Alliance in collaboration with WINGS has been commissioned by Propel Philanthropy to conduct a 10 part interview series on the work of Social Impact Infrastructure Organisations and the benefits they bring to the sector. Over the course of the coming weeks, these interviews will be published here. In the third in the series of conversations with the representatives of social impact infrastructure organisations (SIIOs), Andrew Milner talks to Neera Nundy, Co-founder and Partner at Dasra.

AM: If somebody asks you what Dasra does, what’s your answer?

NN: To different stakeholders in the ecosystem, we probably seem like many different things, but most importantly we see ourselves as bridge builders. When we started almost 24 years ago, we were very inspired by work on the ground. We thought how we could support non-profits, because helping them grow would mean their impact could grow, and helping them institutionalise their work would strengthen institutions in the country. But we realised quickly that you need resources, you need philanthropy, you need flexibility, so some of our work then began to really try and build domestic philanthropy as we were – and are – seeing an increase of wealth in India. So, there are two real engines to our work: with non-profits through collaboratives on one hand, and working to make philanthropy more strategic by advising and helping families and corporates on their giving journeys, on the other.

Do you call yourselves consultants, advisors, a network body, any or all of those things?

There are aspects of our work which are advisory and consulting, but the ultimate aim is to lead to impact. We also run pooled funds and collaborative platforms that are supporting a portfolio of organisations and we are holding ourselves and our platforms accountable to moving outcomes and really looking at lives being impacted. So, we are not simply a consulting, advisory firm, and we are running platforms and therefore having a large network to ultimately move money and resources that have an impact on the ground. So we’re sort of a backbone to these collaboratives that add elements of neutrality, but also a way to bring different stakeholders into the work.  A key stakeholder over the years is the government. We recognised that if our systems in India were really going to change on the ground, the quality of government systems needs to be improved and strengthened, whether that’s in education or health or whatever, and having a platform approach is also a way that we are able to engage on policy with governments. That’s why I’d be hesitant to label us, but I think it’s important in that it might make our work easier to understand.

Looking at your website, you’ve got a lot of strands to your work and you talked about the bridge building function.  Who do you see as your main constituents? 

It’s interesting you ask that. Every five to six years, we go through an exercise of thinking what is Dasra? How do we better communicate? Who is your target audience? We have two. It’s NGO leaders, on one hand, and philanthropists and funders on the other. These are definitely our core audience, if one can call it that, and a lot of our resources, time and effort go towards them. But over the years, especially on the back of Covid, we’ve really tried to push ourselves as an organisation and anchor our work in really building thriving communities and asking how our work is ultimately impacting the most vulnerable. Staying true to that is where we’re trying to rally the organisation but also moving NGOs and NGO leaders to really lead this work to ensure that that’s happening.

Ten years from now, we’d like to be able to support more community-led organisations, even if it’s with small amounts of flexible funding over a five-year period

When you came into this, did you see a specific gap you thought needed to be filled?

The ecosystem in India was very different and nascent when we started. The likes of the Acumen Fund and Bridgespan had just begun and people had only just started talking about venture philanthropy and India was even more nascent. In the simplest sense, the gap we found was that people were saying they were not giving because in a country of over a million non-profits, they couldn’t find good NGOs, because we don’t have systems and easy ways to find them. Trying to debunk this myth and find good organisations was the first thing we focused on – so research, due diligence, bringing credibility to this portfolio, and then using that to go out and influence funders to give and that’s what triggered giving circles. We started giving circles  15 years ago, bringing families together and putting money into a circle which could then support the growth of organisations and non-profits and that was us in our bridge-builder and intermediary role. That experience helped give us a lot of fuel and ability to build and support some of the most impactful organisations. Now, 20 years later, you have Magic Bus, Educate Girls, Angaan, Akshaya Patra and so on that we can be proud that we played a part in a small way in their growth and impact.

What do you see as your most important contribution to the sector? Would it be helping the development of one of those organisations you just mentioned like Educate Girls? 

I think it really is to be in partnership side by side with NGO leaders, to help them achieve their dreams of scale and being able to influence a different group of philanthropists, those wealthy individuals who might speak a different language and feel disconnected from what’s really happening on the ground. Being able to bring these two partners together to ultimately focus on impact has been our greatest contribution. We can walk on both sides and help both of them feel inspired in some ways by what the country needs. I’m sure we could do more.

