The three challenges that stop people from giving in India

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Rati Forbes is a Director at the Forbes Marshall group, which has supplied instrumentation solutions for the process industry for six decades now. She heads the Forbes Marshall Foundation, which focuses on education and health, largely around underprivileged women and children, and research for more effective giving. But despite the responsibilities of a veteran, she behaves like a diligent, young capitalist when it comes to identifying and monitoring budding social ventures that she feels the need to support. This rigor and hands-on perseverance comes from her early start in giving. Growing up with both parents who practiced the philanthropy that they preached, she began volunteering time with social causes at age 13, was regularly reading to the blind by her late teens, and by the time of her first job, she had well-formed ideas on how she wanted her giving journey to begin. Since then, she has used anything available around her to sharpen and inform her social funding, from site visits at slums, to a master’s degree in Sustainability from Cambridge.

The personal journey
What does philanthropy mean to you?
Well, it started out as giving money, but over time, I’ve realized that it is more evolved and meaningful when philanthropy extends to giving your time, your skills, your intellectual input… so you contribute to building something long term and scalable.

When and why did you first decide to give?
It was a mix of factors. I think to begin with, I grew up in a home where I saw both my parents giving time and money for social reasons. My father was an eminent businessman, but he still found time to serve on the boards of several charities and foundations, in addition to giving money. My mother, a pediatrician with an established practice, volunteered half a day every day free at a clinic.

Then there was our Zoroastrian faith, with one of its tenets being good deeds. And in our house, good deeds meant thinking of people less fortunate than yourself. So that was kind of the genesis of my journey of giving.

And of course, growing up in Bombay, you’re surrounded by these extreme disparities, with people not only financially very impoverished but also having emotional and mental problems. When you see all this around you, specially when you come from a privileged home, it makes you think about your responsibilities.

I think I started giving my time when I was 13 or 14. My mother was one of the founder-trustees of an organization called Samaritans here in Bombay, and during my summer holidays, she took me to a couple of their meetings and I started volunteering. That experience had a huge impact on me. A year or so later, I started reading to the blind, and I got involved with the local chapter of the National Association for the Blind (NAB).

I think writing my first check happened maybe in my 20s, when I gave my first salary to the NAB. But to repeat myself, more than writing checks, donors can create much bigger impact when they give their time, their energy, their skills.

How do you think you’ve evolved as a philanthropist?
Of course, you start out on this journey because something you see moves you… you notice something at a school or a clinic or a slum near you, and you want to do something about it, so you write a check. So it starts with the heart.

But over the years, specially with larger sums of money, you see much greater value in building more long-term partnerships, building people’s capacities. Over the last few years, we’ve been trying to give more strategically, and train organizations that we support to not just expect a check from us year after year, but say, by year 2 or 3, actually work to become more self-sufficient, more evolved in terms of their processes and leadership.

The process
What are your views on the value of collaboration?
Having worked on projects by ourselves, and then having worked on projects that are collaborative in nature, I've realized that when you partner with a group of stakeholders, the impact you can have is much stronger, more long term, and affecting a much wider audience. If you want to simply write a check and be done with it, that's fine too. But then over a couple of years, you realize your impact is so small, not just in financial terms, but also the skills you’re able to share with that organization. If you’re looking at real scale, then collaboration is the only way to do it.

For example in Pune, we work with two other corporates on a project for quality education in municipal schools. And there's no way we could’ve done this on our own – this could only happen because the corporates came together, along with individual consultants, the municipal corporation and of course, the teachers.

And collaboration works not just for donors. Smaller organizations also derive great value, because when they’re exposed to the full range of stakeholders – government, corporates, consultants, intermediaries – it can be an enormously educative experience for them. Their worldview becomes so much wider, so much more rounded.

What are some of the challenges you face when collaborating with others?
One of the primary challenges is when collaborators or stakeholders come to the partnership with individual agendas that they think are higher than the common agenda – that’s a flawed collaboration. In any collaborative project, it's very important to be transparent, to communicate your respective priorities right at the beginning, and agree on the common objective. Once that framework is agreed on, the rest of it will move fairly smoothly.

I also think in any collaboration, it's very important to have clear milestones.  “What do we want to see at the 3-month point, the 6-month point, the 1-year point…” Without these, you won’t know how much ground you need to cover in how much time.

As a donor, how do you work towards making an organisation sustainable?
I think making an organization completely sustainable is a bit of a utopian goal. However, as donors, we can certainly encourage organizations to move towards sustainability. We need to show them that their work can have so much more impact when their approach becomes more strategic, more long term. And to get them to understand this can take a lot of time and effort, but we’ve worked quite successfully with a couple of medium-size organizations to turn their thought process in that direction.

