I hail from one of the largest cities in India — the capital, New Delhi, which is renowned to be one of the busiest cities in the world. With a staggering population of over 26 million people, it is also one of the most populous cities in the world, forcing an upward trend in the number of skyscrapers, hotels, and amenities the city has to offer to its residents. While the people who can afford it enjoy taking advantage of these luxuries, there is a large sect of the population that lives in the shadow — those who live in slums, cannot afford to send their children to school and wonder how they are going to put the next meal on the table for their family.
India has been no stranger to income inequality in recent years as reports have shown that 73% of India’s wealth is held by its top 1% of citizens. However, this had never become more glaringly clear to me than it did in late 2013 when the keen eyes of a 15-year-old began to notice how the same streets that housed some of the most expensive properties in the city, also housed overcrowded slum dwellings with living standards below any possible humane standard.
I found it difficult to believe that the educated, sophisticated people, who belonged to the same city, and who seemingly had money to spend on frivolous luxuries, could bear to witness this disparity and not be motivated to do something about it. There’s something that pains you inside while watching a group of 8-year-old kids on the side of the street, sitting in the scorching sun in old, torn clothes taking a break from their daily begging routine, that speaks of high levels of injustice for children who deserve to be in school.
It was around this time that the government of India made an amendment to the Companies Act, 2013 on Indian company law, and mandated the 2% law, which stated that all companies in India were required to demark at least 2% of their annual profits towards charitable and social causes, as a part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program.
It was also around this time that I had been involved in a social project through my high-school, which had me spending a lot of time volunteering at Mera Parivar, a local charitable organization in my city that provided free education and vocational training to primary, middle and high-school school students who lived in the area but could not afford to go to a formal school.
During my interactions with the management of Mera Parivar, I not only realized the true plight of the students who visited their organization on a regular basis but also that of the management team of such organizations. These folks, officially called social workers, spend their weeks and months, accepting lower paychecks, to gather resources and funds to carry out socially beneficial projects, but their job is made so difficult because there is no clear pathway or platform for them to find viable sponsors, helpers or donors. As a result, a lot of their time is spent following false leads — time that could very well be spent planning projects that could significantly help people.
I sensed a clear opportunity here. I felt strongly about the social situation caused due to income inequality right in my city, and I believed that I had the capability to leverage my own knowledge and skills to make a difference. However, I knew it could not be done alone, and that is when Nishtha Singh, Sakshi Tewari, Tanuj Jain and I founded our own venture — The Helping Hand (THH).
Our vision was to create a society where the gap between the rich and the poor is bridged, as we believe that there are an equal number, if not more, of people who can and wish to help and those who need help, leading to a society where every human being is content and has all the basic necessities to lead a life with a smile
Through social media sites, school and personal network, the four of us had enough connections into numerous companies and sat down with their CSR officer to understand what kind of charities the company was keen to partner with. Since the 2% law had recently been passed, many companies were keen to explore new charitable organizations to partner with. This was where we believed we could bring our partner-NGOs to the table and link them up with a viable donor that was keen to donate towards a specific cause.
As THH, we seek to build out partnerships with as many charitable organizations (or NGOs) and understand the spectrum of resources they could benefit from, as well as network with as many companies and sponsors who could potentially help these NGOs with their needs.
The goal was to identify two parties that could mutually benefit each other — one (for-profit) company and one NGO and help establish a sustainable relationship between the two parties where the required resource would be transferred. This resource did not necessarily have to be in the form of a monetary donation — it could be anything that underprivileged people at the NGO would benefit from, and anything that the sponsor was ready to give, typically as a part of their CSR program.(donations are usually be tailored to the business they are in).
The first project we carried out exemplifies our model perfectly. The Flash Food Recovery Program, initiated early in 2014, was set up between Mera Parivar and The Oberoi, Gurgaon — a large global multinational chain of 5-star hotels with a major hotel located in my city. Mera Parivar, which catered educational services to over 200 students daily, also attempted to serve them with lunch at their learning center. However, organizing the resources to create this meal for such a large number of people on a repeated basis was getting difficult for an organization with limited cash. Knowing that the staff at The Oberoi prepares a fresh, sizable lunch buffet everyday for its guests (and as per policy, over-prepares the quantity to be on the safe side of not running out), we went to The Oberoi and proposed that we transfer all of the excess food after the buffet to Mera Parivar, so it can feed hungry, needy stomachs instead of being thrown away, which would be its fate otherwise.
