The Power of Collaboration

Excerpts my keynote address at eSpire’20 by Mantra4Change

Collaboration for me has always been such a positive and powerful note and a notion which has been an integral value in my own work and journey with my social startup — Varitra Foundation. Interestingly, ‘Varitra’ happens to be a Sanskrit word which means an umbrella and for us it has always symbolised convergence of people and their efforts coming together OR divergence of ideas going out.

Our organisation currently works in rural Haryana on “Whole School Transformation” across 20 government schools. These villages are situated on Yamuna belt near the Haryana-up border and we work with first generation goers. When we started out, we realised that we cannot bring in any tangible change in a school if we do not work on multiple components simultaneously because most of these are interlinked or intersectional. But we also realised that we as a single organisation could not take care of everything.

We adopted Advocacy with District Administration, Education department and Gram Panchayat for infrastructural transformation of the school building to give the village school a new identity. This was clearly one of the most cost-intensive components and not an easy one. We built playgrounds, undertook BaLA paintings and conducted building repairs in partnership with MNREGA, Sarpanches and local philanthropists. This has helped us to revive a sense of pride and positivity amongst children attending govt schools.

Next, we began setting up Libraries in every school along with reading program to create a safe space for reading and non-academic dialogue and activities for students. We have conducted BOOK DONATION DRIVES across multiple cities and managed to raise more than 5000 books over the past 2 years with the help of people. We work on Remedial learning through Post school learning enhancement centres. For this we train local youth from the community as para-educators. We call them Shikshan Mittra and they work on improving language and numeracy skills of students! We have built a community of 52 Shikshan Mittra over the past two years. We have tried to actively engage communities like SHG members, active youth and SMC members for their inputs and ideas. Interestingly, we were able to undertake a variety of activities like kitchen gardening, celebrating festivals, community rallies and youth meetings

Lastly, we also work on building child leadership in partnership with NGOs who are domain experts and work on causes like child safety, gender awareness, sexual and reproductive health and self-awareness.

We at Varitra Foundation wish to achieve holistic development of a child and for that, we had to set in motion certain changes for the overall school environment to start showing improvement. For us, collaborating, not only with fellow NGOs but with individuals or Panchayat or Block Education Officer, District Project Coordinator has helped us expand our core capabilities. Our geography was 100% rural and this approach has filled in voids that we as a start-up may have had — whether it was language, perspective or prioritising needs

It has ensured that we did not become roadblocks in our own journey. It also ensured that our stakeholders were not left to become spectators in the process of changemaking.

Challenges with collaboration …

My very first brush with collaboration in social sector goes back to my previous job at TISS Mumbai where I worked in the space of CSR. My job required me to travel across the country, monitor NGOs and present our findings to funders. It was here that we observed how so many NGOs would be working in the same space, say a BMC school in Mumbai for instance. And yet, they would also do their projects in silos. Somehow, each NGO would show some output, but the overall outcome of the school remained low. There was almost no functional linkage or communication between these NGOs. And THAT, for us as a third party, was extremely puzzling! It was then that my colleague, Baljeet Yadav and I conceptualised Varitra and moved back to our home-state — Haryana …

Unfortunately, I feel today, we have somehow reduced collaboration to a process of walking with our legs tied — जिसे कहते हैं टांगों से टांगें जोड़कर चलना जिससे या तो आप ज़्यादा लंबा चल नहीं पाएंगे या फिर गिर जाएंगे….

And this has made so many startups wary of exploring partnerships. Rather, collaboration should be about initiating an ecosystem where everyone does what they are supposed to but in a synergized manner.

For Varitra too, having multiple collaborators has demanded that we often move slow, or take step back and spend a lot of time same-paging. Personally, at times I too have felt that collaboration has affected our organization’s freedom to act independently because we do end up prioritising collaborative activities. So, finding the balance becomes crucial here.

Having said that, Collaboration certainly cannot exist without actual engagement. But it should not also mean ‘sub-contracting’ or working without a clear understanding of purpose or mutual respect. One of the major strengths of collaboration is efficiency and that’s often overlooked.

So many social start-ups continue to duplicate efforts and it only adds more time and labour and eventually, we either burn out or exhaust our resources in the process! So many organisations hesitate to give away their content or ideas or open up their training designs in a field like ours which by value is a non-competitive field.

I also do believe it is important to understand that a collaboration may not last forever. So many times, our team has taken it as a personal failure when we had to close a partnership because we didn’t share the same purpose anymore or weren’t adding any value. We at Varitra slowly learnt every collaboration will run its course or there won’t be enough scope of evolving at a particular point. And that is okay. Collaboration is that it can take place at different stages and in different ways.

Apart from these challenges, I also feel that gaining access to appropriate donors or garner sufficient and continuous funding for such initiatives can be extremely challenging.

To conclude, I’d like to say that organised social work is new in India and it is still evolving. NGOs until the past decades were seen as deterrents or disincentives for business interests & growth. In recent times, however, we have witnessed how corporates can function as powerful growth engines for the social sector. And how NGOs can leverage their expertise and create a synergised ecosystem between government, civil societies and NGOs.

Collaboration represents a new way of doing things.

While I say this, I am also extremely mindful that NGOs are not a homogeneous category. They differ from each other in terms of size and characteristics, and their commitment towards the communities they serve. We therefore need to more & more platforms like Edumentum to nurture ecosystems for collaborations. The CSR Act, has opened another window for us to explore collaboration as an actual approach. If we can find a way to balance the “going ahead” and “giving back”, I feel that collaboration can be an infinite opportunity!