The process was a lot harder than we expected. The decisions a lot more difficult to make. It was really awesome to see and hear from the applicants. The quality and depth of the work people are doing in the sector is strong, deep and very thoughtful. We asked for permission from the organizations below to publish their responses. Please do read and comment on the applications. Without further ado, the winners are (in alphabetical order)

Winners

• ANARDE Foundation(ACIL Navsarjan Rural Development Foundation)
• HAQ: Centre for Child Rights
• Hasiru Dala
• Indus Action Initiatives
• Lakeer Foundation
• M.B Barvalia Foundation Spandan holistic mother and child care hospital
• Reading Class Project
• Resource Centre for Interventions on Violence Against Women, Tata Institute of Social Sciences

Waitlist

• Bridges of Sports Foundation
• Ghaswala Vision Foundation

We split all the finalists into 3 groups and a couple of us spent approx 45 minutes with each finalist. We then wrote up our thoughts and final ranking and discussed them on a conference call. Our initial application call proposed that we would support 4 NGOs. We found it impossible to turn away organizations doing such great work with such focused and specific needs. So we’ve expanded our initiative to accept 8 organizations and have 2 on the waitlist. A few words on common characteristics between the selected organizations:

• They were very specific in their proposal and their interview
• They had very strong reasons as to why this project was important to the organization and how it will help them programmatically
• They had a good sense and commitment to do what will be needed after the grant is over to keep the project going strong, improving and funded within the organization.
• The work that we would do for them has a good possibility of being used for some other NGOs as well, with minor tweaks

From a demographic viewpoint, we had a combination of both old (20+ years old) and new (1 year old) organizations. We also had organizations with very small budgets (INR 2L) to organizations with large budgets (INR 7CR) and across multiple sectors: Health, Governance, Education, Women Empowerment, Sports

To make the above happen, we are now fundraising within and outside our network to raise the additional funds. So yes, we do know the joy and hardship of trying to raise funds for projects that you are passionate about. As always, if you are a funder, please get in touch with us.

We’ll start work with some of the winners in December and the rest shortly thereafter. We’ll keep you updated on a monthly basis, if not more frequently.

Thank you for reading this and being part of our journey.