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Ending global poverty in our lifetime is an audacious mission. So many of Global Washington’s network works on pieces of this goal from different angles – increasing girls’ education or affordable housing, improving health and decreasing disease, or any of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Sattva works across many issue areas and partners, while focusing on scalable solutions for social impact. Given the complex nature of poverty, by design Sattva works across sectors, stakeholders, services and geographies.
In the beginning, Sattva’s focus was on nonprofits across both strategy development and execution support. It slowly began to work with more and more nonprofit clients. Through these clients, Sattva started engaging with the funding ecosystem, and now they work with anyone with impact related goals – non-profits, social enterprises, foundations, corporates, impact investors, multi/bi-laterals, government and philanthropists.
Today Sattva is India’s largest social impact consulting/implementation firm. Beyond advisory work, they continue to have a strong focus on outcomes and getting hands on to support execution. Given their unique positioning in the sector, Sattva has also launched and managed several collaboratives spanning various stakeholders, across sectors and reaching millions of people (such as the Bharat EdTech Initiative, which improves learning through digital means for millions of children in India).
Sattva works around four key segments: nonprofits, foundations, corporates, and impact funds and social enterprises. They have a few cross-cutting horizontals that are focused on functional areas: research, tech and data, assessments, and recruitment and executive search. They have also established practice areas to go deep into thematic areas such as agriculture, healthcare, education, climate, and digital platforms. The team is distributed across India, the United States, Copenhagen, London and Singapore.
Sattva does a significant amount of work across agriculture, entrepreneurship, and skilling/employability to help enable inclusive growth. Throughout everything, they try to integrate a gender lens as much as possible, as there is often a gender divide when it comes to market systems and the strong patriarchy that is prevalent across the ecosystem. In Sattva’s work with funders, they often aim to influence capital to go towards marginalized communities and underserved geographies. For example, a lot of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) income is generated in Mumbai and goes into the state of Maharashtra. Through their clients, Sattva influences about 30% of CSR in India and they often encourage clients to focus on underserved communities in other areas of India.
Read the full article about Sattva by Tyler LePard at Global Washington.