Svarya

Svarya works to act as an encouragement and support to social change organisations in achieving their goals to bring benefit to the community at large Read more. It was born out of its partners the Growald family’s insistence on identifying eight grantees who were either on the verge of realising their social impact dream, maybe just starting up or were successful in their effort and were looking to diversify. It first helps the target organisation to come up with business plans wherein it tries to identify the special work that sets the organisation apart, coming up with a budget requirement, exposing the organisation to more investors and discovering areas of action that the organisation can think of going into. It also consults its network of leaders and whet the plans effectiveness based on their feedbacks. This effort resulted in enabling the identified organisations to make decisions, find out future course of action, sustain themselves and also grow in the process. It supported Solutions for climate(SFOC) of Korea to create a three-year business plan. Svarya analysed jointly with the organisation as to the why of its existence, how it is going to achieve its goals and what growth strategies that SFOC will adopt. The plan that emerged was used by SFOC as a mainstay for grant proposals and to guide discussions internally on the organization’s strategic direction and externally with current and prospective funders. It partnered with the British Asian Trust to create a framework that could be used by decision makers to assess whether to support a social organisation in the education sector and how the organisation could improve its chances of getting access to funds. Svarya with its efforts came up with the “outcome readiness” framework wherein organisational and programme parameters were defined to enable assessment within a six week period also defining benchmarks, time the organisation would take to improve on its actions and the costs involved. Svarya was approached by a investor to partner with Vasudha Foundation, an organisation involved in the area of climate change and clean energy, to develop a plan for its future. It went about its work by first involving feedback from investors, then from the leadership and thirdly answering critical questions like its achievements in the future, revision plans, building capabilities and funder moods. It has come up with an effective plan for Vasudha Foundation to follow to ensure it achieves its vision. The Chintu Gudiya Foundation who had developed the Tech4dev platform for social sectors engaged Svarya to study the technology component of social work. It observed that currently available platforms are not entirely suited for the social sector and after research arrived at the solution that the platform should being open sourced enabling it to be affordable, regular communication between stakeholders to enable full usage of changes, setting up a small team to tackle issues enabling timeliness of response and a clear message to funders enabling sustainability. To address the fact that the leadership of social organisations are far removed from ground reality Svarya designed simulation models. These models present a variety of real life challenges to the participants like interactions with stakeholders such as government officials and funders, negotiations with partner organizations, organizational considerations such as recruiting and managing teams. The leadership is much more aware and ready through undergoing such simulation training. It has been instrumental in coming up with ten important recommendations to bring Government and civil society together by conducting research involving study of existing policies, interviewing multiple Government officials, convening meeting of all Government departments at state level, meeting civil society leaders and also receiving the guidance of international social sector experts. Svarya was engaged by the Accountability Initiative (AI) to find out and put down a method to re-discover its core identity since it was found that due to expansion and multiple stakeholders the social organisation tends to diversify too much losing its focus. Svarya set out to address this by conducting meetings with stakeholders, engaging with the complete AI team, meetings with the leadership and set a stage for continuous interaction while going forward.