Making History: A Vision for India Giving Day 2024
By Alex Counts, Executive Director, India Philanthropy Alliance
Like any American born by the early 1990s, I can remember where I was on September 11, 2001. Among Baby Boomers and previous generations, no one can forget watching Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in July 1969. Each age and each field of human endeavor has its iconic moments that herald new eras, new possibilities, and occasionally, new dangers.
In philanthropy, who can forget when Ted Turner pledged, in an inspired and improvisational moment in 1997, to donate $1 billion to the United Nations? (The last person he spoke to before he took the stage was a mentor of mine and he later told me about how it all came about: an amazing story!) Likewise, the first wave of grants announced by MacKenzie Scott in 2020 shook up the world of giving.
When Manoj Bhargava, Vinod Khosla, Azim Premzi, and Romesh Wadhwani took the giving pledge about a decade back—the first four people of Indian heritage to do so—everyone knew that something significant had changed in terms of the internationalization of philanthropy.
Last year, we launched India Giving Day as a national campaign based on the giving day model that had, up until that time, mainly been used to galvanize giving to local nonprofits at the metro and state level in the United States. The people behind North Texas Giving Day were kind enough to mentor us, but our challenges in designing and executing the first national day of giving focused on a single country were significant and, in many ways, unprecedented.
The bottom line is that we succeeded. With the assistance of 25 leading nonprofits (including 14 represented on the board of the India Philanthropy Alliance), the Rural India Supporting Trust, Mastercard, Bank of America, our National Co-Chairs and our Steering Committee, and above all our 1,031 individual donors (who contributed, on average, $133 each), we got this new national tradition off the ground successfully. Together, we realized our goal of making giving to India more attractive, collaborative, fun, youth-friendly, transparent, impactful, and, perhaps above all, joyful. But much remains to be done.
I am confident that March 1 of next year—India Giving Day 2024—will be another such philanthropic milestone that we will all look back on with awe in the years ahead. But the team at the India Philanthropy Alliance needs your help to pull it off. This year, our ambitions and the possibilities for India Giving Day are much greater compared to our maiden voyage. We want to more than double our impact. We envision more than a dozen organizations announcing the largest gifts in their histories on March 1, 2024. We imagine events—as small as a dinner party attended by 8 people in a private home, to a conference or gala boasting more than 1,000 attendees.
Some people ask: Why give to India? After all, it’s an emerging superpower with the world’s fifth largest economy. The truth is that India is also home to more people living in poverty than any country in the world with a gathering tidal wave of diabetes and other lifestyle diseases that impact the rich and the poor, and those in between. Furthermore, nearly one in three young Indians between the ages of 15 and 29 is not engaged in either education, employment, or training, and the numbers are even more concerning when it comes to women.
For those of us that have a vision of a poverty-free world, as the United Nations has targeted for the year 2030, India is a great test case. If the world’s most populous country, with all of its advantages—world class educational institutions, a thriving technology sector, an effective civil service, tens of millions of skilled young workers, a large, prosperous, and caring diaspora, and thousands of dynamic civil society organizations—can’t rid itself of the scourge of poverty, what hope do less advantaged countries have?
I have been in the philanthropy world long enough to have met almost all of the world class donors I mentioned earlier in this article. In many ways, they are regular people, just like you and me. As they say, they still have to put their pants on one leg at a time. But their thoughtful generosity can inspire each of us to do what we can do for those who have so far been left out of India’s startling progress.
Where will you be on March 1, 2024? How will you and organizations you are involved in be part of this historic day?
Together, we can make history. Please join our movement!