Mon Ami Foundation - Blogs #Community

Storytelling for Impact: How NGOs Can Win Corporate Partnerships

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:35:30 +0530

What makes a company choose one NGO over another? It isn’t always the size of the organization or the number of projects completed. More often, it comes down to one simple question: What difference did you make?

In today’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) landscape, companies want more than reports filled with numbers. They want to understand the people behind those numbers. As fundraising expert Ken Burnett famously said, “People give to people, not to organizations.” That principle increasingly shapes corporate partnerships.

Why Stories Matter More Than Numbers

Stories have a unique ability to do what data alone cannot: they create connection. A report might say that 500 women were trained, but the story of one woman who gained financial independence, sent her children to school, or discovered her own confidence gives those numbers meaning.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review found that people who feel an emotional connection are 52% more valuable to an organization than those who are simply satisfied. Whether it’s a customer, donor, or CSR partner, genuine connection begins with a story.

Building Trust Through Storytelling

Strong partnerships don’t grow because a company writes a cheque. They thrive when both organizations believe in the same goal and trust each other enough to work towards it. Strengthening Civil Society (SCS Global) describes partnerships as relationships built on shared purpose, collaboration, and mutual respect—not simply funding.

That trust has to be earned, and one of the simplest ways to earn it is by telling honest stories about the work being done.

Case Studies: Stories That Changed the Game

Think about what people remember after reading an annual report. It usually isn’t the graphs or percentages—it’s the story of the person whose life changed.

The Global Fund’s “Here I Am” campaign let beneficiaries speak about their own experiences, turning statistics into lived realities.
Organizations like charity: water have long used storytelling to help supporters understand the people behind every project. The numbers were still there, but they finally had meaning.

Mon Ami Foundation: Stories Behind Every Product

At Mon Ami Foundation, every artisan, entrepreneur, and woman has her own journey. Some are learning a skill for the first time. Others are turning that skill into an income that supports their family. These stories deserve to be told because they remind us that behind every handcrafted product is a person who worked hard to create it. The product matters—but the person behind it matters even more.

The Bottom Line

Companies don’t partner with NGOs because of impressive presentations alone. They partner with organizations they understand and trust. Data may show the impact of a program, but stories help people believe in it. And when belief is backed by measurable results, partnerships become stronger, longer lasting, and capable of creating real change.

This blog is contributed by Aanavi Anand, a student of lady Shri Ram College for Women

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aanavi-anand-0a6b91308/

CSR Dashboards: Making Transparency Work for Communities

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:01:00 +0530

Open any company’s CSR report today and you’ll likely find a dashboard: neat charts showing donation amounts, volunteer hours, and the number of communities “reached.” It looks like transparency. But pause for a moment—transparent to whom?

Most CSR dashboards are designed with investors and regulators in mind. They exist to prove compliance under laws like Section 135 of the Companies Act and to reassure stakeholders that social spending is real, measurable, and accountable. That is a legitimate need. Numbers build trust, and trust is hard to earn without evidence. A well-designed dashboard can also help companies identify which programmes are working and redirect resources faster than a year-end report ever could.

Yet here lies the gap: a dashboard full of impressive totals can still tell a beneficiary nothing about whether their own life has changed. A village may appear as a data point in a “communities reached” figure while having no way to see what was promised, what was delivered, or whom to approach if it fell short. Transparency often flows upward to boardrooms rather than outward to the people it claims to represent. This is where accusations of “CSR-washing” arise—numbers that look accountable while the people on the ground remain unheard.

For transparency to genuinely serve communities, dashboards must include the community’s own voice, not just administrative figures. That means:

Beneficiary feedback integrated into reporting.
Outcome tracking at an individual or household level.
Accessible formats that allow communities to question and engage with the data.

The MAMTA Institute for Mother and Child’s beneficiary feedback pilot in Kaushambi District shows what this can look like in practice. By giving communities, a direct channel to raise issues and see them addressed, feedback volumes rose sharply, and most respondents reported real improvements in service delivery.

A recent Times of India report underscores the scale of the challenge. Despite CSR spending crossing thousands of crores in a single year, a nationwide study found that most NGOs—especially smaller ones—still struggle to access those funds. The disconnect between intent and impact remains stark.

