From A Corporate Career To Founding a Social Enterprise
At one time, Amitha Pai was on the path to a rewarding corporate career. With pedigreed qualifications – an Engineering degree from Manipal, an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB) – and a stint at the competitive Aditya Birla Leadership Program, she was being groomed for leadership roles.
At that juncture, she experienced a personal crisis that set her thinking. She realized that more than money, her time on the planet was a limited resource. How could she spend her life in a way that was personally meaningful? Though her corporate jobs had been stimulating, she wasn’t galvanized by profit-making missions. She needed something more, a sense perhaps of social purpose.
Her successful transition to founding One Good Step can offer pointers to anyone considering moves from mainstream careers into the social space.
Examine Your Personal Values
Amitha was born in Udupi, at a time when the temple town still had a spartan, small-town character. “It’s quite different now,” she says.
Her father was a cardiologist, and she recalls patients thronging their home, awaiting appointments. While his practice was his sole means of earning money, he wasn’t insistent about charging everyone. Many low-income patients were treated for free. Sometimes farmers would offer produce in lieu of fees. Amitha believes that her father played a strong role in shaping her character, imbuing her with a moral map to navigate the world.
Her mother, an enterprising homemaker, ensured Amitha picked up values related to sustainability and compassion. “She used to exude a silent kindness, a quality often found among Indian middle class women.”
Expand Your Horizons
After her Engineering at Manipal, Amitha was offered a job at Infosys in Mangalore. She was ready by then to leave Udupi and explore a larger city. She ended up spending five years at Infosys, with the last two years at Los Angeles.
One of the aspects that struck her about her American colleagues was their impulse to spend all their earnings. She herself had been raised in a household where saving for the future was emphasized.
Garner Wide Experiences
When she returned to India, she realized that she didn’t want to progress in the software space. So she opted to do an MBA to explore wider management roles. After graduating from the intensely competitive Indian School of Business (ISB), she landed a role in the Aditya Birla Leadership Program. Rotating through various organizations inside the marquee group, she worked in cement, in their grocery format – MORE – and with their lifestyle brands in fashion. She was exposed to various aspects of business in planning, strategy and marketing.
Use Life Changes To Evaluate Aspirations
In the meanwhile, a shift in personal circumstances entailed a deeper review of her own purpose. She could no longer relate to a career that was primarily driven by profits. At the same time, she needed to tide over various liabilities she and her family had built up over the years: “You take on EMIs so it’s not something that you can immediately just leave and go.” But an internal voice was urging her to also do something else.
To help fund personal expenses, she decided she would undertake consulting assignments. Before transiting to the social space, she not only audited her earning potential, but also her spending potential. She advises everyone to perform similar assessments.
Try Working In The Social Sector
For her first six months in the social space, she worked with different organizations in Bangalore. These enterprises were handling a wide range of issues – from tree planting to helping the visually impaired to rural development. “Because I had absolutely no experience in the field, I wanted to immerse myself and discover my calling.” Realizing soon enough that working with other ventures wouldn’t perfectly align with her inclinations, she decided to set up something on her own.
Be Willing For A Tough Start
After setting up One Good Step, she contends that the first two years were tough. She needed to wade through a host of regulations, even as she established a body of work. Without records of past performance, organizations cannot avail of 80G tax breaks or CSR funding from corporates. Resolute about sticking it out, she invested her own funds to kickstart the enterprise.
Build Experience with Small Trials
One Good Step started with just one street child. On one of those noisy, trafficky mornings in Bangalore, Amitha noticed a little hustler. Gradually, she started bringing a few street children into an anganwadi, where she imparted basic literacy, numeracy, and lessons on hygiene and civic consciousness. A few like-minded people, including a veteran from the social space, started assisting her.
Eventually realizing that Bangalore had more non-profits than rural areas, she moved her projects to underserved places like Chikbalapur and Tumkur. In the early days, on many occasions it was just her, singlehandedly doing everything.
