Dasra is changing the wayIndia looks at the business of giving

Those of us who did not pay attention in our Sanskrit classes would hardly understand the meaning of a word which struck a chord with Deval Sanghavi and Neera Nundi, Co-founders of Dasra. ‘Enlightened giving’ (or Dasra) is both the meaning and the motive of the organisation run by the investment bankers-turned-social entrepreneurs. After graduating from Austin, Texas, Sanghavi was working for Morgan Stanley (MS), where he met his future wife and partner, an NRI from Canada — Neera Nundi. While at MS, they would often sit and discuss ways in which they could put their banking experience to better use and help their home country. So we know it’s the banker in him doing the thinking when Sanghavi outlines the three principles his organisation follows: “understanding the various sectors in which they might want to direct their focus; figuring out the ground realities; and then helping the organisations with their three to five years management plan.” Dasra, which is a strategic philanthropy foundation, started in 1999 under the name Impact Partners, with the aim of helping social entrepreneurs start and eventually scale-up their endeavours. But later on, as they got ‘older and wiser’, they realised that greater impact would come if they also helped established NGOs scaleup, by providing them with managerial support and funding. “There are more than three million NGOs in India and only a handful of them are able to sustain themselves,” says Sanghavi. But this matter-offact tone changes to a happy one the moment he tells us that “Dasra has already directed over `54 crore from high net-worth individuals (HNIs) to fund and scale-up more than 200 NGOs and 50 social businesses in India.” But why would an NRI, raised outside India, start an organisation like Dasra? Sanghavi tells us that his parents belonged to Mumbai and therefore he would visit India quite often. He would notice the difference between his neighbours in the States and his neighbours in India. This stark contrast between the two countries and the lessons he learnt from his parents in his formative years had a huge impact on him. After finishing college and before joining MS, Sanghavi took a break and worked for an organisation helping street children in India. There he not only understood the plight of such children but also got inspired by their “resilience, motivation and aspiration.” This close contact with the harsh realities of life resulted in a shift in perspective and he returned to the States and joined MS. But the itch to work more for the not-for-profit sector made him start Dasra. From nine members to a 30-member team, the growth in scale has happened over the past three months. But even before they scaled-up, Dasra’s portfolio boasted of organisations and companies as diverse as Saher (a Mumbai-based NGO involved in youth empowerment and community cohesion) and Lotus hospitals (a social business that works on a low-margin, high volume model to provide affordable health services). But Dasra’s journey had its road bumps — it was a completely unique model for India and its philanthropists. A strategy-based model which asked people to invest in organisations and not individuals was completely unheard of and getting HNIs to invest in the sector was a big challenge initially. Sanghavi says that they would ask the HNIs to “spend 10-15 per cent of the their funding to this model and the rest 85 per cent remaining on whatever they were currently doing and see in a couple of years which created a greater impact.” A “learn as you grow” kind of model, Dasra is more focussed on impact than profit. They invest effort in an organisation after doing a complete background research and looking at its work strategy. Then they ask the HNIs to fund them to generate a field report, which is then presented to the philanthropists who finally fund the selected organisations. A percentage of this funding also goes into training personnel and setting the organisations’ managerial strategy for the next couple of years. The duo started Dasra with just USD 25,000 in their pockets and it’s been working for several years on a ‘shoestring budget’. Even today, though they have helped more than 200 NGOs scale-up, they are not making big profit. Yet their aspirations are bigger than ever. “Five years from now, we hope to have worked with 1,000 philanthropists and 1,500 social entrepreneurs,” says Sanghavi. Wanting to make philanthropy fashionable in the country, they are ready to set a new benchmark in the sector. And their fondest wish? Sanghavi says, “In a few years hopefully philanthropists and entrepreneurs would have started building teams, plans and executive models, without having Dasra do that for them.”