At Mon Ami Foundation, we try to bridge this gap. Rather than reducing an artisan’s progress to a single number, our impact stories highlight each woman’s tangible gains in skill, income, and confidence. A dashboard can show that a hundred artisans were trained. A story can show what that training actually meant for one of them. Real transparency probably needs both: the dashboard’s scale and the story’s honesty.

Works Cited

MAMTA Health Institute for Mother and Child. Beneficiary Feedback Mechanisms Case Study: India. World Vision UK, 2016, feedbackmechanisms.org/public/files/MAMTAIndia.pdf.
Clear White Space. CSR Washing. Clear White Space, www.clearwhitespace.com/post/csr-washing. Accessed 12 July 2026.
CallMyCA. CSR Section 135 Companies Act 2013 Explained. CallMyCA, callmyca.com/blog/csr-section-135-companies-act-2013-explained. Accessed 12 July 2026.
Rupera, Prashant. Corporate Intent vs Community Impact: Big CSR Spend, Small Impact. The Times of India, 25 Aug. 2025, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/vadodara/corporate-intent-vs-community-impact-big-csr-spend-small-impact/articleshow/123488897.cms.

Contributed by Shreya Mangla, student St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreya-mangla-03486124a/

Virtual Volunteering: The Future of Employee Engagement

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:27:46 +0530

For years, employee engagement followed a familiar playbook: team lunches, birthday shoutouts, an annual off-site. That worked when everyone sat in the same office. It works far less now, with teams split between home offices, co-working hubs, and cities apart. Into that gap steps virtual volunteering—and it is quickly becoming the next major shift in how companies keep people invested.

What Virtual Volunteering Really Means

At its core, virtual volunteering is simple: giving your time and skills to a cause from wherever you are, using nothing but a laptop. As Katherine Gorman puts it, “Volunteering takes place on your couch, with your coworkers, during your workday.” That could mean mentoring a student over video call, writing website copy for an NGO, or teaching digital skills to someone who never had access before.
Unlike an office party, virtual volunteering scales across a whole company at once. That scalability is exactly why it is shaping the future of engagement.

Purpose Overtakes Perks

The real driver here isn’t perks—it’s purpose. As Joshua Harris notes, “Employee volunteering is no longer just about social good; it’s a strategic business advantage.”

That shift explains the rise of Volunteer Time Off (VTO), treating giving back as paid work, not a weekend Favor. It also feeds directly into CSR strategy, building trust with stakeholders and compounding results over time rather than creating one-off PR moments. Technology now matches employee skills to real needs, ensuring impact is both authentic and measurable.

Artisan Incubation Model: Mon Ami Foundation

Our unique AI model demonstrates how this works in practice. Backed by CSR partners like DCM Shriram Foundation, HCL Foundation, Dalmia Bharat Foundation, and Synergy Consulting Inc., it has:

Trained over 1,000 women artisans across Uttar Pradesh, Delhi NCR, and West Bengal in crafts like zardozi and crochet.
Paired IIT Roorkee research students with the camel-herding community in Rajasthan, exploring new uses for camel dung, wool, and milk by-products—skilled volunteering feeding directly into livelihood innovation.
Extended impact inward through initiatives like a Dental Health Camp for school staff in NCR, showing how volunteering can strengthen an organization’s own workforce.

This is not yet a finished success story. Mon Ami’s reach is still concentrated in a few regions, dependent on year-to-year CSR funding. Projects like Pastoral Livelihoods and Project Ektara need deeper market linkages to scale. But the proof is clear: expert time and CSR partnerships already work, even as honest ground remains to cover.

The Road Ahead

Virtual volunteering is more than a stopgap for remote teams—it is a blueprint for the future of employee engagement. It aligns purpose with productivity, scales across geographies, and embeds CSR into everyday work.
So, the next time your company mentions virtual volunteering, recognize it for what it is: not a trend, but the trajectory of engagement itself.

Contributed by Shreya Mangla, student St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreya-mangla-03486124a/

AI in Philanthropy: How Technology is Redefining Impact Measurement.

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:34:46 +0530

Artificial Intelligence is continuously redefining the virtual world, from grant writing to coding. This compelling change in technology has not left philanthropy behind. Almost 80% of foundations report some degree of AI usage, though only a small fraction (around 4%) has integrated AI systematically across their organizations.

