Deval Sanghavi
Topics of Interest: Social impact in India, philanthropy, nonprofits, development
Let’s talk about the impact you can make on the world after graduating from Canfield BHP. Our grads start their journey on the forty acres not always knowing what they want to do in their business careers – and that’s okay. Some take the finance route while others take the management path – all noble pursuits. Then, there are those bold enough to forge their own path, who dare to challenge the status quo, and dream of leaving their mark in the world.
Modeling several (if not all) of these traits is Canfield BHP alum and Sugar Land native, Deval Sanghavi (‘97), founder of Dasra – a nonprofit whose core principles place the lives of communities in India at the forefront of all their work. Dasra began as a venture philanthropy fund to invest in early-stage nonprofit organizations in India. Now, they’re one of the most widely recognized names in Indian strategic philanthropy. With Deval at the helm, Dasra has worked with some outstanding change makers who have made huge impacts throughout the world like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Hewlett Foundation, to name a few.
As of today, Dasra has engaged with more than 800 organizations and has impacted a staggering 20 million lives in India. Presently, Dasra is one of the leading nonprofits on the frontlines battling the COVID-19 pandemic across communities in India.
We got the opportunity to speak with Deval and learned more about his career path, working at Dasra, what his experience thus far has been over the last 20 years, and received some sage advice along the way. Read on.
Who is Deval Sanghavi?
I was born and brought up in Houston. I went to UT Austin in the 90s back when a majority of us had to apply to the Canfield BHP program after freshman year. I was very excited to get into the program from my sophomore, junior, and senior years. I built phenomenal relationships and learned a lot along the way.
I followed a typical pathway which was to go into investment banking. It was there that two things happened. One, I graduated a semester early to volunteer with organizations in India. That helped me a lot to shape my own beliefs and thinking of what success looked like and where the need was, and what I thought I would like to do going forward. Then, I worked at Morgan Stanley directly after that six-month experience. That gave me the tools and to a certain extent, the confidence and the ability to pay off my loans to make a shift to the development sector, which is something I thought would happen much later in life. I was able to do that at the age of 24, so in hindsight, it was quite earlier than I expected, especially for graduating with a Canfield BHP degree.
Tell us about the career path you took and your experience after making the shift to the development sector.
I got into Morgan Stanley through a phenomenal fellowship and scholarship program that they had instituted a few years before called the Richard B. Fisher Scholarship Program. It was named after the current CEO at the time but the goal of that program was to provide scholarships as well as internship opportunities for individuals who were not coming from the typical recruitment schools or ivy league schools that Morgan Stanley would typically hire from. There was a group of us from UT that interviewed for the scholarship/internship and a few of us got it.
Spending the summer of my junior year there and having the ability to pay college off through this scholarship was useful and that helped a lot. Through that, I was lucky to get this job offer from Morgan Stanley as well. It was just an amazing opportunity, something I still treasure until this day, and I’m excited to be in that space. But while having that opportunity with the experiences of growing up here in the US, I would visit India quite often to see family, and witnessing the poverty there was like no poverty I’d ever seen. Seeing children, who look more like me, begging at traffic lights was just something I could not get out of my mind.
While growing up and visiting India, I’d always ask my family, “Why aren’t we volunteering, why aren’t we doing something? This is crazy.” They’re eight-year-olds just like I was at the time, begging. I thought, “Why am I not begging?” and trying to reason with the privilege I was given. Wondering why so many others weren’t given that same privilege was something that stuck with me. But because of the honors program, I was able to graduate a semester early and say, “I have a job now”, so I’m doing what needs to be done from a practical perspective, but I thought “Let me also volunteer with organizations in India and see what that is like.” That exposure and experience right after college was highly beneficial.
As a college student, you have no money so you’re not necessarily addicted to that banking lifestyle, so to speak. You’re also serving at an earlier, perhaps more impressionable age. From day one, in volunteering with a program that worked with children living on the streets of Mumbai, every single day I learned much more from the community from these kids than I thought I could offer them. That stuck with me when I was at Morgan Stanley. As well as thinking about what being content looks like. What does success look like? What does happiness look like? I mean, these kids had nothing. They were physically and sexually abused, lived on the streets, and most of them were without their parents. Yet, there was a level of compassion and empathy, and just being content in life – honestly – that I had not even seen in myself, my family, or the individuals that I would then work with going forward who had no financial issues whatsoever. Yet, they were missing several aspects of life and I think that allowed me to make some of these larger life decisions right out of college and far earlier than I thought I would when I was in Canfield BHP.
