Day 9: Salaam Baalak Trust and Saluting the Child

On Thursday morning, we were greeted by Iqbal and Satender as we began Salaam Baalak Trust's City Walk. Needing to split us into two groups, Satender sported a mischievous smile and urged us to pick the guide we found most handsome. We set out on the tour with our guide, Iqbal (sorry Satender), a former street child himself. Iqbal led us through Paharganj - the neighborhood abutting the New Delhi train station where Delhi's railway children reside. As we walked, Iqbal narrated what we were seeing - a recycling wallah's small shop where kids sell plastic scraps - across the narrow alley, a small room housing a video game system where kids spend the few rupees they earn, an alley where residents combated public urination by installing tiles depicting Hindu gods and Jesus (genius, by the way). Iqbal was an excellent guide - serious but goodnatured, always happy to answer our questions. It was mind blowing to think that at 19, it was just a short time ago that Iqbal had run away from an abusive father and fought to survive on streets like the ones he was guiding us through. That combination of indomitable spirit with a dash of luck is usually the stuff of Hollywood and Dickensian novels. But here Iqbal was - determined to educate himself and make his way in the world.

The City Walk is a truly ingenious way to generate unrestricted funds - the most precious kind of funds for non-profits. For just about $4, walkers are treated to background information about Delhi's street children, Salaam Baalak Trust's work, a tour of Paharganj and a brief visit to one of SBTs temporary short-term shelters. It's the most worthwhile $4 I've ever spent, that's for sure.

At the short-term shelter, we were able to spend some time with boys - some of whom were new arrivals - who were congregated in the modest concrete foyer and doing some drawing. Seeing these children, who we know live such a difficult life, engaging in the basic and universal childhood pastime of drawing produced some major cognitive dissonance. Looking closer, I noticed that two of the boys were drawing homes. I felt that one in my gut.

Meeting with one of the Trust's management team members, I was reminded about the fickleness of funding and the constant need for local organizations to fundraise to carry out their missions. The Trust was a sub-grantee to FHI under a USAID-funded project for four years - but that funding had just ended. For many small NGOs, we ask their employees to be excellent at implementation as well as marketing/selling their ideas to secure more funding. How much time is taken away from running excellent programs in the scramble to secure additional funding? Reflecting on this, the need for income generating arms that support social programs seems even more apparent!

Day 8: PSI

On Wednesday, we were hosted by staff at PSI India in their New Delhi office for a presentation on the second phase of their Women's Health Project. After meeting with community-based and national organizations, it was quite a different experience to meet with the country office of a large, world renowned NGO. Below are some of the highlights and takeaways from our time with PSI:

• Just because you're big, doesn't mean you're clunky! It's easy to assume that large organizations, with their inevitable bureaucracy and heft, can't be effective at the community level. PSI's Women's Health Project dispels this myth effectively. In the first photo below, a PSI staffer is describing the map of the New Seema Puri neighborhood, divided into blocks and with important landmarks identified. In the second photo, you see an extremely detailed and comprehensive household survey that PSI's community health workers use to plan and record their marketing and outreach (photo credit to Meagan Smith on photo 2). PSI proved that with the right models and a motivated staff, large international NGOs can be nimble and operate effectively at the community level.

• Effective social marketing promotes a cohesive, unified message at every level of communications. In the office, PSI staff showed us a tv commercial for the Freedom 5 IUD that centers around a"lock and key" metaphor. Later, we saw how this metaphor was also used in one-to-one interactions between community health workers and IUD candidates in New Seema Puri (photo credit to EOPhile). Note that in the BCC materials below, the IUD acts as the "lock" on the door.

• A woman's choice about family planning involves a whole lot of people. PSI is keenly aware that women are influenced by a whole set of actors that affect her access to contraception. At home, husbands, mother-in-laws and sister-in-laws can apply pressure for women to have more children. In the community, health workers, doctors and pharmacists provide a continuum of information and service provision. For such a personal decision, I was surprised to learn about the myriad of people who affect women's decision-making and access!
• To satisfy your mission, it's important to diversify funding. The Women's Health Project, which promotes IUDs as well as safe abortion kits, was funded by anonymous (and I'm assuming very generous) donor. While the project appears effective and well-run, and meets PSI's organizational objectives, it would never have been funded by USAID do to that agency's restrictions on support for abortions. With diversified funding, PSI is able to implement activities in a mission critical area that may not have been possible if it were entirely dependent upon USAID.