For decades, the social sector has relied on activity reports, numbers of people trained, events held, products sold, and so on. But these numbers only tell us what was done, not what changed. Measuring real impact, the actual shift in someone’s quality of life, income or dignity, has always been the harder, more difficult question. It is also complex because how does one measure social change? Quality of life is subjective and differs from person to person. For one, QoL can be having three proper meals a day but for another, it can be the freedom to follow passion. Or how does one measure, did these women feel more confident? Or do they feel less alone?

“According to Impact management Project (IMP), it’s a 4-step procedure” (Bartalucci et al. 31),

1. Normative Basis: What do we believe is good? What are our goals?

2. Impact Chains: How does our work lead to those goals?

3. Indicators: How do we measure whether those changes happened?

4. Calculate Impact: What is our overall impact score? (SROI analysis or normalised impact score)

This is where Artificial intelligence redefines its value in philanthropy. It’s starting to help organisations figure out what to measure and how. There are thousands of social indicators like wellbeing, health, confidence, QoL, etc., and already built tools and surveys to measure them in abundance. No small team can read all of them and pick the right one. So, AI does it instead. It reads through everything, spots the patterns, and surfaces what matters most in a fraction of time.

Mon Ami Foundation keeps pace with the growing technology and benefitting from it. AI doesn’t just simplify the foundation’s empirical, evidence-based evaluation process but also helps the donors and CSR partners to make rational decisions as they can now access the impact their investment is creating. AI helps identify our contributions to global challenges (impact on SDGs). Our project aligns with UN SDG goals, Decent work and Economic Growth (#8), Responsible Consumption and Production (#12), Partnerships for the Goals (#17). Today, Mon Ami has successfully supported 1500+ artisans, 6000+ families and created an economic impact of Rs. 10 crores+. It engages in direct surveys with its beneficiaries to measure different indicators of impact and AI helps calculate the overall impact.

When impact measurement becomes this accessible, something important shifts. Smaller organisations can fully tell their story. Donors can invest with more confidence. And the women whose lives are changing get the recognition they deserve.

Because at the end of the day, the goal was never to count training sessions. It was always to change lives. Now we have better tools to prove that it’s working.

Works Cited

Bartalucci, Simone, et al. "Measuring Meaningful Change: AI-Enhanced Impact Measurement in Philanthropy." The Routledge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and Philanthropy, 1st ed., Routledge, 2024, pp. 29–50. DOI: 10.4324/9781003468615-4.

Hosseini, Sam. “AI in Philanthropy: From Donations to Data Driven Impact.” Paralleliq, Paralleliq.ai, https://www.paralleliq.ai/blog/ai-in-philanthropy

Coffman, Julia. “Artificial Intelligence and Philanthropy.” Johnson Center for Philanthropy Blog, 10 Dec. 2025, https://johnsoncenter.org/blog/artificial-intelligence-and-philanthropy.

Contributed by Shreya Mangla, student St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University. https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreya-mangla-03486124a/

Last Mile Impact and Collaboration

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:40:12 +0530

When we talk about impact assessment, the conversation often stops at numbers—beneficiaries reached, income generated, or funds disbursed. These metrics, usually compiled by third-party agencies, satisfy regulatory requirements but rarely capture the deeper story. True last mile impact is not about ticking boxes; it is about long-term transformation in habits, aspirations, and community resilience.

Consider hygiene practices, food choices, education, or even gender sensitivity. These are not easily quantified, yet they define whether an intervention has genuinely shifted the trajectory of a community. Unfortunately, field staff conducting assessments often lack emotional investment. Their reports emphasize scale over depth: 1,000 people earning ₹1,000 each is rated higher than 50 individuals consistently earning ₹10,000. But which scenario truly breaks cycles of poverty?

Real change happens when projects create role models—individuals who embody possibility and inspire others. Numbers alone cannot measure hope, dignity, or the courage to challenge entrenched norms. Communities need aspirational frameworks, not handouts. They must see that escaping poverty is possible but also recognize that the responsibility lies with them to take charge of their own progress.

