Notes from Naivasha - part 1

At a time when the world is obsessing over all the Yogi Adityanaths around and is convinced that nothing will change until Marion Kelly takes over as planet leader, I find myself feeling serene and optimistic to a surprisingly high degree. This probably comes from spending the past week at the Acumen global gathering in Naivasha, Kenya.  Every year (since 2014), Acumen selects local leaders and entrepreneurs working on social change projects - about 20 each in India, Pakistan and East Africa - and takes them through a five intense seminars aimed at honing, well, their leadership acumen. The seminars drive the fellows into questioning long held belief systems, challenging their status quos, and sharpening their thinking abilities. I am both proud and humbled to be among the India fellows for the year 2017. 

As I write this, I am very aware that the above description of the seminars is terribly inadequate. I am already a different person from what I was before I went to the first seminar in February 2017. I am more aware of my strengths and inadequacies than I have ever been, and more accepting of the inadequacies than I ever thought was possible. I've had a tendency to talk about my life's story as a series of brightly-lit milestones (medical school, MBA in finance, Indian Navy, Clinton foundation, a passport with 25 countries' stamps, an amazing, adoring husband), and glazing quickly over all the spectacular disasters (a divorce, unending confusion about my life's purpose, a job where I made every textbook leadership mistake). The new me surprises me by recognizing my failures with humility, but also with a sense of strength from what these failures have taught me and how they add to my life's narrative. 

The Acumen fellowship will, I am convinced, turn out to me the biggest milestone of my life. I've just returned from my second seminar as a fellow, which was also the organization's first "Global Gathering", a sanctuary where the Acumen team, fellows and partners got together to share stories of impact and to learn from each other. It was four days of intense thinking, activity and discussions, and I want to record some of the many moments that will always stay with me: 

"Idealism is the new strategic"

- Jacqueline Novogratz, Acumen Founder and CEO, and the Opening Plenary

"Transparency in the face of corruption is that much harder, and that much more powerful"
- Bob Collymore (CEO of Safaricom), talking about the flak he and Joshua Oigara (CEO of KCB Bank) received when they decided to publish their salaries in the public domain.

"One of the smartest things you can do to be successful at work is find yourself a life-partner who can be your champion"
- Bob Collymore again, in a talk with Chris Anderson, who expressed fervent agreement

"Don’t worry about being broken. It’s only in our brokenness that we find our purpose"
"A person is not the worst thing they ever did. Even a murderer is more than a murderer"
"I have a list of four absolutely critical ingredients for creating impact: one, stay proximate to the problem and the communities whose problems you’re trying to solve; two, change the narratives that support poverty and inequality; three, stay hopeful even when there is no hope because that is your greatest power; and four, do uncomfortable things"
- Bryan Stevenson, Founder of Equal Justice Initiative, and one of the most powerful speakers I have listened to

"I went on a 3-day hunger strike to convince my parents to let me go to college"
"At 17, I got on the bus to go to college to a city which was six hours away from home. It was the farthest I had ever been from home. It was the closest I had ever been to freedom."
"My first government job posting was in a village very far from home. My entire neighbourhood came home to tell my father how dangerous it would be if he let me go, and I knew he was under a lot of pressure. That evening, I packed my bag, went to my his room, put the bag next to him and said - 'The bus leaves at 6 AM. If you believe in me, please wake me up at 5 AM and drop me at the bus station.' The next morning, he was standing proudly with me at the bus station. I had learned the power of words"
- Shamim Akhtar, teacher in Pakistan government education department, and Acumen 2015 fellow

"We got so many rejections we started to see them as the norm"
"My biggest lesson is that impact work is a marathon rather than a sprint. It needs a lot of patience. And as you run the marathon, treat yourself with respect. Recharge your batteries often. Invest in family, relationships."
- Ned Tozun, Co-founder D-Light, discussing the idea of scale with Chris Anderson

"People who love charts can change the world."
- Sasha Dichter, Acumen's Chief Innovations Officer, summarising the D-light journey

"Courage only comes with purpose. The crises in my mother's life gave me purpose; my purpose gave me courage, and courage gave birth to the entrepreneur in me"
- Otim Gerald, Co-Founder, Ensibuuko, a Fintech Company based in Uganda and rapidly growing to other east African nations.

