Cherry Picking of NGOs by UR GESTURE

 


The question is why this topic. Why is it important for a crowdfunding website to have an NGO onboarding process, leave alone a stringent one!

There are close to 34 Lac NGOs registered in India. How many do you know and how many do you Trust?

 Personally, the first time I ever interacted with anything close to social service was during my school days when we gathered funds for Helpage India. I was intrigued by the fact that there were gifts for the winner. I was in 5th standard & unaware about their work, yet I used to go from house to house to write the names of the people who donated for this social service. I used to get Rs 5 ( USD 0.067 current) from maximum people. Saddened by the whole collection I used to come back home only to let my mother donate me the rest of the money, just to cheer me up. And happily, I would write names of all the family members on that page which had limited people otherwise. I did this for 2-3 years. Standing in assembly ground, we used to hear the names of the winners who would get bats signed by cricketers, some would certificate, elite one would even get trophies! Every year, I used to stand there hoping under some category my name would be announced. Disclaimer : It never happened :D

I never understood why these well to do families gave such a small amount. This memory is so vivid in my mind even now after almost 20 years!

Years passed by since then and then my 1st face to face interaction with an NGO happened during my under grad, that too because I was trying to impress a girl at that time and she used to volunteer there. Interestingly it was a fun experience.

The 2nd time I interacted with an NGO was during my MBA that too for a Case Study competition. Between the 1st and the 2nd interaction almost 4 years had passed by.

Even during college, very few people were involved with any kind of social work or they didn’t talk about it but that would be topic of some other blog.

The thing is that many people don’t trust NGOs and most of us interact, at least on paper, with an NGO during filing of Tax Return that too via our CA. You know what I’m talking about.

Trust is a consequence. Those families, on whose doors I knocked as a child, didn’t trust the NGO and didn’t know about their work. Even I didn’t know about their work back then; collection was made a part of a yet another competition rather than a gesture of helping the needy. Right now, when I think about it, it was a very bad way of gathering funds but some people might say that sharing of information was also not easy as it is now. But this cannot be an excuse in 2020.

Trust can be built and Transparency is a key to it. For this we have developed a stringent on boarding process of an NGO under Ur Gesture. This helps us shortlist those whose work we have corroborated on ground and can vouch for their ethics.

The process is as below: -

 

We want to leverage the current technology so that, what issues I faced as a child are eradicated in this era!

Trust is a consequence and there is a way to build it!

-Kumar Rishank

Ur Gesture Matters!!

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