One example is this NGO that works with diabetic children. And we really had to push the organization to understand what its real challenge was: the challenge was not how to support 25-30 kids with funding, or how to get pharma companies to provide free needles. It was that they had no proper tracking mechanism in place – these children came from impoverished homes or slums, and most of the time, the parents wouldn't show up for appointments on a regular basis, which is critical in diabetes treatment.

So when the org came to us, instead of just giving more money so they could reach more people, we chalked out a two-prong strategy: first, we put in place a system with one social worker per child, to track and follow up. If they find a child has not come for the scheduled 4- or 6-week check-up, they make a home visit. We also seeded in them the need to have a basic transport system for better follow up, as well as nutrition information for children who can’t visit for whatever reason.

And second, they realized their founders and doctors were spending a lot of time on fundraising, going to people and saying, “You know, we have 30 cases on our waiting list, can you fund them?” and so on. To help with this, we found a dedicated social worker and communications expert to do the fundraising. This left the founders and doctors with much more time for their real priorities.

So more than writing them a larger check, we saw greater value in putting systems in place to bring the organization to a point where they can start showing much bigger impact over the next 3-5 years.

Over this journey as a philanthropist, what are some of your major lessons learned?
If I were to list the three big lessons for me: first is the importance of understanding what creates real impact. And as donors, we expect grantees to spend time writing long reports, which is such a waste of time. We need to agree on indicators with the grantee and only ask for reporting on those.

The second is the importance of identifying good small- and medium-size organizations and their leaders. And we’ve developed really impactful partnerships even with some smaller organizations doing amazing work. We’ve partnered with them with very small sums of money but seen really encouraging results over 5-7 years. We’ve realized that you don’t always have to give to the really big, established names – sometimes, it can also be immensely satisfying to identify upcoming leaders who have a wonderful idea or project, back them with even small amounts – and then watch them enhance their impact to benefit a larger population size.

The third thing is the value of giving to the organization, not just the program. Because as donors, we often ask them why they’re not scaling but we don’t help them scale. We need to behave less like ‘donors’ and more like partners. More than their program needs, they need hands-on help with second-line leadership, with impact assessment, IT systems, processes.

How have you chosen the causes that you’ve given to?
More often than not, the choice of cause comes from what you see around you. We began with sanitation. And it started because we had a reading enhancement program in 100 municipal schools in Pune. And every time I would go to one of the schools, I would go prepared that I wouldn’t have access to a clean toilet for at least the next 3-4 hours, and that made me think about how the children manage, how menstruating girls manage. That was the trigger for my interest in sanitation.

I read up a fair bit on sanitation in India. I tried to understand which NGOs are out there, and it was really providence that I stumbled across Shelter Associates, headed by Pratima Joshi. Based in Pune, it was a small organization at the time, doing some amazing work.

Our governance initiative came out of our work in sanitation. While we’d had some wonderful success stories coming out of our sanitation work in slums, sometimes we also saw our sanitation solutions could not reach some parts of a particular slum. Because in those parts, the basic piping was just not there, the water systems were not there and so on. That’s when we realized there's only so much an NGO can do… beyond a point, you need the involvement of the local government, maybe the local corporator. That experience showed me how critical governance is to any development work that you set out to do in this country.

What is your advice for someone who has the resources but doesn’t know where to give?
I think most of us have some sense of what we’d like to give to, where we’d like to start our giving journey – it’s just that a certain amount of lethargy has set in. We don't take that first step. And I think the best way to start is to follow through on something that you’ve seen and would like to give to. There are so many people out there you can speak to, people with some solid experience in giving to those sectors, or even organizations doing great work in those areas.

I do a lot of research for my giving. I look at the organization, do site visits. I try to talk to people who’ve given to an organization, I talk to the leadership of the organization. And when I say site visits, I mean not just to the office to speak with the leadership or the people there, but also surprise visits to the areas where the organization actually works, to talk to the beneficiaries and understand their point of view.

What’s the equation between you and your husband Farhad in terms of philanthropy; how do you influence each other’s thinking?
My husband (Farhad Forbes, also a Director at Forbes Marshall) and I both feel very strongly about the need for quality education, for good health initiatives, which explains why he spends a lot of his time on the board of a school as well as this large community-based hospital in Pune. I'm not sure about the actual check giving but I do know that he gives a lot of his skills and competence to these organizations. We do bounce ideas off each other, so yes, we certainly influence each other in terms of our giving.

The sector
With the children of this generation, is there a conscious effort to bring them into philanthropy or is it something that they’re taking on by themselves?
In our home, dinner table conversations often revolved around issues that my husband and I have both been involved in, and I think our children have sort of absorbed these conversations over the years since they were very young. It's nice to see that our daughter has been volunteering from a very young age… she’d volunteer with some of my own community projects during her summer breaks. Most recently, when she was an undergrad at Stanford, she took courses in social impact using mobile technology.

