanthropist, Rohini sits on the board of trustees of ATREE, an environmental think tank, and is a director on the board of EkStep, a nonprofit education platform. A former journalist, Rohini has written for leading publications such as India Today and Times of India.

In this interview with IDR, Rohini speaks about why we need to underwrite failure in the social sector, how philanthropists can support failure in practice, and shares some of her own failures as an activist philanthropist.

When working on complex issues of social change, failure is inevitable. Yet, people in the social sector are reluctant to talk about it. Why do you think this is the case?

When I think about failure, I think about the different ways in which it is perceived across samaaj (civil society), sarkaar (state), and bazaar (markets). In bazaar failure is underwritten structurally by financial markets. You’re allowed to go there and try something really crazy. And if you fail—not that anybody chooses to fail—there is a safety net for you. That’s why bazaar can afford to glorify failure a little bit, and say ‘fail forward’ or ‘fail fast’. 

Sarkaar, on the other hand, is not incentivised or structured in a way that invites failure. That’s why they will prefer to see a proven model that they can take to scale, rather than try to innovate, because innovation involves a lot of failures. And this is alright because the government’s goal is not to provide risk capital to society, but rather to provide equity and service delivery.

Coming to samaaj, there is a greater risk appetite to try out things to help society, but there is less underwriting of the risk of failure. And this needs to change, because we are talking about people and their lives; we’re talking about their emotional, financial, and social well-being. So, in this context, it is important for social sector organisations to talk about failure, recognise it early on, and course correct. To do this effectively, we need patient philanthropic capital that will allow organisations and missions to experience some failures, some learning, and some experimentation, to find what works.

You make a very important point about philanthropy providing risk capital and staying the course. What does this look like in practice?

The way I see it, there are three main things that can create an enabling environment: trust, patient capital, and allowing the conversation on failure and innovation to be upfront and transparent. For me, it all begins with trust. The relationship between the philanthropist and nonprofit partner has to be built on trust, so that the nonprofit feels accepted when they are trying to do something different. Because if they’re not trying to do something different, how are things going to change? And some of these experiments will fail, either because the demand for those services or the institutional structures that support them are not ripe enough. Philanthropy needs to create space for these failures to be talked about and explained, and then allow more experimentation.

Once a funder trusts an organisation, they need to think about committing to multi-year funding.

We also need to be very conscious of timeframes, when talking about failure. Take the education sector in India, for example. About 25 years ago, parents were not very committed to putting their children through 14 years of schooling. Dropout rates were high and the number of out-of-school children was large. But thanks to the work of nonprofits, government policies, and markets, the understanding that education might lead to a better life for their children began to grow, and the demand for education built up rapidly. Today the idea of education being necessary has been completely internalised in India. Though it took some time, what might have initially seemed like a failure to the nonprofits and philanthropists working in the space, (the number of children with no access to education), today looks like a lot of success.

Once a funder trusts an organisation, they need to think about committing to multi-year funding so that the nonprofit is not spending 30 to 40 percent of their organisational bandwidth trying to raise funds, instead of trying to innovate on the ground.

In spite of a growing recognition among philanthropists that the programmes they support might not work, nonprofit grantees might still be hesitant to talk about their failures in fear of losing funding. How do we address this?

I think the social sector putting forward more stories and examples of short-term failures that allowed them to innovate and succeed in the long-run will build an understanding and make philanthropists more open to having a longer timeframe with their grants. In doing this however, both the philanthropist and the organisation need to make sure that failure is not glorified. We are not trying to achieve failure; we are going to fail because it’s not always possible to succeed, and it’s important to accept that.

While doing this we also have to be careful to distinguish between the failure of the organisation and the failure of some individuals within the organisation. There is a different way of responding to failure of some individuals—perhaps from a moral lapse—than a failure coming out of a good intent to innovate. The analysis of the failure and its origins is extremely important. Creating the space to do this—first internally by the organisation and then a little more openly—should become a structured process. I’m sure many organisations do this already, but it would be helpful if we could come together to create frameworks, toolkits, and processes, which are easy for organisations to follow and share publicly.

Beyond acknowledging and analysing failure internally within organisations, what can we do to ensure that others can also learn from failures, even if not their own?

This is a very important point because the goal of the social sector should be to ensure that even if organisations, institutions, or leaders fail, their mission shouldn’t fall by the wayside. We need to keep space for others to continue the task—the societal task—even if some organisations fail. One way I see of doing this is by converting the effort and knowledge of organisations into digital public goods; using open source technologies that allow people to come in and share, discover, and learn. In a sense, this is a de-risking from the failures of individual leaders, organisations, and innovations—sharing knowledge so that we don’t make the same mistakes again.

We are not trying to achieve failure; we are going to fail because it’s not always possible to succeed, and it’s important to accept that.

But beyond just individual organisations or philanthropists, how can we learn from the failures of the social sector as a whole? To me, what would be interesting would be if we had a process to look at the failures of the social sector in India over the last 40-50 years. Because by now, it should have been in a less risky space. Could we have done something differently, together?

We are now seeing a new wave of young social sector actors using technology and other new methods to increase equity and access. What can they learn from the old wave of social sector players, who worked from the 1970s to the 2000s? What were their failures? What can we learn from them and do differently?

Can you tell us about some of your failures, and what you’ve learned?

In my professional life, I’ve experienced many failures, some worse than others. But my very first failure in my professional life as an activist philanthropist was way back in 1992, when I set up an organisation called Nagrik, after one of my very close friends died in a horrible road accident. Along with a few others, we laid out our goal to create safer roads.

We worked on it for a few years without a large budget, but I don’t think the budget was the problem. I think the problem was that we didn’t quite know how to go about it. There was a lot of enthusiasm, passion, and intelligence in the group, but I think we didn’t structure ourselves. And so, the whole initiative faded away; but the problem didn’t go away at all. India continues to have the highest number of road accidents and deaths in the world, with 150,000 annual deaths.

When I think about my own failures, I also go back to the fact that what looks like a failure today may look like success tomorrow.

It was a failure at many levels and I take a lot of the blame for the lack of strategic thinking on myself. But it taught me a few lessons about how not to do things, how to think through things, how to set realistic goals, and how to ensure that you have a professional cadre working with you—not just enthusiastic, good Samaritans.

And when I think about my own failures, I also go back to the fact that what looks like a failure today may look like success tomorrow. We cannot predict when this will happen, and especially as philanthropists, we need to be aware of this. It’s been nearly 15 years since Arghyam, the nonprofit organisation I set up and fund, started working on supporting sustainable water and sanitation solutions. Somebody could look at us and say that the water situation in India has actually gotten worse in this time. Is this a failure of the organisation and the vision? I think we could say that Arghyam could have been much more impactful. But one could also say that the water problem in India is so huge and so complex that it is completely unrealistic to expect one organisation to do anything more than shift the needle in some aspects of the water situation. And we have been able to do that. We have been able to make the issue of groundwater more visible among practitioners, donors, and policy circles. Some of the policies that our partners have been able to embed in government frameworks will hopefully create more sustainability and equity in the water sector, sooner rather than later. To a certain extent, we succeeded in nudging, catalysing, and innovating. But of course, if you look at the whole water sector, then Arghyam has by no means finished its journey towards its mission.