Coming on to your personal involvement, what was the trigger for that? What made you want to set up this kind of organisation?

I didn’t wake up one day and suddenly decide this was my calling. It’s not so romantic, to be honest. My pathway’s been rather zigzag. I grew up in a middle-class family in Canada and studied maths and I was supposed to be a STEM girl because my mother was an electrical engineer so the expectation was that I’d do well in school and get a good job. Then my mother moved back to India and started a boarding school for tribal children in 1990, and so from then on, I was going back and forth and I was exposed to what was happening in India. I went to boarding school in India when I was 10, and then to Harvard Business School after Morgan Stanley and banking. It was there that I realised I could make some special contribution by bringing to the social sector the exposure I had had in finance, the credibility that came being in Wall Street, and some assurance that if it didn’t work out, I had a Harvard Business School degree behind me, so let me take a risk to do something far more meaningful. I also met my husband at Morgan Stanley and both of us came up with this idea called Dasra, and we just found the courage to build it after I did my MBA.

Were you sort of conscious of taking almost a leap in the dark, because Dasra was and still is one of the few infrastructure organisations in South Asia? Was it very much in your mind that you were doing something that nobody else was doing?

I think it was, but I’m not sure I fully thought it through. I was just so excited to be here, to be in India and to feel like I was doing something meaningful. Then little pieces started to come together and make sense. We’re lucky in a way that we’ve survived and are now thriving.

In a sense, infrastructure organisations operate at a remove from the CSOs. How do you support your constituency to address the big problems like climate change and inequality? How effective you think you are at doing that? 

You bring out two really great points. I think we have been challenged in ensuring that we all feel connected ultimately to the change on the ground, but over the years, I have accepted that my skillset, talent and what we’ve built here is one step removed, but that we can add more value in that way than by going deep into the grassroots, and actually being in the community myself. I did work with Sewa in the self-help group movement in microfinance for my summer at HBS, and that was an awakening. I felt that there are people far better at mobilising community and people from the community should be engaged in that, not outsiders. That realisation made me more comfortable with being one step removed, but then how do you tackle big issues like climate when it’s so distant? Perhaps it’s also distant from the community or the implementing organisations and climate specifically has taken a while for us to figure out where we play. Some of it is the context of India and the sensitivities around a coal energy narrative, but just this year, with the success of our other collaboratives, we’ve launched a collaborative called Climate Rise, and that has come from NGO leaders themselves saying that building community resilience to respond to and be ready for climate change is what their communities are asking of them and, at the moment, they aren’t well equipped to build that capacity. So, Climate Rise is one of the first civil society-led organisations across a number of different areas of work, trying to build intersectionality around climate. We’re seeing a lot more energy coming from building these kinds of platforms, whether it’s ClimateRise or the collaborative for adolescent girls or urban sanitation. We have another collaborative around child protection and care – how do you de-institutionalise care for children so they don’t stay in government homes but stay in families. All of these are very big issues and part of our journey has been to find out that helping collaboration happen is one way to bring an outcomes focus to them. Part of the value of collaboration is thinking about aggregate outcomes, how we measure them, what our collective agenda as a collaborative is going to be and how it’s linked to SDGs. So we continue to build bridges, but we’ve moved to become a systems orchestrator, which is the way we see our role evolving towards.

Could you single out one initiative that you think of as your most successful?

Yes, and we’re still doing it because our adolescent girls are not entirely empowered yet. It was our first collaborative that we started about 12 years ago and it’s called 10 to 19. It’s really targeting girls’ leadership from the community, but we focused on coming together and agreeing on a number of things – first, keeping girls in school would be one of the key outcomes, another would be delaying first pregnancy, a third was trying to delay marriage and a fourth was looking at agency and employability. The collaborative and the way it worked started to break down those barriers and revisit the way our sector worked, which was in distinct areas like education, health, and so on, to starting to think more cross-sectorally and to really be accountable on outcomes. I see that as a real success and a turning point for us in shifting  how we were thinking, how we were approaching our funding, but also how we were enabling NGOs to be accountable on outcomes. Ultimately, the girl needs everything. She doesn’t just need to be able to go to school, she needs to be able to access health and hygiene. That was a big shift for us, but also a shift where we started to see funders willing to pool funds. So we had almost created a vehicle where an education funder is willing to come in, a health funder is willing to come in, and they’re all agreeing on a set of outcomes. That’s where we started to see some real shift in how philanthropy works.

