Holding Competing Values: Stories from 2021 Acumen India Spring Cohort

Unheard Stories of Moral Practices is a five-part series showcasing the hard-edged skills, challenges, and values practiced by the 2021 Acumen India Fellows from the Spring Cohort.

Organizational leaders often hold values that are in conflict with each other. These conflicting values stem from the multiple identities we carry and can be seen in the tussle between our approach and a systemic approach. Leaders address these conflicting values, by stepping-back, and understanding the challenges faced by those different from themselves.

Social Leader vs Political Leader by Shashank Shukla, Social Worker at Samajwadi Party

I am a grassroots politician working on day-to-day people’s issues. Over the past few weeks, I have engaged in COVID relief work — distributing medicines, masks, sanitizers, ration kits and have successfully arranged to fund from friends and family to procure ten oxygen concentrators. This would serve 600,000 citizens in my constituency, Bangermau. In no time, we were able to build a facility equipped enough to serve every patient.

With the extensive work, the local media provided great coverage about the work and all prominent Hindi dailies carried the news. One fine evening, my cousin (one of the donors) from the USA reached out to me disappointed that I had leveraged public funding to gain media coverage and for personal aggrandizement — as perceived by her. This perception came to me by surprise, although my identity as a political leader was well known to everyone in the family. The political identity supported the work — to provide last mile connectivity and to ensure that funds reached the needy. The expectation of doing social service on the other end is to somehow be anonymous and selfless.

Carrying this tension, I got into a conversation with my cousin about the impact of donations and access to critical infrastructure during the pandemic. I explained to her why it becomes important to showcase the work — especially as a political leader in India where the foundation of challenging unjust systems falls upon social leaders. It also helps citizens understand the leaders and their leadership styles — giving them an opportunity to choose their leaders based on the work rather than the promises. In all likelihood we agreed to disagree, however, the tension to carry multiple identities in my work as a political leader and a social worker will remain constant — to strike the balance requires one to step back, listen, and build based on the reality at the ground.

Individual Actions Vs System Builder by Mekha Thachankary, Co-Founder of Guardians of Dreams

I am a social entrepreneur committed to ensuring that vulnerable children in India have a safe and nurturing environment to grow up in.

Back in 2017, my co-founders and I met with three boys selling pens on the street at 2 AM. They were shivering in the cold so we offered them our jackets and started to get to know them. They told us about their lives in the slums and how they would be subjected to abuse if they didn’t meet the sales for the day. They mentioned how there are thousands of children just like them in Bangalore, fighting the same ordeal day to day.

I was extremely affected by their story and decided that although we couldn’t rescue all of the children they spoke of, I could at least take action to rescue the three children who were right in front of us. We called the local authorities, the child helpline and spoke to the children’s home. From their responses, it became obvious to us that there were bottlenecks. The children’s home severely lacked the capacity to rescue or shelter the kids and some of the people we spoke to seemed fatigued by the size and complexity of the problem. For the local authorities, this didn’t seem to be their highest priority — in fact, they asked us to let it go.

At 5 am the “parents” showed up to take the children away. With a bit of interrogation, it was clear they weren’t their actual parents — they didn’t even know the children’s names. While watching them walk away, I sat there stunned at what had just happened. I couldn’t fathom the reality these children lived in every day. As an individual and a samaritan, I couldn’t shift anything for them. That night what really hit me was the complexity of challenges in rescuing street children.

That incident never left my soul. As a good samaritan, I was powerless. The only other obvious route I could envision was to build a children’s home that leaves no child behind, build helplines that react to every situation, and build the structures that would give street children a life of dignity. This undertaking would be extremely complex.

The tension between individual action and building a new ecosystem remained. As I kept coming back to the conversations with the local authorities and children’s home — I found the gray — to strengthen the already existing ecosystem. I launched Guardians of Dreams to upgrade and transform the quality of care across existing Child Care Institutions (CCls) like the children’s homes I spoke to that night.

Today, Guardians of Dreams have adopted a holistic child care model that touches upon five key areas — Infrastructure, Education, Healthcare & Nutrition, Caregiving, and Aftercare across states.

Pieces like ensuring that the child has a safe space and receives the care to become a fully functional adult are crucial for successful rehabilitation. Especially for our children, all facets of the process are important for childhood growth. Launching this organization has helped me realize that it’s not just about becoming a hero for one night, or about rebuilding everything from scratch. It’s about working together with the 250+ existing children’s homes in our network and upgrading their capacity and capabilities so that not only will no child be left behind but also that they have the best quality care provided to them to become positive and contributing members of our community.

Join our Fellows, and the Acumen community in understanding and practicing Moral Imagination, to reimagine systems that create ripples of change.

Register for the Path of Moral Leadership course with Acumen Founder and CEO, Jacqueline Novogratz to learn the hard-edged skills necessary to build a better world. To know more about our 2021 Spring cohort, and their work, head over to their bios.