Can urban discard be used as a tool to alleviate poverty? How can the poor be involved in evolving their own solutions with dignity? Why must we focus on the receiver’s dignity instead of the donor’s pride? 

In this episode of No-Cost Extension, host Deval Sanghavi speaks to Anshu and Meenakshi Gupta, co-founders of Goonj. Goonj aims to build an equitable relationship of strength, sustenance and dignity between the cities and villages using the under-utilized urban material as a tool to trigger development with dignity, across the country.

Founded in 1999, today, Goonj works in 31+ states across India with a 1400+ team and a network of 600+ partner grassroots organizations. Their work impacts at scale issues like water, sanitation, agriculture, menstrual health, disaster response and rehabilitation.To know more about Goonj visit www.goonj.org.

For more information on NCE go to dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on Twitter at @Deval Sanghavi and @Dasra.

How can loving a sport lead someone to found an NGO? How can we empower young people to make their own life decisions, rather than giving them solutions? What is the secret to scaling such social initiatives across the world and what changes can one hope to see from the Indian social sector funding landscape?

In the first episode of season 2, Deval Sanghavi speaks to Matthew Spacie, the founder of Magic Bus, an NGO that works with children and young people in India taking them on a journey from childhood to livelihood and out of poverty. There are currently hundreds of thousands of children on this journey of moving out of poverty in 22 states and 80 districts of India.Magic Bus works across south Asia in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. 

Matthew Spacie (@MatthewSpacie) is the founder of Magic Bus (@magicbusindia), an NGO dedicated to using sport and life-skilling to change the lives of the underserved youth of our communities. To know more about Magic Bus, check out their website, www.magicbus.org 

For more information on NCE go to dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on Twitter at @Deval Sanghavi and @Dasra. 

Deval Sanghavi is back with another season of No-Cost Extension, ready to engage more deeply with the theme of rebuilding. Through conversations with social leaders, small NGOs and voices from philanthropies, Season 2 will focus on rebuilding communities, rebuilding India, and rebuilding the fabric of our society. The first episode drops next week!

For more information on NCE go to dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on Twitter at @Deval_Sanghavi and @Dasra

Deval Sanghavi speaks to Safeena Husain, the founder of Educate Girls, an NGO that works to support girls’ education across India.  Educate Girls has just completed 14 years, and during this period they have grown from working with fifty schools to working in over 18,000 villages across India and reaching millions of children. 

Safeena talks about her own personal journey that led her to set up Educate Girls and how they learnt to use machine learning to identify the most vulnerable locations to work in. She also speaks about how she set up the world’s first Development Impact Bond in education (a proof-of-concept that ties funding to outcomes), what we’re not seeing when it comes to the fate of millions of children post-COVID, and her pet peeves on the structural dynamics of the development sector. 

Safeena Husain is the founder of Educate Girls, a non-profit that focuses on mobilizing communities for girls’ education in India’s rural and educationally disadvantaged areas. 

For more information on NCE go to dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on Twitter at @Deval_Sanghavi and @Dasra

Deval Sanghavi speaks to Aakash Sethi, the CEO of Quest Alliance, a non-profit organization that equips young people with 21st century skills. Aakash shares what it was like to grow up in a family dedicated to development work, what it means to him to build for a world where young people feel empowered and included, how to grow from loss and the impact of COVID-19 on education in India. They also chat about how Quest has become one of the best places in the development sector to work in, and the importance of eating and sharing together for a thriving work culture.

Aakash Sethi is the CEO of Quest Alliance. Aakash’s work experience in the private sector, working in companies like Microsoft reflects in the manner that he's built Quest, leveraging technology to improve the quality of education and to empower youth to navigate the future of work.

For more information on NCE go to dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on Twitter at @Deval_Sanghavi and @Dasra

Deval Sanghavi speaks to Anu Aga and Meher Pudumjee, a mother and daughter philanthropic team who are deeply committed to equity and inclusion. While many families grapple with intergenerational philanthropy, Anu and Meher are examples of how different perspectives can come together to shape a long-lasting philanthropic engagement. 

Anu Aga has been a trailblazing corporate leader when there were a few like her. She has led the energy and environment business Thermax Ltd. Anu is a social worker, and has been a Member of Parliament (in the Rajya Sabha) and is actively engaged with multiple nonprofit organizations in India including Teach for India. Her daughter Meher Pudumjee is the Chairperson of Thermax and is active in many initiatives from chairing Akanksha foundation and in leading efforts and providing greater dignity and equity to informal workers across India through the Social Compact.

For more information on NCE go to dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on Twitter at @Deval_Sanghavi and @Dasra

This special episode is a conversation between Deval and Hansal Mehta that took place earlier this year at Dasra Philanthropy Week. Listen in as Hansal speaks to Deval about his perspectives on philanthropy, what he believes is real impact, and his lockdown beard. 

Hansal Mehta is a well-known National Award winning filmmaker, director, and writer. Some of his well-known films are Shahid, City Lights, and more recently, the web series Scam 1992. Hansal is a longtime friend of the development sector. His wife Safeena Husain is a social worker and the founder of the non-profit, Educate Girls in Mumbai. 