After a few meetings with the Mera Parivar Director and The Oberoi’s HR and Head Chef, we got the two parties to sign an MOU describing the legal terms of the agreement, and were ready to go! From the next day, we got food — of impeccable quality and taste — to feed almost 250 hungry people. After a few days, all the logistics for food transference were in place and the process had become as smooth and automated as it could be. Both organizations’ management was onboard and shared a good relationship, and we had just managed to solve two problems at once — ensuring that fresh food is not wasted and thrown away and that hungry stomachs are fed and now had a dependable source of food!
Between 2014–2016, we managed to carry out a number of projects similar in nature, with different resources and organizations. These include carrying out collection drives for winter clothes while partnering with different offices, residential complexes, which were then collected and donated to NGOs to help protect people from the harsh Delhi winter; working directly with the NGO to find volunteers to teach the students who would come to be tutored; getting donations for sewing machines to promote vocational training; finding sponsors for talented, bright minds who were graduating to college; and working directly with an unfairly treated social worker in a critical condition by expediting her pro-bono treatment after talking to the hospital. Overall, our range of projects has targeted creating some impact on underprivileged children, education, youth and women empowerment, and nutrition.
The overarching goal of all these programs has been to create a relationship between the NGO management and the potential sponsor and then setting up a sustainable system that can mutually benefit them. As THH, our goal is to solve the problem of fund-and-resource raising for the NGOs by providing them with a potential sponsor. This ensures that the social workers have more time to spend on actually implementing projects and helping people rather than worrying where their funding or support is going to come from.
Our success so far & the road ahead
The 2014–2016 period was one where we gained significant momentum in terms of the projects we launched and partnerships we built, both with new charitable organizations as well as large companies. Our relationship with Mera Parivar grew, and in 2017, along with significant help from Daffodil Software, THH opened its first ‘Youth and Women Empowerment Center’ in the National Capital Region of India, where we carry out Computer, English language and vocational training for uneducated youth and women in the area. After graduating from our center, they would be skilled enough to get a job in the market that could support their livelihood.
Over the years, we are proud to have partnered with major multinational corporations (PepsiCo, Baxter, Vodafone, Micromax, to name a few) as well as local Indian bred companies (Neva, Cosco) and have been a part of their CSR program. By partnering with a more local NGOs and local government schools, we were able to understand and handle the needs for a range of organizations, which, if anything, made us realize how much work there is still yet to do.
In the future, we plan to use our Empowerment center as a potential think-tank for enthusiastic, youthful social workers who wish to make a change and build our network of corporate and NGO partners to increase the scope of projects we can implement. Also, as each project aims at sustainability, it is a continual process of following-up on past projects and ensuring they are carried out with the same effectiveness.
My Personal Journey
My personal journey with The Helping Hand is something I hold very close to my heart, as it supports a cause I am very passionate about. It gave me the chance to give back to society, both through volunteering as well as through building strategic partnerships with organizations. It helped me build an attitude that never gives up, and gave me the confidence to believe that anything is possible.
Incorporating The Helping Hand as a Trust in 2015 was one of the first experiences I had with registering a company, and exposed me to the legal procedures that need to be followed while doing so, including inducting a board of Trustees and appointing an Executive Committee.
Entrepreneurially, I learned the value of teamwork and collaboration and how important it is to stay focused on the goal at hand. The reason we could successfully carry out so many projects is only because of the collective brainpower put in by our team and numerous volunteers. Collectively managing different projects as well as coordinating their different aspects with different stakeholders gave me an early glimpse into the life of Project and Program Management.
Professionalism, both in communication and style was important for us to establish THH as a credible organization and was something I got better at with every meeting I would attend. The importance of this was further magnified when participating in numerous cold-emails and cold-calls, as learning to deal with rejection and failure is important when you are trying to build partnerships. This experience also gave me the opportunity to start and brand my own company hence get exposed to all facets of business: leading a team and understanding the dynamics of managing a social venture in India, including the intricacies of business pitches, finance and tax, fundraising and dealing with people on all points of the economic and business spectrum to get the job done.
Note: The Helping Hand is a purely not-for-profit venture, registered as a Public Charitable trust in 2014 in Gurgaon, India. If you are interested in volunteering or contributing in any way, feel free to reach out to me directly!