Is it fair to say, had you not experienced what you did earlier in your career, that we would not be seeing a successful nonprofit like Dasra today? Or was that seed always there?
I remember coming back from India and having conversations with my classmates in the Canfield BHP program about how great of an experience I had in India over a couple of beers, if not more, talking about, “Should I just do this now?” and they were like, “You’re crazy. You have a job”, and I was like, “You’re right, I have loans”. So it was definitely something that was appealing to me.
The Canfield BHP program is definitely what got me, in my mind, to Morgan Stanley. Then I think Morgan Stanley gave me the financial resources to pay off all my loans after my first year to take this risk as well as the confidence that if you’re excited about something and it is more than just a job, you will be successful at that. The third piece is the skills that I learned there were just phenomenal. Analyzing sectors, looking at management teams, thinking about what the next three to five years looks like at a sector level or a company level, and all of these things affected this decision.
But most importantly, I met my wife, Neera Nundy [at Morgan Stanley]. She was similar to me, born and brought up in Canada, but of Indian origin. Both of us would be doing pitch books at 4 am and talking about, “Wouldn’t it be great if we can use these skills to work with communities in India that are not as privileged as we were growing up here?”. If it wasn’t for Canfield BHP that got me to Morgan Stanley, and if it wasn’t for Morgan Stanley providing me with the capital to not have any liabilities, or meeting my wife, I don’t think we would have started this.
So what is Dasra?
We were in awe (still are) of the various community-based organizations that exist in India that are serving those around them in need. Even when I was at Morgan Stanley – this is the sort of geek that I was – I’d be reading up on NGO leaders in India and becoming inspired by them thinking, “Wow, I would love to serve them, I would love for them to be a client of mine, I would love to be in service of them, and help their organizations grow in scale.”
Working with groups that are trying to stop child marriage in the country, working with second-generation or children of sex workers to ensure that they don’t go back into the trade that their mothers were forced to be in, or minority groups that have been disenfranchised for generations and figuring out how to enable them to be empowered and give them a voice, these were the kinds of issues that resonated with us. Knowing that there were NGO leaders behind that, that no one was supporting or giving them a sounding board to dream big – most funding that came to them said, 100% needs to go to the beneficiary, and none of it can be used for your salary, management, rent, or things that are instrumental in running any organization – that was the premise of Dasra.
How do we then become a nonprofit that supports other nonprofits across the country, enabling them to reach their aspirations, knowing well that their aspirations are grounded in what the community needs? They’ve already taken the plunge in supporting these communities without capital or any other sort of ulterior motives to support these groups, but if we can then aid them in their journey – that would be something that appealed to us and could create greater value.
Fast forward to when we started then, to where we are today, we’ve worked with hundreds, if not thousands of organizations, strengthening their leadership, creating communities for them to work off of each other and learn from each other. We’ve actively shaped philanthropy in India over the last decade, in terms of working with family foundations, the new wealth, helping them give more effectively and trust the community voice. I’m working now, quite closely, with the government in terms of implementing both state and national level policies focusing on supporting the most marginalized and vulnerable of communities.
What have been some of the challenges and opportunities that you’ve experienced in the last year or so?
We’ve all been forced to work from home and while we are very lucky to be able to do zoom calls, most of the NGOs that we support, their communities, and their support are actually in person on a one-on-one basis. Whether it’s education or livelihoods or health, they are interacting with the community daily. For that to all of a sudden be shut has been extremely difficult for the organizations to support their communities. The second wave that hit India, starting around April, is still affecting the country and has created even greater ramifications in terms of the loss of life and the lack of a healthcare system or any concerted response. Many more people have died because of that and that’s just been extremely, extremely frustrating, upsetting, and depressing. At all levels, it’s been an emotional roller coaster to see friends and family die because of the lack of planning and support.
In terms of the positives or the opportunities that have come out of it, there have been two big things that we’ve been looking at in the last eighteen months, which are somewhat new. Number one, we’ve started to work with companies to create a more equitable and dignified workplace, not just for their direct employees, but for everyone across that value chain.
