By Gijs Spoor | Lead
UnLtd Tamil Nadu kicked off 2016 with a bang!
Our sector event in Chennai - Annual Changemakers' Day
Our efforts to build a regional hub for UnLtd Tamil Nadu in Chennai culminated this quarter with our Annual Changemakers' Day, in partnership with IIT Madras, Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI) and Center for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CSIE). 80+ participants from the corporate, academic and social sectors convened at IIT Madras on February 5th. The goal of the event was to strengthen the local support ecosystem for social entrepreneurs, and mobilize key sector stakeholders to support our growth and increase our reach to investees across Tamil Nadu. Sessions facilitated by resource persons from IIT Madras, MCCI Chennai, Ashoka Youth Venture, Villgro, Gandhi Fellowship, Nalanda Foundation spanned opportunities for building social entrepreneurship as a viable alternate career option, social entrepreneurial journeys, resource mobilization and corporate communication strategies, legal and governance matters as well as networking spaces for our investees. We're thankful to all our partners, facilitators, and participants for making this a successful and inspiring event, and look forward to Annual Changemakers' Day 2017 for even more ecosystem growing.
Our investees
Besides statistics, I feel it makes sense to share with you an inspiring story of what happened last week to one of our social change makers called Logammal, a village school teacher working on children parliaments across Tamil Nadu. She was invited by a group of school children in a far off district to come and teach about democracy. Having replied that she had no budget, the children decided to add up their savings and pay for her bus fare and accommodation! No NGO handholding, no government, no adults were involved. I was struck by the greed to learn of these 14 year olds in rural India, moreover about a topic as abstract as democracy and governance! (see picture). And imagine the long-term impact on their community when they grow up trusting that they can participate in development and avoiding corruption.
Still, here are the statistics: 9 projects from across the state graduated in March 2016 and 7 projects are still receiving support until next September. Together, these changemakers have impacted thousands of lives and are continuing to attack underlying causes of poverty, exclusion and exploitation. On average each social startup becomes a job creator for 30 people, raises 14 times the amount of money we help them with and impacts 6,000 lives (data from external evaluation by Dalberg Consultants).
Please see our 9 min video for more details and testimonials. And even better: share it with your friends :)
Our organization
Our team also got off to a flying start this quarter. After 3 years of running with short term interns and in an effort to retain talent, we have built a very strong team of professionals including a professional from Rajasthan with 6+ years experience, three returning long term international volunteer graduates and of course Dr Shiva, myself and Revathy who is in the process of joining Auroville. With now seven full-time team members and a set of standardized key business processes in place, our organization is all set for its next stage of growth.
Our key partnerships formed in the last months include with MCCI, IIT Madras, Ashoka youth venture, as mentioned earlier, as well as Young Presidents’ Organisation (YPO, a global network of young Chief Executives) for an investment deal with 5 of our investees. In the UK we keep working with Social Starters who send teams of pro bono professionals on 6 week management assignments that are extremely popular with our startups.
Our challenge
As mentioned we are maturing from a volunteer to a professional team, which will allow a shift in quality and reliability. We are now looking for "friends of UnLtd Tamil Nadu" to support us with a recurring donation. We are grateful for any amount of help. We will keep you updated with a behind the scenes look into the reality of social change in the Auroville bioregion and share many more uplifting stories like that of Logammal. Please keep supporting us and consider making a recurring donation on our Global Giving page.
THANK YOU!
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