And the cross-sectoral approach was the reason that was so successful?

I think that was the key. I think building a platform where groups of organisations are coming together and can engage with the government is important because the government has its own compartments – the health ministry, departments that deal with women and child welfare  so you can bring ministries together and help them see what policies are working. It’s like a one-stop shop in some ways, and, as I said before, we’re providing that backbone. Seeing how you’re linking girls in the community ultimately to effectiveness of policy was an interesting, powerful construct for us, and even informed how we looked at the roles of the different stakeholders.

Let me turn that question around and ask you, which of your initiatives, if any, do you think have been unsuccessful?

I don’t know if you can call it unsuccessful, but we haven’t stayed true to the simple consulting and research model. You can build a business with revenue from that and in our early days, we did pretty much take any business because we had to sustain ourselves. Going back to your opening question of whether we saw ourselves as consultants or advisors, or whatever, we could have built the business entirely on that and our organisational structure and our ways of working were very much geared towards that, but I think ultimately, it didn’t help us achieve our own passions and the mission. After all, we’re a non-profit. Why does this model need to be subsidised and are we in true service of the most vulnerable? We had to let go quite a lot of the business that we could have done. In India, you can’t have a hybrid so easily, you can’t hold a non-profit model plus a for-profit model. Making some of those choices wasn’t easy. Doing the giving circles, putting significant amounts of money into one organisation – I think those days have gone because others have come. So it’s not entirely about being unsuccessful, but there were more successful people coming into those spaces so we asked ourselves, should we be here or should we really push the needle and start rethinking where the gaps are? I think what excites us is going into new areas and innovating.

I think it’s definitely as simple as getting more people to give more, and give for longer timeframes. But we also need facilitators, stronger capabilities that really accelerate the impact that we’re all trying to work towards.

So it’s a choice, rather than a lack of success. Touching on the resource question, where would you like to see Dasra in maybe five or ten years’ time and what would you need to get you there? 

We’re very excited and feeling inspired by building domestic philanthropy. We’re in a country with an incredible disparity between wealth and poverty, but just seeing how the next generation of intergenerational wealth or the first generation of new wealth are all willing to approach philanthropy is a real opportunity for us. We launched something last year called GivingPi, and it’s a network of families that are in family philanthropy, to distinguish between family giving and corporate giving which can be a bit blurred in India when it’s promoter led. Giving that stems from the power of family values can be transformational. We have over 200 families now in this network and in the next decade, I’d like to see the space of family giving developed far beyond just ourselves and  private wealth management. Real families backing innovation and transformation is important. We’re already seeing a squeezing of foreign philanthropy. It’s a highly regulated environment and there are big challenges with funding grassroots organisations, so our organisation’s real mission and passion is to raise money, but for the most vulnerable. During Covid, we ran a campaign called BacktheFrontline because ultimately, it was the NGOs’ frontline workers that responded to Covid, it wasn’t the government. As we raised money for that and the regulatory constraints, too, were kicking in at that time, we realised that we really want to support leaders from smaller organisations that are under-represented, whether because of caste or religion, and that can be very sensitive. The campaign has now evolved into what we call the Rebuild India Fund, where we give unrestricted flexible funding to grassroots NGOs for five years. So, ten years from now, we’d like to be able to support more community-led organisations, even if it’s with small amounts of flexible funding over a five-year period.  I would hope by the end of five years, we’ve helped almost 500 organisations grow in a way that is building community resilience. I hope we can continue to do that and to keep our leadership. I’m always inspired by the fact that we have people who want to stay here, to work at Dasra. We’re a team of 150 people now.

You mentioned that domestic philanthropy’s going to become more important because of constraining factors like the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act which is squeezing external funding. Does the fact that more money needs to be mobilised from within India make your work even more important?

Absolutely, yes. But it’s slow. It takes time to unlock this kind of capital and that’s why it’s a long game for us.

On the funding question, in some ways you’re in the same position as your constituents in that you need to raise money for yourselves. What would you tell funders about why you need funding and why your work is important?

