On Feb. 18, the TIE-Social Enterprise group presented a panel discussion on  the opportunities and challenges of social impact and philanthropy in India. Panelists Venkat Srinivasan, Emily Rosenbaum and Jeff Bradach shared their views. Dr. Rakesh Pandey, faculty at Olin moderated the panel.

“The TIE Social Enterprise group was founded nearly eight years ago by Raj Melville, Rakesh Pandey, Vithal Deshpande and others. Ranjani Saigal, Vithal Deshpande  and I have served as co-chairs of this  organization,” said Anu Yadav, the executive director of TIE. “We have run several successful social enterprise conferences”. The conferences featured a pitch competition and one of the participants Megan Marcus who was mentored by TIE-CM Pravin Chaturvedi, was recently awarded the prestigious Ashoka Fellowship. 

Venkat Srinivasan, CEO and Chairman, Rage Networks and Board Member, American India Foundation talked of the efforts at AIF. “At AIF we have people on our board who have run very successful businesses. Their skill is the ability to scale projects.  We like to identify successful ideas and help scale them. For example we have MANSI, a project that works in health care. It started out as a small project in Jharkhand and now has scaled significantly in Jharkhand.  We also like to influence policy. For example we influenced several parts of the previous government’s five-year plans” said Venkat.

Emily Rosenbaum CEO, Akshaya Patra Foundation USA, briefly outlined the vision and mission of the foundation and spoke about the kitchens that feed 1.4 million midday meals to government school children. 

Jeff Bradach, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Bridgespan talked briefly about Bridgespan, a company that focuses on social enterprise consulting. Bridgespan has opened a branch in India.  As a professor at Harvard Business School, Bradach has written extensively on scaling social enterprises. 

The government mandate of insisting upon a 2% contribution to corporate social responsibility has had a significant impact on the nature that multinationals give. “ US corporations are now asking us to talk to our Indian counterpart for partnering with us” said Venkat Srinivasan.  â€œHowever when you talk to the Indian group they ask you talk to their bosses in the US. So one needs to build a relationship in India and the US” said Emily Rosenbaum. 

“Scale means different things in different context as does scaling. There is things you need to do to scale from 10 to a 1000 and then the process of going from 1000 – 100,000  is completely different” said Bradach. 

Venkat stressed the importance of impact studies and numbers for getting funding. “How do you get people of non-Indian origin interested in Indian Philanthropies?” Bring them to India and show them your work was the universal answer. “I was invited by Desh to Hubli to see the Akshaya Patra kitchens and that is how I got interested in the effort” said Rosenbaum. 

Dr. Rakesh Pandey talked about the challenge of moving Indian philanthropic dollars from the temples to social cause. 

There were comments on the use of technology for scaling and the importance of creating a professional fundraising team to support philanthropic effort.  

It was a great social enterprise panel and we look forward to more such panels in the future.