I see in the younger generation a greater focus on the ability of technology to create wide reaching impact. Also, I find in our family, the younger people are all interested in impact investment, as opposed to charity or traditional giving.

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What is your advice for philanthropists looking to involve their children in philanthropy?
Talking about philanthropy to your children is a bit like talking about values. It's not good enough to just tell your child, “Be honest, be truthful, be kind” – they need to see it in action. If the child sees his parents being honest, being kind to staff, being good to people around, I think that's the best lesson he or she can learn. If they are at all interested, you should take them with you to the organization or to meet people, especially as they grow older, so they get a better understanding of what you're doing in that space. To my mind, that would be the best way to initiate children into philanthropy.

What has your experience been working with the government?
Over the years, we've worked with numerous government agencies – we've worked with the local education board, we’ve worked with the health board in our municipal corporation. And more often than not, I’ve found that the leadership of most of these boards is really very good. By that, I mean they know their job, they're competent, and they do want to get the job done.

Most of the time, our challenges have come from people lower down. They’re the ones who’ll not pass the paper along, they’ll put hurdles in your way, and you can’t always go to the person at the top because you may upset the person you're working with at the ground level.

But overall, our experience with government has been quite positive. Most of them want to get the job done and also, when a project does well, if you pass credit along to them, they are with you. And you need to involve them at every step of the process. If you take care of these things, it can be relatively simple to work with government agencies.

Of course, we've had challenges, but that's human nature and you’ll probably find that anywhere you work. It's best to start with the leadership in those boards or in those areas and then work downwards, and that’s turned out quite well for us.

What are some of the barriers that stop people from giving in India today?
Of course, one of the biggest challenges to giving today is the credibility of organizations. A lot of organizations have poor reputations in terms of how they're using their funds. So as donors, it’s very important that we do as much due diligence on an organization as we can. And this can be done by meeting the leadership, going on site visits, talking to people. I always ask, “Who else has contributed to you?” and then I make a concerted effort to talk to those organizations or individuals who’ve given to them.

Another challenge is in India, emotional ties play a big part. If parents and grandparents have given to a particular religious trust or temple, somehow the present generation feels obliged to continue that, even when they would rather channel that money somewhere else. I think we need to cut that umbilical cord and really look at what today’s needs are. I'm sure our great-grandparents would understand that.

The third one is a challenge with some family foundations that were set up many decades ago with very specific purposes. But they’ve become a bit redundant now because those issues don’t arise any more. It's very important that instead of keeping those funds locked up as I've seen they are, particularly in my own community, we need to somehow work with the charity commissioner or other such offices to see how we can put those funds to better use.

What do you think philanthropists in India today can do differently?
I think first off, they need to be much more strategic about how they can impact the operations of the organization they’re giving to. Beyond the check, they need to think about getting on the organization’s board perhaps, or working with and mentoring some of the leaders of those organizations. We do those things in our businesses anyway, including looking at developing future leadership. So why can't we do the same things for a development organization that we’re involved with?

Secondly, why can't corporates have their employees volunteer more strategically, more meaningfully, instead of just spending two hours playing with a group of children – that’s something even a college group could do. In our organization, we have everyone from engineers to finance people who we’ve deployed quite successfully in many of the organizations that we work with.

One example is when we supported a social enterprise in Pune called Coppre, which works to revive copper handicrafts by employing a lineage of artisans called Tambats – these people have specialized in working with copper since the 18th century, but have been in decline since the industrial revolution triggered the mass manufacture of metal craft.

With Coppre, we found the real challenge was not funding but the absence of dedicated teams for sales & marketing and finance. So our sales & marketing and finance teams helped them put together a business plan, and also better formulate their financials and budgets. We helped Coppre with small amounts for three years, and it became sustainable from year three, found its own sales & marketing person and saw increased income levels for the artisans. This is how we push for meaningful and strategic volunteering.

Another thing we do is, in partnership with Centre for Advancement in Philanthropy, we run an annual series of structured workshops for a group of NGOs in Pune, on subjects including governance, legal compliance, finance and talent management.

What are your views on philanthropists using their business networks to enhance their giving?
I've never quite understood why people don't direct their personal and business networks towards their philanthropy. I find a lot of givers compartmentalize the two, and don’t really talk to their friends or business peers about their philanthropy. They talk very openly about their business deals, but hardly anything about their giving. Whenever I’ve talked to either a business associate or a personal friend about philanthropy, about development projects that I'm involved with, I’ve seen that has been a great influencer in terms of helping the person trigger his or her own thoughts about giving.

If you were to describe your philanthropic journey in one word, phrase or sentence.
I think my growth as a philanthropist has led me to my growth as a human being.

This interview is a part of the India Philanthropy Series, a joint initiative between Dasra and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aimed at capturing inspiring giving journeys.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.