Half-Time!

An opportunity to exercise leadership where it is needed most? Check. An opportunity to form an intimate perspective on the challenges facing the millions of lives social enterprises are trying to impact? Check. An opportunity to learn first-hand from the social entrepreneurs and change-makers that are defining the social enterprise landscape in a country as vast, diverse, and complex as India? Check. An opportunity for unparalleled personal growth? Check. This is the mental check-list that I went through when I first made the decision to move to India last year as part of the Piramal Fellowship.  Reflecting back on the first half of my journey, I can honestly say I have gained all that I had hoped to from this experience and more.

I was brought on as a fellow with Idiom Design & Consulting where my project is to come up with an innovative financing model to extend design thinking to social enterprises.  The philosophical bedrock of the project is the notion of “design democracy” – that design thinking need not be a luxury that only big businesses can afford, but it can and should be made accessible to social enterprises where indeed it can be a powerful catalyst for growth. With significant background in finance but zero knowledge of design, my project presents me with a delicious challenge!  It was at Idiom that I would first learn about the concept of design thinking, which goes deeper than simply designing better products and services for the base of the pyramid, and gets to the very heart of designing entire systems and business models that most effectively serve under-served populations.

Over the past nine months, I have travelled to over 20 cities, small towns and villages. In Orissa, I worked with Paul Polak, founder of Spring Health, to help design solutions for clean drinking water for untouchable communities where access is constrained not just by market forces, but also by social norms. I went on a 10-day road-trip across the heartland of India, to interview and capture on film the dreams of 200+ ordinary Indians for their own lives and their country as part of Idiom’s Dream-In project.  When not on the road, my days are otherwise spent in sunny Bangalore, which is fast becoming a hotbed for social innovation.

The most important part of this Fellowship has been the nature of the fellowship itself.  When faced with challenges, and there are challenges galore, be it working in an unstructured environment or simply missing loved-ones back home, the camaraderie and support of the fellow fellows has carried us through.

Here’s looking forward to the next half of the fellowship with renewed vigor, purpose and commitment to carry forth our tasks of enabling social enterprises to effectively address the most pressing social problems around us!