This post is a continuation of "The Power of One", so if you haven't read it yet, it's probably a good idea to do so now and then come back to this.
OK, got it... so what's this about?
Well the "power of one" story is kind of incomplete because it hints at all the amazing things we do (if I may say so myself) with the resources available to us. This post attempts to explain why we are so happy and proud with our so-called achievements by putting them into context of these "resources".
So, we have seen that we do lots and lots of stuff impacting thousands of lives directly through our various programmes and beyond. The question now is - what allows us to do this? Is it a big team? Is it a big budget? Is it magic sauce? First let's take a look at what are the things we don't have that allows us to do all this:
- We don't have laser-focus, and we are very, very proud of it. This doesn't mean we do anything and everything - we have very strict filters for the work we do and often turn down donations (clothes/ sweets, etc.) and opportunities when we apply these filters. However, our strict filters are there to ensure our children get the best of what we can offer and at the same time do not limit us the way a laser-focused mission approach or a project-based approach would limit us.
- We also don't have a 5-year plan and a business plan set in stone. Though we've been asked the question often enough, isn't it enough to say that if we had a 5-yr plan or a “business plan”, Satyam and 20 other children would still be selling eggs or fish or vegetables or washing dishes and scrubbing floors. We wouldn't have launched 4 other new programmes and had an outreach of more than 1,50,000 if we had stuck to a 5-year plan we made in year 1 or year 2.
- We don't have big institutional funding. Most NGO's survive on either CSR, Government, institutional donor funding which is "project-based" or "tied" funding. Though we would love to have that kind of money (is anyone listening?) and only one person to report to, its been a blessing in disguise in many ways - we have been able to do what excites us and address the needs of the communities we serve - and not have to toe the line of a project manager sitting somewhere else or follow an agenda set by someone else. It has also kept us honest to our work because we can't get away with a report at the end of a project - we are accountable to thousands of people ('investors', if you will), who don't hesitate to ask tough questions of us to account for the Rs. 1000/- or Rs. 5000/- they have trusted us with.
OK, so you must have a big team to run all these programmes and do all the stuff you mentioned earlier. No big deal!
Well, I wish I could say yes, but the answer is no, we don't have a big team - we have a very small team... in the last year have always had less than 10 people (including myself) working full-time at any point at Project KHEL! At present, we are just 7 people.
It's a small team but it's a team of crazy passionate people who are willing to extend their work hours when needed (everyday? :-D) , who don’t ask themselves why they are suddenly sitting in a rickshaw taking kids to school , or ask themselves when they signed up for filling water in bottles and rationing water to thirsty kids, or visiting mothers and fathers in slums at 10pm to talk about their children's futures or visit hospitals to ensure that a child is getting the care they need to, or... you get the point.
OK, so you must have a ton of money and pay these people lots and you must be a hard task-master
Hmm... I wish we did have a ton of money, and I was a hard task-master (well I am, but not SO much!) ... but the truth is we don't and I'm not. We raise most of our money through crowdfunding which requires all of us, the entire full-time and part-time team, to (very literally) beg for money - for amounts as low as Rs. 100/- !! Quite frankly, no one in their right mind would choose to do that if they had a lot of money.
Though we are unable to pay big salaries, we have found that we easily pay competitive salaries when we compare ourselves to other organizations doing similar work (with bigger budgets). What we DO have is a very, very strong commitment to paying our people fairly and on time . In 60 months of our existence, we have NEVER ONCE missed a salary payment to our staff (something very rare in the sector and even in other sectors) even at times of financial or mental stress, both organizational and personal, we ensure our staff have never had to utter the words "udhar chahiye, salary nahin mila".
That brings us to some more numbers!
OK, so we don't have a big team, we pay them on time, we do a lot of work, we have big enough impact numbers so what kind of money does it take to achieve this? Well, last year we did all of this (and more) in about 34 Lakhs and to get that into perspective we should look at it in terms of cost per beneficiary for each programme or how much can we do with Rs. 1000/- .
For our regular programmes (meaning programmes where we meet children multiple times each week), with Rs. 1000/- we can make this happen:
For our workshop programmes - where we meet individuals just once or twice 1-4 times to spread awareness on a particular topic - with Rs. 1000/- we can do the following:
These are incredibly low cost per beneficiary figures! This means we are able to do so much at such low costs. Keep in mind that these costs include ALL of the other stuff that is mentioned earlier but does not find its way into the accounting process because they do not fall into any of the above 6 programme brackets. So if we are investing our time collecting and distributing clothes and utensils for a slum that was ravaged by fire, or doing a medical camp, or taking 100s of children for movie shows, or posting every single day on various social media platforms - its all actually included in the above costs itself. We do all of it with a small team of committed people. How does it happen?
Well, if you haven't already guessed, one reason is our "untied" funding that allows us to do so much more. It gives us freedom to work 150% with passion and commitment instead of 70% to meet some target numbers and cut some corners. This also means, that in order to continue being able to do all this we need the support of individual supporters. We have been blessed with a whole bunch of family, friends and well-wishers who support us, but without much more of such "untied" funding, we would soon be forced to change our focus to what a big funder wants us to do. Quoting from a recent article on retail giving, "Retail giving lets you set your agenda and stay mission-oriented. Virtually no institutional donor gives you that kind of freedom."
So, we would need much more of untied personal or corporate funding - which requires us to build immense levels of trust to get people to cough up money without tying it to fixed outcomes. It also requires huge investment from the team to go out and raise that money in order to be able to continue doing what we do. So at this point, there is no way of saying whether the next year or 5 years would have similar impact or more or less - it all depends on how our supporters (YOU :-) support us and that will decide the direction in n which our work goes.
The primary reason we are able to do this is because we have been successful in creating a child-centric organization with a culture and work ethic that focuses on ONE with an eye on the many, something that allows us to work with passion, commitment and empathy and not become number-driven robots who are doing the work that is written in a "deliverables" section of a project document. We are able to do ALL of the stuff mentioned earlier precisely because we do not focus solely on the numbers, instead we focus on the "need" of the children and communities we work with - and this freedom from numbers allows us to "deliver" more than any "deliverables" a project manager could dream of.