(14:27) "I think it's really important for us not to look at a metric of I'm giving 1% or 0.1% or 0.03%. It needs to be about what is the problem in front of me that we need to solve?  And I think that's critical. And so for me, I guess it really starts with that. Which is, are we trying to really move people out of poverty and enable them to thrive? Or are we complacent when they survive? And I say this because many of the metrics that globally are looked at in terms of poverty are really mortality rates - is somebody living or dying? Literacy is defined by whether you could read or write your name, not whether or not you can read and write enough to gain an education, which leads to some sort of employment or that you can sign documents that you ensure are not cheating you, or that you can read even what's available to you with various government schemes and take action. And so I think the bar unfortunately is so low in terms of survival versus thriving societies."

The interview and the Q and A that followed have been edited. For the full version you can go to Dasra’s Youtube channel. For more information on NCE go to dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on Twitter at @Deval_Sanghavi and @Dasra. 

Deval Sanghavi speaks to Vineet Rai, the Founder and Chairman of Aavishkaar Group, a leading global impact investment platform. Although they have very different perspectives when it comes to development and social change, they share a long friendship that goes back to their early years in the development sector. Listen in as Vineet and Deval talk about the shared idealism that shapes their values, their history of travelling together across the country to learn and understand how issues play out on the ground, how capitalism and philanthropy each approach development, and what impact investing is all about. 

(30:00) "Our passion or our argument was that if we can wean away a significant amount of $300 trillion from the “greed is good” narrative to a narrative that is “sustainable is resilient” -  that you should be able to create a more equal world using this capital. Then you will be able to have a much greater outcome for the world as usual, maybe not as an investor for yourself."

Vineet Rai is the Chairman and Founder of the Aavishkaar Group, whose ecosystem includes Aavishkaar Capital, an impact fund manager focused on the global south; Arohan, one of India’s largest microfinance institutions for low income households; Ashv Finance, an NBFC that works with MSMEs; IntelleCap, a global impact advisory firm, and Sankalp, a networking platform for impact investors. 

Deval Sanghavi speaks to Sharda Nirmal, the founder of the Sharanam Center, a home for girls in Dharavi, Mumbai, and Karen Doff, the founder of the Aasha Foundation and a longtime collaborator of the centre. The Sharanam Center is not an institution - it is a home. Sharda talks about how she established the Sharanam Center as a young woman and with her husband over twenty years ago. Karen first encountered Sharanam as a visitor, but soon became a close collaborator, working with Sharda, and finding ways for many people - from her mom’s hairdresser, to her colleagues at work - to support the centre. Listen in as Karen talks about what giving, scale and sustainability really mean when dealing with the lives of individuals, and how to inspire everyday givers to contribute to the long, hard work of working with children in the development sector. 

Sharda Nirmal is the force behind the Sharanam Center, a shelter home for girls in Dharavi, Mumbai that is a part of the Community Outreach Programme (CORP India). Sharda and her husband set up Sharanam twenty years ago, when Sharda was twenty-two years old. Karen Doff is the founder of the Aasha Foundation.

(18:20) "At least for me, what the Sharanam Center has exemplified is that realization to begin with - you can't measure love on a results framework... but you can see love and clearly everything that the Sharanam Center stands for is about love. And I think the second is really about doing what we can as we would do for our own children. That is not just a statement clearly and we can hear it in your voice, but it is a way of life for you. And I think many times when we look at the development sector, those that want to give back at times look at [...] what is the bare minimum that we can provide, and really it's about survival, I guess, versus thriving communities. And I think what you and the Sharanam Center have exemplified is really about survival is the bare minimum. And that's not what we stand for. It is about thriving in society. It is about giving the same opportunities that we have been given, if not better."

Deval Sanghavi speaks to Donald Lobo, one of India's most unassuming philanthropists.  Listen in as Lobo deftly steers the conversation away from the Rolling Stones article he was featured in, and as he talks about his giving philosophy and why he trusts organizations that are truly embedded in communities, what people think the terms impact and scale mean versus what they should mean, and why Lobo’s hopeful about the Indian social sector. 

(42:39) ” If you're doing something for the public good, why don't you give the public ownership of it? And I think this is where funders, foundations can play a big role in it. That's step one, right? But step one is really not going to get you anywhere. You can put your stuff out there, but if other people aren't willing to use it or willing to do research and figure out what's there, that's also a big part of the ecosystem and a big part of the problem."

Donald Lobo moved to the US from Mumbai in the early 1990s to pursue computer science, and  found himself on Yahoo’s founding team. He is also the co-founder and lead developer of CiviCRM, which was set up to give the social sector free and open software. Having always had a keen interest in civil society, Lobo always found time to volunteer alongside his work, and very early on he began thinking about investing more and more of his time and his resources in causes close to his heart. Lobo is the founder of the Chintu Gudiya Foundation that funds NGOs in India and runs Tech4Dev, that works with non-profits to build their tech capacities. 

For more information on NCE go to dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on Twitter at @Deval_Sanghavi and @Dasra