I would think that the need of the hour is administrators and policymakers around the world who can orchestrate governments to collectively empower and incubate emerging social entrepreneurial projects and nonprofits. This week’s readings collectively shed light on some of the most important aspects of social innovation- scale, sustainability and impact, all through the lens of government intervention. A crucial point to note in the report on “Investing in Social Entrepreneurship and Fostering Social Innovation” was how although traditional foundations and philanthropists continue to remain the primary source of funding for most of these projects, their reluctance to use limited money to fund projects that do not yet have a proven track record is justifiable. And like how Paul Carttar mentioned, leveraging the government’s distinctive status as “funder-in-chief” could probably be the best solution to this long standing problem. Or, maybe not.
Just like any startup or emerging nonprofit, I faced a multitude of challenges specifically related to funding and securing government support when my team cofounded Samarpana in 2012. Fundraising through bake sales, marathons and other events could only take us so far. Despite the backing of several educational institutions, private sector companies and the financial support offered by several investors, partners and event sponsors, we continued to struggle w.r.t scaling impact. As an organization, we try to better the lives of army martyr families and design welfare programs for war widows and their children. But even as of today, the geographic regions within the country over which we can potentially maximize impact, the number of families who are likely to benefit from several of these welfare programs continue to be bounded by controlled capital and scarce resources. A proposal that we drafted seeking government support translated to a meeting with the Sainik Welfare Board, an apex body of the Government of India whose main role is to ensure the implementation of government policies for the welfare of ex-servicemen and their families. During the meeting we had the opportunity to propose the necessity of a government-nonprofit collaboration which could potentially lead to impacting over 250,000 war widows and over 300,000 families in the country. While this partnership seemed like holy grail to our challenges at the time, we left the meeting feeling otherwise. To them, supporting the cause of the NGO through varying levels of partnership involved our compliance with several bureaucratic regimes and their consent on everything-quite literally! It required modifying our administrative structures to be more fiscally affordable and altering some of our fundamental methods of operation in order to ensure this partnership was not just successful but an effective one. Making these changes would slow us down as an organization. These changes also meant high levels of dependency on government approvals and requests for sanctions. We needed more time to weigh out options. Was this partnership in the slightest way an efficient solution to scale impact?
While it may seem that the ever stagnant percentage of marginalized and discriminated groups would drop to a near zero and that sustainability of nonprofits in the socioeconomic realm would be a given with extensive government participation, my personal experiences force me to believe otherwise. While the concept of a merger of this kind is appealing on paper, much cannot be said until something works out for sure.
References:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.