Ride Through Self Doubt
She recalls one hot day in a village, when she was feeling physically fatigued, and started wondering about what she was doing. After all, she could have stayed comfortably ensconced inside an airconditioned office. Besides, she had forgone the reassuring monthly ping, when salaries were credited. She decided then that she would persist for two years at least, and then take a call on whether she should explore alternate pathways.
Eventually, however, as she started hiring field professionals, and expanding her projects, she sensed she had made the right choice. Attuned to a “credibility deficit” in the NGO space, she started tapping into her personal networks at ISB and Infosys for funds, volunteers and other forms of support. “There are millions of NGOs, but not all are trustworthy,” she says. Even among the places where she had volunteered earlier, she recalls that only about 40% of the organizations were delivering on their promises.
Design Programs Around Existing Needs
One Good Step started a Streets to School program in partnership with Pragathi Charitable Trust, to ensure that street children did not miss out on critical schooling years. Children of migrant laborers are often denied education as they are saddled with the caretaking of younger children. Or expected to contribute to the family’s income.
The NGOs created a bridge school, where children were allowed to bring younger siblings and awarded free lunches. While the littler ones were being supervised in a daycare-type facility, the school age children were imbued with basic skills to lift their learning levels.
So far, the team has ensured that at least 322 children have been drawn out of treacherous streets and ushered into mainstream schools.
Partner With Other Enterprises
In another project called “Light for Education,” One Good Step tied up with SELCO, an enterprise that builds solar-power, to offer solar powered lamps to village children in Class 10. The lamp batteries needed to be recharged inside schools, bolstering school attendance while reaping the lowered cost of shared infrastructure. Such lights ensured that kids did not need to worry about sudden power cuts or voltage drops. More than 3,700 kids across 17 schools have been given solar lamps, which will be passed onto future batches of 10th Graders.
Stay Attuned to Other Issues
When Amitha also realized that other learners were being held back from their books because of visual impairments, she decided to partner with a hospital to get their eyes checked, and spectacles donated.
Tying up with Sankara Eye Hospital, she had corporate volunteers trained to conduct initial eye screenings. Children who were showing signs of ophthalmic deficits were taken to the Hospital for further treatment. After all, delays in eye treatments are a double whammy: leading to further visual impairments and learning losses.
Through this program, they reached more than 50,000 children. They also had school teachers trained in primary screenings, to cut short treatment delays for future batches.
Nanna Kannu also helped cement the organization’s credibility in the NGO sector. This was about two-and-a-half years after starting out.
Respond To Unforeseen Crises
COVID was another unforeseen crisis, that required new, urgent responses even while cutting back on earlier programs. During the first wave, they assisted with relief initiatives for migrants and daily-wage workers who returned to their hometowns. During the second wave, they helped connect people with hospitals for a host of treatments including neonatal and maternity-related issues.
With kids now returning to schools, but with families still struggling with resources, they are focused again on ramping up the infrastructure at public schools. Amitha observes that many families that had earlier opted for private schools can no longer afford them, leading to a surge inside Government schools.
The system wasn’t prepared to handle such an influx, with many suffering from inadequate classrooms, poor quality play areas and the lack of drinking water among other gaps. One Good Step has helped ramp up the physical infrastructure, transforming these schools into spaces that kids would be happy to return to. They have also supplemented learning programs in some areas, and added counselling services to build confidence and address mental health issues.
Build Word-of-Mouth Credibility
Amitha finds that volunteers drawn from corporates are often powerful word-of-mouth marketers for her organization. When they get a first-hand feel of the work being done, they encourage other volunteers to sign up for work or donate funds.
One Good Step currently has a team of about 15 people – some of whom work directly with the organization, and others on a contract or project basis. So far, they have been growing organically, drawing from the support of partners and organizations who believe in their mission.
Advice to Folks Considering a Move into the Social Space
- If you can’t forego your monthly earnings, look for a job in the social sector rather than setting up something of your own. That way, your earnings can be protected to an extent.
- Be willing to work very hard and with meagre resources. A lot of admin assistance and other perks available in corporate jobs will be absent here.
- A lot of your corporate learnings may have to be “unlearned” in this space.
- You require large reserves of empathy to thrive in this sector.
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