Giving Compass' Take:

• The dignity mindset involves focusing on providing the individual who is being served with compassion, even as organizations scale up and expand their reach. 

• How can nonprofits achieve both scale and personal dignity? What organizations are already doing this well? 

• Find out how one organization is hand-delivering necessities to refugees.

Over two decades ago, Anshu Gupta visited the earthquake-devastated village of Jamak in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. Gupta, who had come as a volunteer to support survivors, knew he would encounter almost unimaginable suffering. What he didn’t anticipate was the sight of relief workers from an aid agency, carelessly dumping bales of donated clothing off the back of a truck.

In his view, the workers’ apparent indifference signaled a lack of respect for people who still had their dignity, even though they had lost everything. A few years later, when he launched a nonprofit called Goonj—which delivers more than 3,000 tons of secondhand clothes and used household materials annually to India’s poorest citizens—he vowed to treat every constituent with a shared sense of humanity.

When confronted with the daily challenge of serving many thousands of constituents, social sector organizations can lose sight of the individual beneficiary, essentially reducing the human experience to numbers on a spreadsheet. Indian nonprofits that embrace a dignity mind-set counteract this impulse by thinking and acting “small.” Even as they extend their reach, they organize around a unit of one: the individual participant.

Read the full article about the dignity mindset by Soumitra Pandey, Rohit Menezes, and Swati Ganeti at The Bridgespan Group.