"Data makes underserved people visible and gives them a voice"
- Tonia Kariuki, CMO, Africa, GE Healthcare

"I may have discovered my purpose late in life, but people in my family live long. I'm only in my 50s so I have 50 more years to work hard"
- Gayathri Vasudevan, CEO Labournet

If all the sessions I participated in expanded my mind, the friendships that expanded my heart were even more powerful. I learned that Sonali and I are basically the exact same person; we just look different. Fahad and Zubin discovered what might be the one thing that can tell Indians and Pakistanis apart - turns out that the head nod that says 'I agree with you' is an absolutely Indian thing, and Pakistanis find it as inexplicable and funny as the rest of the world does. I made friends with Bola who is an epidemiologist working in public health in Kenya and who went to work in hardcore advertising for a year because she wanted to learn to package healthcare advice better. We played holi and learned to dance the Attan and the Eskesta (maybe 'learned' is a stretch, but we tried). I will never forget my story-walk with Zahoor, who is an Acumen 2010 fellow, and who generously shared with me stories about his struggle-filled years in the development space, and about his large, loving family which is an interesting mix of tradition and openness. Neither will I forget my 3 AM conversation in the garden with Shabir, fighting cold and sleepiness, because I could not stop listening to the stories of his childhood - with humor and pride, he described to me how he loved reading so much that he would fish out old newspapers from the trash he was employed to clean.

In the midst of all this intense learning and bonding, two other things happened. One, my own cohort - the India 2017 fellows - became even closer and became the family I constantly found myself drifting to, every few hours, to feel recharged and loved and accepted. And two, I found that I am no longer uncomfortable about being in this space of career transition. Like Gayathri Vasudevan, I intend to live long and work for a long time in building a world of equal opportunities and access.

Click here for Notes from Naivasha - part 2 (Business Insights)

Acumen is a global VC fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches and a core philosophy of "patient capital" to build strong, sustainable organizations which deliver goods and services to address poverty-related issues globally. As of 2015, it has invested over $100 M USD in over 100 enterprises across 6 portfolios: water, health, housing, energy, agriculture, and education.

A subset of my Acumen India 2017 family: superstars who work in education, sanitation, financial inclusion, child rights.....

Notes from Naivasha - part 2 (Business Insights)

One of my most amusing, humbling yet empowering experiences at the Acumen global gathering was that every single professional or personal crises that I've experienced seemed to be a textbook case. I described in detail what I thought was a particularly twisted team dynamic issue to Barbara Grant, CEO Crux Consulting, expecting a lot of sympathy and compassion, only to have her exclaim in joy - "Oh, that is my favourite kind of problem!". Here is a summary of some session insights I plan to revisit multiple times for the rest of my career:

"Impact work is a long term career. If you really want to change the world, you need to work in a 50-year context, possibly even longer."
"Failure allows us to both learn and iterate. And what stops us from seeing this is the pressure of urgency that we put on ourselves - the pressure that tells us to 'either do it yesterday, or run away'. We need to be urgent, but we also need be patient. Just like we need to be both humble and proud."
"The one who knows his WHY can endure any HOW."
- From Maryam Mohiuddin (Founder, Social Innovations Lab) and Mina Shahid's (Co-founder, Numida Technologies) session on "Befriending failure in your lifelong commitment to social change"

"Understand that everything that you find painfully annoying about the 'difficult people' you work with is like a two-sided hook - the other party is as hooked as you are, and nothing useful can happen until you get this hook out"
"First, unhook if you can, or choose to be strategic if you can't. Second, be as curious as you can be, and really seek to understand. Third, establish trust. Fourth, allow for grace and prioritize the future"
- From Barbara Grant's session which had the absolutely irresistible title "Unlikely Allies: When you need to work with people with different values, roles, priorities"

"Start-ups need to be based in autonomy, scale needs to be based in structure. So when start-ups move to scale, processes and people need to move from autonomy to structure. This typically creates a lot of tension."
"Leaders in the impact space need to spend about 20% of their time in coaching and mentoring their team"
"The biggest cause of failure in early stage organizations is a badly defined value proposition and mission statement. For organisations in series B funding stage, the biggest causes of failure are the people - leadership and team."
- Justus Kilian, Post investment manager, Acumen, in a discussion on taking organizations to scale

"Rarely can a response make a crises situation better. What makes things better is human connection"
"It IS possible to express non-resonating feedback without being judgmental. It just needs courage, authenticity, and a little practice."
- Prerak Mehta and Neel Shah's session on Empathy

Notes from an NGO start-up

Mentor Me India (MMI) is a Bombay-based NGO working in the space of mentoring. We match, support and measure progress of structured mentoring partnerships where the mentees are 9 to 15-year-old children in low income communities and the mentors are professionals looking for meaningful volunteer work. Our work is driven by our mission: to empower children in low income communities to grow to their full potential through enduring one-to-one partnerships with strong role models. We currently support over 400 mentor-mentee pairs across 12 locations in Mumbai, and are building plans to become a national organization in the next five years. To find out more about our work, please visit the website or write to us at info@mentormeindia.org.