Our day with PSI was exciting and intellectually satisfying. It was clear that the program was based on a solid logical framework, which itself was based upon data from dependable sources like India's National Family Health Survey. With donor's increased emphasis on evidence-based programming, it seems that PSI is well positioned!

Day 6: Managing the hell out of ideas

During one of our first classes in DC (which now feels like a lifetime ago), Dr. Vyas asked us to introduce ourselves and share why we'd registered for the class. I recalled an "a-ha" moment I had during a Net Impact conference back in 2005 when a speaker said something along the lines of "I don't think I'll have the next big idea. But I can manage the hell out of the process." YES. That was a key moment early in my career as I began to think about the role I wanted to play in development. Over the years, it's boiled down to something like this: I want to link social entrepreneurs to the resources, networks and tools they need to develop their ideas and bring them to scale. Monday was going to be a big day for me, since we'd be meeting with two organizations - UnLtd India and Acumen Fund - that do just that. I eagerly anticipated what each organization would have to say because of what I view as a shared philosophy - the problem isn't a lack of good ideas - the problem is that most good ideas don't get off the ground because an idea plus passion without some serious management acumen will get you a whole lot of nothing.

First up was UnLtd India and a presentation by Pooja Warier and her colleagues. Here are some things that really struck me about UnLtd's presentation:

• UnLtd has an exceedingly clear vision statement. Hearing Pooja talk about the gap UnLtd is filling (support between the concept stage and semi-maturity), UnLtd's organizational goals (identifying stars at the nat'l level, leaders at the state level and fostering a general culture of changemakers), and the characteristics they seek in social entrepreneurs was an excellent reminder that engaging in/supporting social entrepreneurship takes a lot of up-front thought and clarity of purpose.
• UnLtd embraces their "failures", or people who's ideas don't make it to the "star" or "leader" level. While the romantic view of social change is that it's spontaneous, it actually takes a ton of planning, stops and starts, and big old mistakes. I can't recommend the following book, that I picked up in the Mumbai airport en route to Delhi, enough- Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. Mohammed Yunus' first development project was a huge flop - who knew?! As a proposal writer, I have an often singular focus on what worked - what impact did we have? what did we do that was right? I think UnLtd is really onto something by creating a space where it's OK to say "man that was a disaster and here's what we learned"
• UnLtd doesn't focus on a particular sector or group of sectors. If someone has an idea that is not religiously or politically affiliated, they're eligible for support from UnLtd. This approach has pros and cons. On the plus side, some ideas are stifled by others' (read funders mostly) need to put them in a neat category with a bow tied around it. Abstaining from forcing ideas into boxes let's them be exactly what they are, and not what a funder, or manager, or communications person writing a fact sheet wants them to be. It also contributes to UnLtd's larger goal of creating a general culture of creative problem solving in India. On the other hand, there's something to be said for doing a few things well and going deep. Even though UnLtd's staff provide chiefly management expertise, some technical expertise is surely needed. By not focusing and being a "jack of all trades", is UnLtd then a "master of none"?

Next up was Acumen Fund with a discussion on their model and health portfolio. Acumen is different from UnLtd in two key respects: exclusive focus on for-profit enterprises, development of a portfolio in key technical areas (such as health, agriculture, and energy). Like UnLtd, Acumen is filling a gap by providing capital and technical assistance to social entrepreneurs with promising ideas that can be brought to scale. They emphasize their application of "patient capital" that fills a gap left by traditional investment models that require faster and larger returns than fledgling social enterprises can likely produce. Here are some of the highlights from our conversation with Acumen:

• Need does not equal demand. Brilliant and devastatingly simple. A social entrepreneur may have a brilliant model for delivering clean water to rural households with a well thought out business plan. The water is at a price point that people can afford. A delivery system removes the barrier of walking several miles to the water source. Clean water will reduce health problems in communities. But what if no one is buying?! What may be needed is a model that combines the business know-how of Acumen with the social marketing skills of PSI (see Day 7's post!). Food for thought...
• Measuring social impact is hard! This is a no-brainer, but we had a really interesting conversation about who's responsibility it is to measure the impact of Acumen programs. Even though enterprises are screened with a set of criteria that includes"social impact" it seemed that rigorous impact evaluation of investments could be strengthened.

As my classmates predicted, I was blissed out during our meetings on Monday and had a bit of an afterglow throughout the evening. These organizations are utilizing a model that I think holds a lot of promise. It was an affirming day for me - but also a reminder that I have a lot to learn and more questions than I know what to do with!