NGO aims to bring 'Smiles' to 1.5 million

Smile Foundation, a New Delhi-based development level organisation that works for education and healthcare of underprivileged children, has set a target of reaching an annual beneficiary figure of 1.5 million by 2012 in India through the model of Social Venture Philanthropy (VP) – an idea successful in the business world as venture capital.

“SVP, introduced by the foundation for the first time in India, was evolved to finance, handhold and support genuine grassroots’ NGOs targeted at providing education, besides taking into consideration the healthcare and livelihood components,” says Naresh Chaudhary, chief operating officer of Smile. “The foundation named it SVP with the sole aim of maximising social returns unlike the business concept of venture capital that harps on monetary gains.”

For SVP projects, Smile identifies and selects committed individuals, groups or organisations who have a passion to be a change maker, provides the critical seed money and handhold them to be able to reach an exponentially larger number of children than it would have done with the conventional single-project infrastructure model, Chaudhary adds.

“Under SVP, Smile provides critical seed money starting from 30,000 to Rs 5 lakh in the form of recurring costs on a quarterly basis to its partners, supports them for a minimum of three years and does not take financial pay back from them,” Chaudhary says, adding that the foundation has so far extended Rs 8 crore for various SVP projects.

The social entrepreneurs from Smile Foundation include a barely literate woman working for empowering children and women, a retired head master dedicating his life to teach rural children in rural Rajasthan, a group of educated and employed youth making a movement and transforming lives of thousands of orphan and street children in remote Orissa, and two young MBA graduates in Chennai working hard to make hundreds of underprivileged girls employable in retails chains.

With a presence in 21 states in India, Smile Foundation has so far nurtured 150 organisations under its SVP model, benefiting more than 500,000 underprivileged children directly through various projects.