It was less about the money and more about the intent.

Kuldeep Dantewadia has a clear memory of that meeting with a philanthropic donor in the latter half of 2019, which was scheduled for 45 minutes, but lasted over 1.5 hours. Dantewadia, the co-founder of Bengaluru-based non-profit Reap Benefit, was building a community of citizens to solve problems in their local wards and neighbourhoods.

The donor asked him questions about his non-profit model, not from a place of criticality, but curiosity. She wanted to know how Dantewadia planned to translate individual actions to collective problem-solving in order to bring about larger societal change. She was curious about how women were solving local issues vis-a-vis men, and whether Dantewadia’s team encouraged diversity, not just in terms of gender, but by being inclusive of people of different languages, regions and socioeconomic strata. “She made me think deeper about my own work,” Dantewadia recollects.

What he felt more heartened by, however, was that when he was leaving, the donor inquired about his mental health, something nobody had done before. “She said, ‘You look tired, are you sleeping well? Do you take breaks?’ It was refreshing to see somebody ask me that,” he says. “I came out of that meeting energised.”

Soon, Dantewadia received a grant of ₹5 crore over three years, and his association with the donor continues to date. Reap Benefit, he says, has today built a community of over 50,000 people [who he calls ‘Solve Ninjas’], who have taken over 94,000 civic actions, started 3,143 campaigns, and built 552 civic innovations to address local civic issues across the country. This involves mapping water-logging during floods, providing urgent Covid relief to over 1.6 million people, executing campaigns to improve sanitation in government schools, and collaborating with government officials in budgeting for and solving municipal issues.

“We are now able to establish the connection between the work done by individual citizens and the systemic impact it creates,” Dantewadia says. The donor’s accessibility and support over the years, he says, helped him build a more resilient organisation. “That is important in philanthropy, because otherwise, philanthropists come with a worldview and push people on the ground to subscribe to that worldview. Here, it was almost like she was subscribing to our worldview and helping us have more confidence in that.”

Read the full article about Indian philanthropy by Divya Shekhar at Forbes India.