Last year, at least in India when the lockdown happened, literally in an hour it was announced that we had hundreds of thousands of families, millions in fact, that were walking thousands of kilometers with children in tow, just to go back home because all transportation was cut off. Most of these families live in the areas that they work. If their factory was shut, their house was shut and most of our slum communities across the country, unfortunately, make up about 50% of our urban population. So we’re talking about hundreds of millions of people who don’t have access to their own toilet or running water. When you’re sharing a toilet with 200 people, when you have a household of five individuals, or seven in a ten by ten square foot house without running water, all of the CDC and WHO recommended norms of hand washing and social distancing cannot happen.
Now you have this huge group, tens of millions of people, going back home to a rural infrastructure, which did not have food security, did not have health care, did not have life opportunities, which is why many of these individuals moved to the cities in the first place. With all of that, we realized that while the government has some really good laws in place, honestly, they weren’t enforceable. So how do you then bring companies to lead the effort to create greater rights for those that they employ directly or indirectly and create a new social compact?
We had three or four organizations that were on the ground working with these communities well before COVID hit to design an assessment tool which they’ve implemented now with twenty-one different companies across three different cities in India. The goal is for these companies to assess how they fare on various metrics. Some may be legal, such as minimum wage, but some may be even more than that, in terms of providing social security, health care benefits, registering to government programs that enable these individuals to get some sort of subsidies or unemployment checks like we’ve seen here in the US. The goal is to create a category of companies in India that have a new norm in terms of how they treat their employees and everyone across the value chain. It will mean increased labor standards and slightly increasing costs but it will become more sustainable and profitable in the long term. It’s something that we’re excited to see scale across the country with thousands of companies in the next couple of years.
What advice can you provide for someone looking to become the next Deval Sanghavi? How can students get involved?
There’s a lot one can do. I think what a business education gives you is the ability to think about strategic and operational issues that hinder or accelerate an organization’s ability to grow and create impact. Now, clearly in the business world, that impact primarily is your ROI. In the development space, it is slightly different, although there is still an ROI there’s more of a social return on investment that one needs to look at. Whether you’re in finance, marketing, organizational development, or management, any sort of aspect is still required in the nonprofit space.
In India alone, we have a billion people that still earn less than $5 a day, and when you have a billion people that are [earning] less than $5 a day, the social services or programs that are required are significant. They’re at scale and very similar to those for-profit businesses except the investor is the donor here, not the customer. The customer does not have access to capital to invest. Whether it’s financial modeling, helping a group think about their marketing strategy, helping them think about communications, social media, management changes, or strategy, every single thing that you learn in the [Canfield] Business Honors Program is as pertinent to a nonprofit as it is to a for-profit.
Whatever you’re pursuing, whether it’s in social impact or even on the for-profit side, take risks. For whatever reason, it is easy to get a job at a big company and work there forever and yes, you will be financially sustainable and profitable, your family will be well taken care of, and all of that other stuff. But to be honest with you, I don’t think that should be one’s goal in life, I think the goal in life should be to change, to be disruptive, to take risks, and you can take them far easier when you’re younger – that is what I would recommend.
Starting your own organization or entity right out of college (or after a couple of years) is fantastic. The more people who do that, even if you fail, it’s a phenomenal life experience. But honestly, don’t try to follow the path that you think needs to be followed. Too many people do that and a lot of my colleagues, who are CBHP graduates who followed that path – I can 100% confidently say that I am far happier with my life and with my work than they are today. They’re going through a midlife crisis of sorts to find meaning, to find purpose, and questioning why they’ve done what they’ve done. I don’t question that at all and that is extremely important. I know that’s hard to do when you have outstanding loans and a lot of pressures family-wise, society-wise, but you’re putting those pressures on yourself. It’s really good to understand and realize, as a college student, you’re not just broke, you owe thousands of dollars to college so you need to think of that as your base, not necessarily where your parents are or where other people are. That will hopefully allow you to take greater risks and go all-in on whatever you do next.
To get involved, we have volunteer opportunities for students and encourage people to come out to India (again, it’s hard with COVID) and spend the summer with us. We would love to do something like that with CBHP as well. These are things we’d be happy to explore because getting that exposure and realizing how lucky one is to even be part of the CBHP program is significant and hopefully gives you a level of control, confidence, and a sense of responsibility – that it’s not just acquisition of personal wealth. There is much more that one can do, for themselves, their family, and for society at large. Hopefully, people who come through the Canfield BHP program realize that and take advantage of it post-graduation or while they’re in school.