People are hesitant to give because you don’t feel like you’re really changing lives when you’re funding an organisation like ours. What we try to do is help folks understand, since many come from the business side, that you need a thriving ecosystem in philanthropy and it needs to be strengthened. If you think about financial services, there’s so many different kinds of ways to move capital around and, to move philanthropic capital, you also need intermediaries. There are people doing research, due diligence, helping us understand and measure the impacts, and so on. Now, some people get it, some people don’t and sometimes you may need to break it into pieces to make it understandable, but the true enlightened ones – and over the years, we have had a few – they’ll fund Dasra. You know, Dasra means enlightened giving in Sanskrit.

You talked about having good people. Is it hard to to attract them to Dasra when you’ve got competition from…?

It’s easier now than 24 years ago. We are like this revolving door but finally, we’ve figured out how to keep at least a few of our leaders. We have had 350-plus alumni swing through Dasra, but I’m proud that they stayed in the sector. A lot of them have started their own non-profits that have been successful. I’ve come to terms with the fact that there is a service we are providing to the sector. That being said, the talent war that you hear about on the corporate side also exists in India and we are competing with international folks that have deeper, stronger budgets, so it’ll always be a challenge and we don’t build careers very well in our sector. We’re all founders driven by our passions. We just have to make sure we create space and careers for others to build our organisations into institutions. Some of us are challenged by this founder syndrome and a lot of our capacity building work with organisations and leaders has been to confront this and really think about what it means to build talent and their organisations, but also the sector.

Are we pushing enough or are we all flocking to the same organisations and the same things and that is a question I always ask

Thinking generally about philanthropy in India, what do you see as the main needs of the sector? Are they regulatory or is it just encouraging more people to give?

I think it’s definitely as simple as getting more people to give more, and give for longer timeframes. But we also need facilitators, stronger capabilities that really accelerate the impact that we’re all trying to work towards. We’re all at different stages of this, but there is something to be said for building our capacity as a sector, which takes resources, but it also takes a certain kind of talent. You can’t take everything from the for-profit world. How we continue to be a vibrant sector that innovates does take a certain group and certain abilities. It’s also a question of what it takes to build and scale organisations. That’s really why we started Dasra because the need is so big in India that it’s hard not to have scale as a priority. Obviously there are small and beautiful non-profits, but for us, a big motivation and aspiration has been to build scalable organisations. We need to continue to innovate around that, and technology, to name just one thing, needs to play more of a role, and we need to build that kind of capability.

Is regulation a big factor? Does that need to ease or change? 

Absolutely. I think if our regulatory environment became less constrained, if certain kinds of taxes were introduced, that would unlock a lot more money, but very few of us are engaged in trying to change that. It’s a difficult environment right now. It’s a question of how do you stay on course, when some amazing organisations have lost their FCRA for reasons that don’t always feel justified. We’re all trying to be careful – we’re lucky, we just got our FCRA renewed two weeks ago – but we’re also trying to push the needle on what communities actually need. So there’s more need than ever to be collective, to come together so you actually don’t get called out and that you have strength in numbers.

What do you look back on with most pride out of Dasra’s history?

Proud feels a bit egotistical, but some real joy comes from seeing how much these organisations that we supported have grown over the years and the impact that they’ve had and the kinds of leaders that continue to lead and build them. Ultimately, it’s these individuals and their organisations that I’m most proud of being part of. I think we have also done a lot to bring in philanthropy from families, from companies. We’ve raised and influenced more than 350 million dollars since we started and I think that influence has contributed in some small way to enabling organisations and ultimately helping communities. We have trusting relationships with an unbelievable network here in India, and outside India and for India. We’ve been around a long time and the staying power helps, but I think we have an incredibly supportive network that I’m so grateful for.

Do you have disappointments?

The work is so slow. Sometimes you wonder, are we really making a difference? Are we pushing enough or are we all flocking to the same organisations and the same things and that is a question I always ask, and I’m always disappointed when people leave Dasra for whatever reasons. I feel like everybody takes a part of me and, at some point I’ve got to stop saying that because then I won’t exist. I take it personally but I shouldn’t.

In addition to this article series, Propel Philanthropy collects stories demonstrating that modest grants can drive but results. You can learn more here.

Andrew Milner is special features editor at Alliance magazine