CB Bureau‘Sustainability, social equality and the environment are now business problems. And corporate leaders can’t depend on governments to solve them,’ said Peter Senge, founder of the Society for Organisational Learning (SOL). Senge’s principles find an echo in the ideologies behind Smile Foundation formed in 2002 by two investment bankers who, along with like-minded corporate professionals and technocrats, decided to finance, handhold and support genuine grassroots initiatives targeted at providing education and health to underprivileged children, in the process, becoming the first ever grantmaker and changing the face of thousands of lives.
Smile Foundation promotes and catalyses universal education among underprivileged children, creates the process to embrace these children into the mainstream in a sustained manner, enables them to emerge as productive assets, and sets the foundation for nation building.
It believes in empowerment of underprivileged children and youth through education. It identifies and builds the capacity of grassroots-level NGOs. At present, Smile Foundation is reaching out to a large number of underprivileged children and youth through more than 110 welfare projects spanning areas like education, healthcare, livelihood and advocacy, across 21 states of India. Soon, the organization will be expanding its knowledge-based activity across South Asia.
Education to deprived children
Musahars’? infamous as ‘rat eaters’? are the most exploited and deprived among the poor in Bihar. They hunt rats and eat them in their struggle to fight hunger. They are still regarded as untouchables, live as outcasts in the difficult-to-access embankment areas of the Kosi river, and have only physical labour to sell and earn a paltry sum of Rs 20 a day.
They are the darkest spot in Bihar’s literacy drive with a literacy rate of hardly three per cent. Smile Foundation in association with Shoshit Seva Sangh runs a free residential English-medium school for the Musahar children. Children here are enrolled right from pre-school and given non-formal education up to class IX. There are currently 204 students in the school, which is in the course of getting affiliated to CBSE and aims to accommodate 800 to 1,000 students by 2013.
Social venture philanthropy
Smile Foundation underscores the fact that helping is not simply a matter of dispersing money but also of making a deep, long-term commitment and casting a hard eye on results. With this model, the foundation partners with emerging and committed organizations for various programmes. It tries to build their capacity, training them to gradually sustain and scale up themselves and their activities. It initially offers them the opportunity to reach their potential and progressively scale up and bear the entire weight themselves.
The entire management and operation of Smile Foundation is in compliance with the principles of ‘good governance’ and, thus, sets itself apart with its set norms of sustainability, scalability, accountability, transparency, credibility and effective leadership.