Young people, students especially, often ask me, “What should I study to best prepare for a career in the social sector?” My answer has been, “Pick a course of study that plays to your strengths and aptitude because the social sector needs every skill-set imaginable.” Over almost 23 years in the sector – as a fundraiser, grant-maker, campaigner, researcher, academic, activist and, yes, manager — I’ve had the immense good fortune to work alongside great talents with degrees in engineering, law, finance, marketing, literature, business management, social work, journalism, human resource management, and some of the most effective leaders in the field who have no formal qualifications at all, just the lived experience of inequity and a burning zeal to ensure justice. 

Possibly the best illustration of the need for, and value of, diverse skill sets in the social sector that I’m familiar with might be CRY – Child Rights and You. CRY was founded in 1978 by Rippan Kapur – an airline steward with a BA from Bombay University. He did not come from a wealthy family, did no formal ‘needs assessment’, ‘benchmarking exercise’  or ‘feasibility report’ or even start by seeking philanthropic funding. CRY grew organically from his personal efforts to alleviate the conditions of children in his neighbourhood starting while he was still in school. Through sheer conviction and the ability to persuade people of his sincerity – he was able to garner the expertise and services of some of India’s greatest artists, performers, advertising and business management professionals, chartered accountants and lawyers. The organisation he founded has gone on, over the past 40 years, to raise something like Rs. 1000 crores, helped build almost 500 of India’s best child rights NGOs, influenced policy for children at every level from tiny tribal hamlets to amending the Constitution, pioneered some of the most innovative means of fundraising, helped create the nonprofit ecosystem as we know it today through its investments in capacity building and institution building and won dozens of awards in India and around the world.

People often ask what the secret formula of CRY’s success is. I believe that one of the key ingredients is the diversity of talent that CRY has always welcomed into its fold, its ability to draw on expertise from a very wide range of fields, cross-fertilising ideas and backgrounds to constantly evolve not just its programmes and its fundraising but also its adoption of technology, its early investments in brand-building, and in building capacities – of its own staff, its partners and the sector as a whole. When someone asked Rippan what the best thing they could do for children, he is said to have answered, “The best thing you can do for children is the thing that you do best.” This, I believe, is what allowed him to see every individual and organisation as a potential resource and ally for children. 

So is ‘corporatisation’ the solution to the sector’s many challenges? I often hear that non profits need to be “more business like.” People who leave their corporate careers to cross over to the social sector are treated like self-sacrificing martyrs or saviours of blighted NGOs. Despite relentless reports of corporate malfeasance and catastrophic breakdowns in governance at some of the most respected businesses, the corporate sector is continually held up as a model of efficiency, effectiveness, leadership and innovation to non-profits. If only, we are told, we would adopt ‘corporate best practices’ in strategy, systems, structure, skills, staffing, governance and, increasingly, even style, we might finally break out of the mindsets that keep too many NGOs small, slow and starving. With the CSR mandate operational since 2014, many NGOs across India have scrambled to acquire the board members, staff, metrics, skills and language that will, they hope, unlock their slice of the CSR pie.

Responses in the sector to ‘techno-managerial’ mindsets have, I find, become extremely polarised. There are those who are almost Brahminical in their obsession with maintaining the purity of their mission and respond with knee-jerk repudiation of any person, idea or tool that might have originated in the business world. On the other hand, there are growing numbers at the other extreme who  unquestioningly import corporate mindsets and methods even at the cost of diluting their mission and values. Only by doing so, we hear increasingly, will we break out of the shackles that prevent us from achieving scale, sustainability and influence. Not only do these two groups seldom interact, each appears to hold the other in utter disdain.