It is exactly four months since I joined the MMI team, and now is a good time to summarize my impressions from this time. It had seemed like an unconventional move, the transition from an organization with a long history of public health work to an innovative NGO start-up. But time has shown that following my instincts may have been a good idea. It has been a roller-coaster – four months of exhilarating successes and heart-stopping worries - but every day has been satisfying, intellectually as well as emotionally. I've spent a lot of time struggling with the jargon (so what is the difference between a “group mentoring session” and a “mentor-training session” and an “induction session” again?) and figuring out priorities. But there are events that stand out, and the four month anniversary is a good time to record some of them:

“These children have changed in ways that I never expected”

17 April 2016: I met Ashlesha Chitnavis, the CEO of Udaan, an NGO where MMI has been supporting a mentoring program since January 2016. We remind mentors that 6 months is too early to notice visible change in their mentees, and that it is important to be patient, but Ashlesha’s enthusiastic approval made my day: “If you had told me, six months ago, that I would see Vivek coming to class, not throwing things, and actually asking the teacher a question, I would not have believed you. I don’t know what Vinesh (Vivek’s mentor, who works with L&T) did, but the boy has been transformed. And he’s not the only one”. When a school partner is keen on enrolling more children as mentees, we know we’re doing something right.

My first mentor orientation session

4 June 2016: Around the time I was interviewing for the ED’s role, I was also interviewed to be a mentor (my mentee is an 11-year-old girl who lives in a slum in the western suburbs). All mentors who clear the interview and background checks go through a half-day “orientation session” before meeting their mentees. This was a fascinating experience, not in the least because of the people I met. There aren’t many places in the city where you have people from such varied contexts - marketing professionals, architects, physicians, actors - connecting and openly sharing anxieties. We learned that the drivers of success in mentoring relationships (trust, mutual respect, dependability) are the same as drivers of success in any relationship; we learned that the one-to-one mentoring we had signed up for would include multiple supporters– the mentees’ parents and the MMI team, among others.

“I ran in the pinkathon – it was the best day”

9 July 2016: the day I was introduced to my mentee. Mentors and mentees are matched through a simple algorithm and meet each other in group settings the first few times. MMI does this in style – as mentors came in, they got name tags with cryptic drawings (I had a tree and Prashanth had a pencil next to his name). The kids seemed more confident than the mentors, who were a little overwhelmed by everything they learned at orientation. It took Priyanka (not her real name) less than a minute to find me: “You have a tree next on your nametag, and so do I. That means you’re my didi.” Our small talk was effortless. We learned that we both like running (she ran the pinkathon last year!) more than dancing. When I asked her why she signed up for the program, she said: “You will be my didi, you will teach me to speak English, and you will make me more confident”. I hope to do all that and more.

“My mentee has given me more than I will ever give her”

10 July 2016: “Graduation” for the mentor-mentee pairs who were matched in Summer 2015, was as heart-warming as one would expect. What repeatedly came up was that mentors were convinced that their lives had improved after they became role models to children who, in spite of all their difficulties, approach life with nothing less than perfect joy. The mutual trust, respect and affection was palpable – and we hope will lead to lifelong friendships which will change the life trajectories of these children.

“I want all 70 of my children to be healthy and successful”

16 July 2016: The induction session (the day when mentors and mentees are introduced to each other) at the Navi Mumbai center was a strange mix of hilarity and sombreness. Our NGO partner here is an orphanage run by pastor Manoj and his wife Priya whose story is so interesting that it will make a book one day. About a decade ago, this middle class couple decided that they had had enough of feeling sorry for children they saw begging in the street, went ahead and adopted four orphans. They barely had enough to make rent, but they optimistically decided that things would work out. And as often happens, they did. Their home grew into an orphanage which is now a registered entity with a staff of 12, and currently supports nearly 70 abandoned children and orphans. Of these, 28 are 9 to 15 years old, and all of them need mentors. We’ve so far found only half that number, and the pastor has had to take the tough decision to choose the 15 that that most need mentoring. The induction was one of the most energetic that our team has seen, and our only discomfort was that the 13 kids who don’t have mentors yet kept wistfully peeping into the room where the mentor-mentee pairs were writing songs together.

“Positive Closure”

28 July 2016: I was able to speak to the lovely Alejandra Avina who is a match specialist at Boston’s Big Sister organization, which has been matching and supporting bigs (“mentors”) and littles (“mentees”) in Boston for over 60 years. Alejandra generously gave me nearly two hours of her time, and was amazingly helpful. The biggest takeaway from that conversation was the idea of “positive closure” – about how important it is to end all mentoring partnerships on high, positive notes, and not around themes of guilt or abandonment (again, true for all relationships).

Things continue to be challenging. Even before we have finished patting each other on the back for recruiting and matching another fantastic batch of mentors this summer, we realize that the deadline to find a new office space is less than month away. The impact assessment for last year’s mentoring program, the exit interviews for the mentors who have had to leave us, the closure conversations for children whose mentors have discontinued the program, the website, plans for the year ahead, fundraising – there is so much that needs to be done. A friend recently said, “I just have one question for you. Which one of your problems will you chase first?”. It’s a good question; the prioritization of the issues is issue in itself, and one that keeps changing. The good news is that we have managed to build ourselves a team of extremely talented people, and we’re well on our way.