No-Cost Extension with Deval Sanghavi Vaaka Media

The Rebuild Conversations is a series in which the No-Cost Extension team checks in with the Rebuild India Fund Investment Committee members to see how they’re doing, what they’ve been learning and how they envisage for the future of the Fund.
Rebuild India’s mission is to provide grassroot organizations with long-term flexible funding that can support them through the course of 5-10 years, without constraints or targets. As of early 2024, the fund has been working with over 142 NGOs from across India.  
In this conversation recorded in January 2024, you can hear Rameez Alam (Catalyst 2030), Deep Jyoti Sonu Brahma (Farm 2 Food), Deepa Pawar (Anubhuti Trust), Anita Patil (Goonj) and Nandita Pradhan Bhatt (Martha Farrell Foundation) talk about the learning and unlearning of past ideas, grappling with the preconceived biases that we all go into the work with and the difficult questions that need to be asked when navigating the sector. 
You can listen to the first two Rebuild Conversations on this feed. To know more about the Rebuild India Fund, the work that it does, or more about the investment committee members go to www.rebuildindiafund.org. 
If you want to listen to more of No Cost Extension, go to https://www.dasra.org/podcast.php where we’ve got show notes, links and a lot more. 

Twenty five years ago Vishal Talreja founded Dream-a-Dream as a voluntary effort in Mumbai with eleven other individuals who were committed to working with young people. 
Since then, Ðream-A-Dream has become a non-profit that works with close to 5 million children across six Indian states, with a vision to provide transformative educational experiences that impart life skills to children living in poverty.
Deval and Vishal have known each other since the beginning of their journeys in the social sector, and over the years their relationship has grown from one of co-travellers in the same sector and strengthened into one of friendship.
After a brief stint in investment banking and running Dream-A-Dream as a volunteer effort, Vishal committed to Dream-A-Dream full time, a decision that wasn’t met with approval by his family. Listen as the Ashoka Fellow and Eisenhower Fellow  speaks candidly about his early years setting up Dream-A-Dream, the societal pressures to conform and get a ‘real’ job and meeting his life partner Suchetha who is now the CEO of Dream-A-Dream. 
In this episode, Vishal also opens up about how building an organization came at the cost of his own mental health and the well-being of his organization.  He speaks of his burnout and depression, and how his physical and mental health forced him to pull back and recalibrate, which led him to found The Cocoon Initiative, which allows civil society leaders to take a break from their work to rest, rejuvenate, reflect and revive their core strengths, clarify their purpose and heal their body, mind and spirit from years of having given fully into one’s cause.
 To know more about the work of Dream-A-Dream please visit www.dreamadream.org. You can find The Cocoon Initiative at https://www.cocooninitiative.org/. 
For more information on No-Cost Extension go to https://www.dasra.org/nce  and follow Deval on X at @deval_sanghavi  and @Dasra
 

Rahima Khatun has been associated with Nari-O-Shishu Kalyan Kendra (NOSKK)  an NGO working extensively with  the rights and dignity of women and children across West Bengal for over two decades. 
The earliest seed for NOSKK was sown on Republic Day in 1952 when Rahima’s father started a community library in their village before going on to open madrassas to promote education amongst both men and women. 
A strong desire to work for the community was ingrained in Rahima as a child and she often spent her weekends building houses, cleaning drains and later worked tirelessly as a youth leader.  But it was attending the UN World Conferences on Women in Beijing in 1995 that close to 50,000 women from across the world attended, that strengthened Rahima’s resolve to work in the field of gender rights through NOSKK.  
In this episode of No-Cost Extension, Deval and Rahima talk about how attending the Beijing conference impacted her and the organisation’s growth, NOSKK’s work in livelihoods, with self help groups and adolescent health and how they intersect. She also speaks about the transformative work of the Migration Resilience Collaborative, changing gender norms and destigmatising mental health in the communities they work with and within her organisation. 
As a member of the Rebuild India Fund, Rahima shares how unrestricted funding has made a huge change to NOSKK’s way of working and how being a part of the cohort has helped them in myriad ways.
Mahaswetha Chakraborty, a member of the Rebuild India Fund communications team was the translator during this conversation. 
To know more about the work of NOSKK please visit https://www.noskk.in/
For more information on No-Cost Extension go to https://www.dasra.org/nce  and follow Deval on X at @deval_sanghavi  and @Dasra
 

