harish iyer

True, the media in India has little philanthropic support. In a country of 1.2 billion, I know of exactly one foundation set up to fund media! Check this recent extract from a Poynter newsletter: - North Carolina News Lab Fund ($2 Million) will support launching Press Forward Charlotte, part of a broader initiative to strengthen the nation’s local news ecosystem. The commitment was made in partnership with Wells Fargo, the C.D. Spangler Foundation, United Way of Greater Charlotte, the Gambrell Foundation, the Leon Levine Foundation and individual donors. - Mississippi Free Press got a $150,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. - American Journalism Project raised $15 million for a new local news initiative in LA. - Neal Peirce Foundation offering travel grants of up to $1,500 to cover city solutions. And this is just about support for local media. Do you see any such announcements in India? Where is philanthropy that is required to create informed individuals capable of critical thinking?!! There is an elephant in the room: A huge reluctance from funders to support media. Who will call it out? India Development Review (IDR) Dasra Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation #media #mediafunding #philanthropy

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Lucky for us I had the chance to meet Father Jerry very early in our journey of V-ALL in the North East. His insights on the approach and the region really helped us think about what we were structuring and we still made a lot of mistakes. After spending a couple of weeks I realised some very basic things. 1. In the impact space of mainland India we just club it as the North East and it is an after thought, the diversity region. 2. Most organisations from outside working there don't understand the diversity of people. If we say India is diverse, the states in the North East are extremely different. North and South Assam are poles apart from each other forget the other states 3. The youth and people in all the states carry trauma and lived experience that we don't even understand. The challenges are different. All I remember from Father Jerry's, Shannon Massar and a lot of others advice and now from our pilots is to listen and to remember that a cut and paste approach is not going to be the solution. The context is different and without locals to conceptualise the solution, we will never be able to help or cause any impact. For us at V-ALL we now have a local team of 7 interns who will think of what next. #vallindia #theroadahead #startup #socialimpact #vall V-ALL

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“What works at scale” starts from a mindset shift. It urges us to reimagine the way we solve and enable solving for complex social problems. Patient capital can be wind under the wings for this by making room for traversing non-traditional pathways, experimentation, failing, learning and starting again. It cares about solving the problem and not an individual solution, it asks us to think progress and not just impact numbers, it allows civil society organisations to breathe, innovate and build systems that scale. https://lnkd.in/gwchkxXy A.T.E. Chandra Foundation | Financial Express (India) | Sanjay Purohit #philanthropy #reimagination #socialimpact #mindsetshift

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"A useful contribution from the philanthropic community, international and domestic, might be to invest in building the capacity of nonprofits to adopt this approach and strengthen the ecosystem needed to facilitate giving of this kind, especially through digital channels, at the commercial end of which India leads the world." It is time to think about newer models of giving because while the old ones are working. The onus is still all on the NGO to find new donors, keep communicating and raising money from them. Time for philanthropy to step up and change with the rest of the world to see how giving can have newer models. We are in the business to disrupt giving with V-ALL incase anyone wants to have a conversation.

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Commencement of the SME Communities' 'SME Dialogue' section with Tarakad Giridhar 's perspective on a relatively unexplored side of entrepreneurship : dealing with unforeseen losses. The 'SME Dialogue' section will endeavor to focus on creating awareness on topics of immediate relevance to the SME community. The first article covers the topic of 'trauma in business'. Trauma is trauma. There is nothing about its quantity or quality which makes it different. But the response to trauma can tell a lot about the entrepreneurial quality of the team behind the SME. #SMECommunities #SMEDialogue #SMEsOfTomorrow

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