At Mon Ami Foundation, our Red Earth Model is built on this philosophy. We nurture community resource persons who act as catalysts, encouraging peers to adopt new practices and envision brighter futures. For us, impact is not an entry in an Excel sheet—it is the ripple effect of one person’s transformation inspiring many others.

Collaboration, therefore, must go beyond compliance-driven assessments. It requires empathy, storytelling, and a commitment to measuring what truly matters: sustained behavioural change, strengthened social fabric, and the emergence of local champions. That is the essence of last mile impact—where numbers fade but hope and agency endure.

Why Should All the Turtles Look the Same?

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:59:02 +0530

Communities and Collaboration

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 18:40:00 +0530

Communities and Collaboration

Indias heritage with handicrafts is legendary, with techniques and proficiencies handed down from one generation to the next.

Crafters work collectively to produce designs that have withstood the test of time. Whether its the marble carvers from Agra, Kanchipuram silk weavers, toymakers of Channapatna, filigree artisans of Cuttack, block printers of Ajrakhpur or textile handicrafters of Bhuj, the power of communities crafting together is undeniable. However, what these crafters lack is the ability to take designs to the next level. With no formal training in design or skill development, they are reliant on external support to help them reinvent their craft to make it relevant to contemporary needs.

Mon Ami Foundation, in association with HCL Foundations Craft Hub works with migrant communities to develop a sustainable livelihood through crochet crafting. By offering design and marketing support to these communities, crafters create innovative products with utilitarian value in urban markets. During their interactions with migrant women, Mon Ami Foundation has seen that working in communities helps:

Empower women: by learning an additional skill, these women have the opportunity to earn an incremental income and become economically independent
Create narratives that count: the sense of accomplishment on getting a stitch perfect and creating a marketable product, while working among peers, gives an inexplicable boost of confidence to these women.
Weave meaningful conversations: normally used to working alone, and displaced from their families, community initiatives give women a sense of belonging and purpose.
Pave career pathways for Gen-Next: childcare becomes a part of working in communities. With little girls often accompanying their mothers and picking up crochet skills over time, there is a sense of continuity.

Working with women in communities, the crochet movement lead by Mon Ami Foundation and HCL Foundations Craft Hub, that began 2015 impacts the lives of 100 families in Delhi NCR.

In the years to come, we would like to expand our reach in different areas in terms of the crafters we skill, the markets we cater to and the corporates we collaborate with.

To become a market linkage partner or to commission direct projects, do connect: contact@monamifoundation.com

Recrafting Lives Through a Crochet Connect

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 18:16:00 +0530

Recrafting Lives Through a Crochet Connect

Crochet, the art of creating a textured fabric using yarn and a single hook, has been carried on since the 16th century. Skilled hands make intricate designs through the hypnotic in & out movement of a hook, therapeutic in itself, while finished products lend themselves to an immense sense of personal accomplishment.

Although there is no concrete evidence, the Macraes, a missionary couple from Scotland, are credited with the introduction of crochet to India in the early 20th century. Initially used for prayer rugs & caps within the Muslim community and in Christian ceremonies, crochet has transcended all boundaries and become popular across the country. Women in India took to crocheting with ease, possibly on account of their inherent predisposition to craft.

Today, with an influx of migrant workers into cities, there has been a paradigm shift in the way women are expected to contribute to the family income. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of migrant women are able to seek employment as they are burdened with frequent pregnancies, child-care responsibilities, caring for the elderly and coping with health issues. How are these women to overcome their challenges and contribute to the family income?

Mon Ami Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit Trust is committed to helping these migrant women earn a sustainable livelihood through crochet skill building efforts. Crochet, is an extremely useful skill to impart for the following reasons:

Low initial investment can start with a crochet work-from-home bundle
Easy to teach and learn
All age groups can be trained
Cannot be unlearned can fall back on the skill anytime
Provides a sense of community working in self-help groups
Option to conduct remote training through technology
Can work from home free time can be used to earn additional income

Although migrant women have been displaced, crochet allows them to reconnect with their intrinsic skills and create products by hand. Working independently, Mon Ami Foundation has trained 400 women. Today, along with HCL Foundations Craft Hub, Mon Ami Foundation has trained 100 women in NCR. Together, they are in the process of setting up the largest crochet movement in the country.

To become a market linkage partner or to commission direct projects, do connect: contact@monamifoundation.com