Building Perspectives — Corporate Constraints, Ground Realities & Shared Expectations

26 September 2026 · Mumbai · 3 CSR panelists · 14 organisations in the room

Why this room

Civil society organisations rarely get to see how a CSR function actually works — how many proposals land on one desk, who signs off, what gets audited, and what happens when the person who believed in your work moves on. This edition put three CSR leaders and the leaders of 14 organisations around one table to talk about exactly that. The panel included Pallavi Ramane (Societe Generale India) and Tejaswini Hulsurkar (HDFC Life), with the conversation moderated by Jayadarshini Ramaswami, Founder of Dhaaga.

Ten principles the panel kept returning to

• Trust is the foundation. Funding follows trust, and trust is earned through openness about delays, challenges and change.
• Support the CSR manager. They are your advocate before the Board, often working in a team of one to three.
• Communicate with clarity. A proposal or report should convey its purpose within a few minutes of reading.
• Keep administrative costs modest and transparent. Around 5% is typical — show salaries, MEL and capacity building as separate budget lines.
• Report against the plan. Compare what was planned with what was achieved, explain the gaps, set out the corrective steps.
• Seek independent validation. Third-party assessments add credibility. Include their cost in the budget.
• Uphold data integrity. Reviewers work with data every day and recognise inflated figures and AI-generated reports.
• Invest in quality photographs. CSR teams use them widely, and their cost can be budgeted for.
• Build relationships across the organisation. It helps a partnership withstand staff changes.
• Look beyond the grant. Volunteering, pro bono expertise and employee giving open doors — at times up to the Board.

Part one · What a CSR desk actually looks like

“Transparency is the foundation of trust. Those reviewing your work bring deep experience, and candour is always valued.” — Tejaswini Hulsurkar, HDFC Life

Part two · The questions the room actually asked

• Scale versus depth. Funders often want large numbers in year one. Set expectations at the outset — one partner said plainly that year one would go to hiring, setting up, training and a baseline study, and the funder agreed because it had been said in advance. CSR portfolios usually hold both large programmes and small, deep ones.
• Budgets and the 5% cap. Keep administration to genuine office overheads, and create separate lines for human resources, MEL, capacity building, communication and senior management time. Allocate shared salaries by proportion and show the calculation. Budget for the life of assets, not just their purchase. And recognise when a funder who won't accept the real cost of delivery isn't a partner for the next three to four years.
• Rent and physical space. Most corporate funders don't cover it. Explore community spaces and show where you already operate without paid premises.
• Reporting that earns its keep. Reviewers want four answers: were funds used appropriately, how many people were reached, how do results compare with the plan, and what went wrong and what was done about it. Lead with the funded project and put the rest of your work in an annexure — one panelist funded a second project after reading about it there.
• When the CSR manager changes. Meet the new person early and in person, present the work afresh, and keep relationships alive across HR, volunteers and leadership. Be equally open about leadership change on your own side: one partner called a face-to-face meeting mid-commitment to explain a full change of leadership, and the funder's trust grew.
• Funding your own capacity. Put a staff training line in every budget and pool them into one annual programme. Draw on the company's in-house expertise — compliance, communications, strategy. Ask for portfolio-level sessions on compliance, FCRA and CSR reporting. One panelist described strengthening HR, finance, documentation and resource mobilisation in organisations that depended on a single funder for 80–90% of their budget; within about five years they were raising money elsewhere.
• Partnership beyond the grant. Employee volunteering, functional expertise, matched employee giving — and engagement before any funding request. One organisation guided a company's cleanliness drive with no funding involved; the firsthand exposure is what eventually won the grant.

Saying the same thing better

Part three · Meeting in the middle

The session closed by asking where expectations and ground realities diverge most, and what each side could do differently.

• Organisations can set realistic timelines and say them at the outset, present budgets transparently, report against the agreed plan with context, raise challenges early and in person, build relationships across the partner organisation, and invest in documentation and photographs.
• CSR partners can allow for a preparation phase when it is explained in advance, offer capacity-building sessions across their portfolio, make employee expertise and volunteering time available, help partners strengthen HR, finance and documentation, stay the course rather than exiting midway, and introduce trusted partners to other funders.

A story from the floor

A participant described accepting a modest first CSR grant for a school plantation project that other organisations had turned down. The work was delivered well, the company came back with a larger order of saplings, and the relationship grew into five to eight years of continuous work in the same community, including medical and veterinary camps.

“You didn't just tap into funding, you tapped into trust. That is why you were able to build more.” — Jayadarshini Ramaswami, Moderator, Founder of Dhaaga

With thanks to Tejaswini Hulsurkar, Pallavi Ramane and the other CSR leaders for speaking so candidly, and to every organisation whose questions shaped the conversation.

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Social Café, Pune — A Peer Learning Circle for Civil Society Organisations

22 August 2026 · Pune

Why we got together

Civil society leaders working across very different corners of the social sector came together for something that doesn't happen often enough: sitting across the table from each other and actually talking. Not a pitch session, not a fundraising event — a peer learning circle. Some organisations in the room had already solved problems others were still wrestling with. The idea was to put those two groups in the same room, over coffee, and let learning happen sideways.

Who was in the room

Different geographies, different beneficiaries, different theories of change — which is exactly why the room worked. When problems don't overlap, solutions often do.

What we learned, from each other

• The reimbursement model of funding doesn't work well for civil society organisations. Many funders reimburse only after money has been spent. For an organisation on thin reserves, that gap decides whether a programme runs smoothly or runs out of runway.
• Keep knocking. Someone will open the door. Persistence isn't a backup plan, it's the plan. Relationships with funders, government and communities are built through repeated, patient effort.
• Cross-learning goes both ways — CSR needs to learn from civil society organisations too. Funders often arrive with their own frameworks before learning from years of ground experience. Flip that flow and both sides design better programmes.
• Convergence creates more collaboration and more impact. When organisations in overlapping communities never talk, everyone loses efficiency — and the community loses joined-up support.

What's next

Four of six leaders signed up for an organisational health and growth readiness assessment. Follow-up conversations between organisations working on similar themes, a shared informal channel between events, and smaller focused sessions on the themes raised are all in motion.

Thank you to Alert India, Yug Foundation, Ekta Gramvikas Sanstha, Navsanjeevan, Mashal and KVGPS — for showing up, speaking honestly, and treating each other as peers rather than competitors for the same funding pool.

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