Summary
Impactful Journeys is a podcast about discovering and learning about the great work that nonprofits are doing in India. The purpose of the podcast is to make it easier to discover and support nonprofits, foster collaboration between organizations, and strengthen the nonprofit sector. The podcast aims to address challenges in supporting the sector, such as discoverability, trust, and ease of giving. It also focuses on strengthening the nonprofit ecosystem and providing a platform for knowledge sharing. The target audience includes donors, professionals in the nonprofit sector, individuals looking to contribute to nonprofits, and those seeking inspiration.
Takeaways
* The podcast aims to make it easier for people to discover and support nonprofits in India.
* Collaboration between organizations and knowledge sharing within the nonprofit ecosystem is a key focus.
* The target audience includes donors, professionals in the nonprofit sector, individuals looking to contribute to nonprofits, and those seeking inspiration.
* The show will feature conversations with NGO founders and leaders, donors, and experts in various fields.
Full Transcript of the Episode
Hello, नमस्कार. मेरा नाम अमित वार्ष्णेय है, My name is Amit Varshneya, and thank you for joining me on Impactful Journeys, the podcast about journeys to, with, and of impactful nonprofits in India. If you're just joining me on this journey and are wondering what this is about, you've come to the right place.
From time to time, I also post on my blog post on Substack and over there too, I talk about the purpose of this podcast and the blog. So I encourage you to go follow it. I've included the link in the description below. But you don't have to go right now because we'll just go over some of those points in this podcast today. And just to make it simple, we'll do it in an FAQ kind of format ok? All right. Okay.
So, before we go forward, a quick aside about the term nonprofits. I'll be using the term a lot and what I'm referring to are actually social organizations.
These institutions are known variously as voluntary organizations, community-based organizations, voluntary development organizations, the commonly used non-government organizations, NGOs, self-help groups, SHGs, etc. depending on the area of the activities they're involved in. So while मैं ये terms use करूँगा, I'll use these terms from time to time. For the most part, just I'll use the smaller, you know, the shorter "nonprofits" as an umbrella term, ठीक है ? So whenever I use that term, it could be referring to one or more of these classifications. So let's go over the purpose.
What exactly is Impactful Journeys about? This podcast series is going to be about discovering and learning about the great work that nonprofits are doing in India. We're going to be talking to leaders of some impactful nonprofits, as well as ecosystem and / or leaders.
And what we hope to achieve are the following. First of all,
* making it easier to discover this great work that nonprofits are doing for people who want to support it either by joining as talent or as donors in funding.
* we'll get to know each other. We get to know the great work that is being done that you may not get to hear about ordinarily.
And so the hope is that with this, we'll help potential collaboration happening between organizations.
So, okay, but why? But I mean, tell me a little bit more. I guess that's the question that'll come up.
So let's look at some data. In India, there are around 3.3 million nonprofits. I mean, varied estimates, but the most recent one or the most referred to one is that there are 3.3 million nonprofits - 33 lakhs.
So there are 33 lakh non-profits in India. The estimate is that the number of non-profits with an annual operating budget of more than 10 to 12 million dollars or in rupee terms, more than 100 crores is around 20. So 33 lakh non-profits and there are only 20 that have an operating annual budget of more than 100 crores.
For a country of our size and the scale of our issues that we need to all come together to work on, the non-profit system that can effectively partner with the state and the markets needs to be a lot stronger and more vibrant. And for the sector to grow its impact, for it to be stronger and more vibrant, the two most important needs, in my opinion, are in attracting more and better talent and attracting more and better capital or funds. So this podcast is really to help at the high level making the sector stronger and more vibrant.
How? In two ways.
One is from the funding perspective. So if we talk about the funding perspective, there was a study recently done by The Bridgespan Group for the Give Foundation. And the study was to study the donor habits in the Indian American community in the US. Now while it is only the wealthy donors in the Indian American community, I believe that what applies to the wealthy in the Indian American community or Indian NRI community anywhere applies to wealthy Indians or donors anywhere. And so what this study found that the three biggest challenges for donors in giving to nonprofits in India were
* discoverability,
* trust and
* ease of giving.
So from discoverability, the donors, really the issue specifically was, I want to support I want to give and I really feel for the specific issues and causes but Where do I, who do I give to? Where is the good work going on? How can I get the details and understanding of that in real terms? How do I get that real touch/feel sort of sense of the work being done? So that is one thing that we want to achieve through this platform is by talking to different NGOs going behind the scenes if possible to really provide that high level of discoverability for donors that want to give.
Then the second part in addition to discoverability is, there's one more reason.
If you talk about the non-profit ecosystem, the ecosystem for it to thrive, there are three broad categories of players.
First category, category one, NGOs and social enterprises.
Category two is funders, funding institutions.
