Giving Compass' Take:

• Vidya Shah at India Development Review writes about the six lessons her organization has learned over a decade, including the importance of collaboration and the role of communities in solution building in philanthropy.

• How can other philanthropists apply this same learning at their foundations? 

• Read these funder lessons from philanthropic failure. 

It has been ten years since we, at EdelGive, set out on our philanthropic journey. Needless to say, we did not do it alone. Our nonprofit partners, funding partners, and colleagues at Edelweiss, all played a vital role in bringing us to this milestone. Here are some of the lessons we have learnt along the way.

  1. Learning by doing: Building our mettle by making mistakes. EdelGive was incubated at Edelweiss, whose parentage and patronage steered our evolution as the philanthropic arm of the company. Even so, I am struck by how much we got wrong.
  2. Treading the Middle Path: Ask questions, many questions! Sometimes, the middle path is simply combining standard output-oriented metrics with asking, ‘where the bullet holes aren’t.
  3. A sectoral focus. Our early areas of focus were education and livelihoods, which we chose intuitively. Being a corporate foundation and wanting to be closely tied with Edelweiss, we wanted thematic areas that would resonate with our Edelweiss colleagues.  But we came across gender equality issues all the time.  So, six years after funding only education and livelihoods-related initiatives, we began developing a women’s empowerment portfolio.
  4. The role of communities in building sustainable solutions. Several studies have shown that the involvement of communities is critical in ensuring improved service delivery and accountability of the public sector.
  5.  The value of systems thinking. The interplay of relationships among government, communities, businesses, civil society, the media, technology, the environment, and the legal system makes a single approach untenable.
  6.  Collaboration. As we grew our work in education, livelihoods and women’s empowerment, we repeatedly heard our peers complain about the lack of collaboration in the sector.

Read the full article about lessons for fellow philanthropists by Vidya Shah at India Development Review (IDR)