From selling horlicks in the Burdwan coalmine districts to studying filmmaking, this week’s guest on No-Cost Extension, Yasmin Madan has led a rich and varied life. 
After holding various senior level positions at PSI and serving as the Private Sector Lead at Thinkwell, Yasmini joined Co-Impact – a global philanthropic collaborative ‘supporting locally-rooted coalitions working to achieve impact at scale in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.’ At Co-Impact, Yasmin is the Director and US Lead for Philanthropic Collaboration.
Her extensive experience running country programs in Zimbabwe, Vietnam and Cambodia working across HIV, malaria, reproductive health, sanitation and cervical cancer led her to realise that there were genuine problems in the system that needed to be dealt with so that the system could serve its people in the long run. 
In this episode, Yasmin talks about how social innovation is not about disruption  but about coordination, collaboration and orchestration. We discuss the difference between funder attribution and contribution, the life changing work of Lend A Hand India, and why we have a moral obligation to impact and scale. 
You can read more about Co-Impact's work here https://co-impact.org/
For more information on No-Cost Extension go to https://www.dasra.org/nce  and follow Deval on X at @deval_sanghavi  and @Dasra
 

Deepa Pawar is the founder and director of the Anubhuti Trust, an organization formed and self-led by women, with the intention to work with youth on developing their leadership so that there are aware and responsible youth in society who can lead change for a more just and equitable world.
In this episode of No-Cost Extension, Deval and Deepa sit down at the Dasra office to talk about the stigmatization of Nomadic and Denotifed Tribes in India from the time of colonial rule, their unacknowledged role in the freedom struggle and how they have been historically viewed as outlaws. 
Deepa speaks of how NDT communities cannot be viewed only through the lens of vulnerability and marginalization, the contribution of women in keeping the culture of the community alive, and how Anubhuti Trust places agency and liberty at the heart of their approach to movement building.
She speaks of her accidental entry into the NGO sector, how Anubhuti came to be formed, the various areas their work touches upon - from Dalit activism to anti-caste feminism to environmental justice. 
Deepa is also a member of the Rebuild India Fund Investment Committee and discusses the need for the development sector to be experimental, the myopic lens through which we often look at results and success and how funders can sometimes get in the way of the work organisations are trying to do.  
For more information on Anubhuti’s work check out their website at https://www.anubhutitrust.org/. 
For more information on No-Cost Extension go to https://www.dasra.org/nce  and follow Deval on X at @deval_sanghavi  and @Dasra
All additional audio courtesy of Anubhuti Trust/Youtube and field recordings. 
 

What is it like to dedicate one's life to working for some of the most under-represented groups? Nandita Pradhan Bhatt is the Director of the Martha Farrell Foundation, an NGO that supports informal, migrant workers, mostly female domestic workers and adolescent children to build their leadership and collective voice against injustice. Nandita has been a civil society practitioner decades, and has worked extensively on gender inclusion and the prevention of sexual harassment against women.
In this episode of No-Cost Extension, Nandita speaks of her childhood on tea plantations in Dooars and Darjeeling, where her father was a senior manager and she had an upbringing that cultivated a deep sense of respect, dignity and privilege. Deval and Nandita discuss the issues that workers face and how they were invisible to her growing up.  But as the Director of the Martha Farrell Foundation these deep issues are now only too obvious to her now that she’s ‘on the other side’. 
After training as a special educator and working with young people, Nandita went back to college for a gender studies degree. She then worked with Dr. Martha Farell at PRIA, working in the space of gender mainstreaming in leadership and conducting gender audits of panchayats. From there her work has gone on to encompass sexual harassment at the workplace, the rights of domestic workers, and more. 
Nandita and Deval discuss equality and equity and the difference between the two, how young people have very definite ideas about what they want, and the Rebuild India fund, which Nandita says her heart is tied to. 
The Martha Farrell Foundation supports practical interventions which are committed to achieving a gender-just society and promoting life-long learning. You can find out more about them at https://www.marthafarrellfoundation.org/
For more information on No-Cost Extension go to https://www.dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on X at @deval_sanghavi  and @Dasra