And the third category is the ecosystem support organizations. Now ecosystem support organizations - what we're talking of, functional and technical services, legal, advisory, incubation, capacity building, knowledge consulting, research, education, and media. And that is really where this focus is. We need more media that supports and focuses on the nonprofit ecosystem in India.
And with this effort, I hope to be one more participant to the media landscape for Indian nonprofits that brings a different voice and hopefully lead to more podcasts also and more media doing even better and bigger work to bolster the ecosystem. In addition, we will be bringing in experts from the ecosystem, leaders from the ecosystem, from a lot of these supporting organizations from the functional and technical services, legal advisory, capacity building, knowledge consulting, monitoring and evaluation and so on, to again provide that conversation, that dialogue, and that knowledge sharing happening between organizations.
So then the next question is,
Who is the target audience? Who is this for? ...
So if you're a donor already supporting Indian nonprofits and you're looking to maybe expand your portfolio of organizations to support, or even just want to get more information about your nonprofits in an easy to consume manner, this podcast is for you. If you're looking to start contributing to nonprofits, you haven't done that before, but you want to increase or change the way you want to give, you want to learn from others, you want to learn more about the nonprofits doing great work, this is for you.
If you are already employed in the nonprofit sector, you're a professional there and want to learn more about peer organizations or organizations working on other problems, you want to learn from each other, you want to network, this is for you.
If you are not a professional in the sector, but you are looking, let's say you're in the corporate sector and now you want to work on more impactful problems, find purpose and contribute more towards the growth of all around development in the country, this is for you.
And finally, let's say you're not one of these. You're not already working or supporting or looking to support in an outsized fashion, but you just want to get some inspiration, witness change makers, see how some people went beyond just, you know, wringing their hands about problems they saw around them and stood up to do something about that. You want to hear about some inspirational leaders and organizations, you want to feel good and optimistic and maybe contribute in some small way, large way or even just mobilize opinion. This is for you.
So if you're any of those above segments that I talked about, you have an interest in what is being done on the ground to support strong all-around development that supports the government and society in having an equitable and strong and prosperous country, this podcast should be of interest to you.
What kind of guests will you have?
So as you can guess from the previous question, we will host some admirable NGO founders and leaders. We will host donors that have led the path in the way they've given and contributed. These may be individuals, HNIs (High Networth Individuals), or sometimes not even very prominent people, but people who have given from the heart and really are passionate cheerleaders of the cause. We will host leaders that support and contribute to the Indian NGO ecosystem. I talked about that. So there's going to be advisors, experts, experts in general advisory or fundraising, impact measurement, monitoring evaluation, technology, law finance, whatever expertise that they may be helping with and we'll host them. And my effort will be to structure as many of these as master classes. So we can all learn from some of this great work that's being done. And so in the end, it is something that is of use, at the end of the episode, we should have learned a little bit more and got some more inspiration.
What kind of, what will be the structure of the shows or how will you, what kind of shows can we expect.
So here are a few guiding principles that I want to go for. I want to have crisp, structured conversations that are not too short, that we're just scratching the surface, or on the other side, having such long conversations that we're not able to fit into your schedule. It's a busy world. We all have other things to work on. So I want to make it easy to consume, easy to understand, and still be able to achieve your objective of learning something, getting to know more and getting more inspiration.
I consciously do not want to get too technical in my conversations. You know, we should know and we all know it is a vast space. There's a lot of work being done. Just thinking of it from the SDG perspective, there are 17 SDGs. Then each SDG has sub-goals. I think, in total, there are all put together 169 sub-goals. Each sub-goal is a big world of their own. Right? And if you want to get deep, you can get deep pretty quickly.
But then you kind of lose the others. So because this podcast is for everyone that wants to learn and across the board, we don't want to go too deep, too niche. However, we also don't want to be very frivolous and just being at the surface. So this will be a fine balance. I'll have to strike a very fine balance to try to be meaningful, but not to get too technical and jargony. So that's sort of the middle path we will follow.
So like we all know, this work is of the soul and the spirit and requires a lot of empathy and vulnerability. And so while talking and demonstrating of impact and metrics is important, and we'll definitely go into those angles, we also want to keep the right brain engaged and talk about the softer side as well. So again, that we will not get too technical but not too frivolous. We will not get too deep into the left side of the numbers and the metrics and also just keep it non-impact based. So both of them will be balanced and that would be my endeavor all through. But also I would look to your feedback and keep me honest, keep me in the right lane. Keep giving me feedback.
You will be our best friend, philosopher, and will guide us to bring stories and work that achieve our objective of impactful journeys. So that sort of brings us to the end of the questions. I hope this has been useful and you'll want to come back and listen again.
Please do share your feedback and suggestions. Do suggest topics and individuals you want to hear about and keep it kind.
Be kind to yourself. Be kind to everyone else and so with that namaskar. Thank you and till next time
