The Indian population in the U.S. has soared in recent decades, along with the wealth it can bring to bear. In fact, Indians in the United States have the highest per capita income of any ethnic group, per 2019 Pew Research Center data. These numbers are part of a larger story of the nation’s rapidly shifting ethnic landscape. By 2050, America will be majority nonwhite. These demographic shifts have implications for a wide variety of sectors — including philanthropy.
This is why, for several years now, we’ve been working hard to get a handle on donors of color, including Indian Americans. We’ve overviewed some top Indian American philanthropists, many of whom found success in Silicon Valley and in STEM fields, with some getting their start at the prominent Indian Institutes of Technology (ITT). Others have made their fortunes in real estate, on Wall Street and elsewhere. This cohort includes billionaires Vinod Khosla and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. According to a 2018 survey, the Indian American community contributes more than $1 billion annually.
Indian American philanthropists often support causes in India itself — backing prominent Indian NGOs like Ekal Vidyalaya, Pratham and Sankara Eye Foundation and their U.S. affiliates — as well as across the U.S. and in Europe. Pratham USA, for instance, raised some $25.6 million in total revenue without donor restrictions in the 2021 fiscal year, powering its work in areas including literacy and learning, girls’ education and vocational training.
Then there’s India Philanthropy Alliance (IPA), a network of nonprofit, philanthropic and charitable organizations that mobilize people and funding in the U.S. and elsewhere for development and poverty reduction programs in India. IPA began meeting informally in 2017, and two years later, formalized the organization on the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi.
I recently connected with Alex Counts, director of IPA, to find out more about its work cultivating a broad group of Indian philanthropists, the causes these donors are interested in, and what’s down the line.
An NGO start
After graduating from Horace Mann and Cornell in 1988, Alex Counts became interested in the work of Muhammad Yunus, now a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who developed a banking system to empower underprivileged women in Bangladesh. Counts did a Fulbright there, and then spent the first decade of his career living and working in the South Asian country and being mentored by Yunus.
In 1997, Counts launched Grameen Foundation, which made Yunus’ microcredit model global. “It’s one of those things you get thrown into at age 30. You don’t know what you don’t know,” Counts told me. But within 12 years, he started to get a handle on running an international nonprofit, experiences he’s written about in books like “Small Loans, Big Dreams” and “Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind.”
By 2015, Counts was heading the American India Foundation, one of the larger organizations channeling philanthropic dollars largely from wealthy Indian Americans back to India to meet humanitarian needs. India has progressed economically by a significant amount over the last 30 years, Counts said, but there are still more people in absolute poverty there than in any other country in the world. “It’s kind of a tale of two situations,” he said.
Eventually, Counts started to encounter frustrations working in this space, such as the fact that other India-focused organizations weren’t really communicating or collaborating with each other. Out of this sprung the seeds for what would become the India Philanthropy Alliance.
Collective impact
In 2011, the Stanford Social Innovation Review released a paper titled “Collective Impact,” which argued that large-scale social change requires broad, cross-sector coordination. India Philanthropy Alliance was founded in that spirit. The basic idea, Counts said, is bringing together groups that might, in some ways, see each other as rivals vying for a fixed quantity of donor dollars, and instead enlarging the pie and growing together.
IPA is composed of a growing list of U.S.-based organizations working toward humanitarian and development goals in India. One of them is Agastya USA, which supports the work of Agastya International Foundation in India. Agastya provides experiential, hands-on science-art education, project-based learning and peer-to-peer learning. Other IPA members include CRY America, which focuses on underprivileged children, including protecting them from child labor, exploitation and abuse. There’s also Indiaspora, Pratham USA and American India Foundation, which has grown from a $10 million organization during Counts’ tenure to a $40 million organization in recent years.
Another IPA member is Akshaya Patra Foundation USA, whose calling card is delivering midday meals to Indian kids on a massive scale. VisionSpring provides reading glasses in India and a few other countries with the help of local entrepreneurs.
In March, IPA spearheaded India Giving Day, a national celebration of charitable giving and philanthropy across the United States. The campaign included major events in Dallas, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Counts is encouraged by India Giving Day because he believes nonprofits too often think through a scarcity lens, where the risks of fundraising alongside other organizations outweigh the benefits. As he put it, “Maybe they’ll just end up getting my donors and I could end up losing.”
In order to navigate this, Counts sought to balance IPA’s big-tent philosophy with members’ concerns. Ultimately, at a retreat, IPA found compromise and included 11 other organizations in India Giving Day in addition to its 16 member organizations. The event ended up raising $250,000 from Rural India Supporting Trust (RIST), co-founded by Manoj Bhargava, who founded 5-Hour Energy. And Counts set aside $100,000 for matching gifts for the participating organizations.
“Building trust in a nonprofit coalition around certain things is not that hard. But around fundraising, it is not easy. And it took time,” Counts said. Now with a track record, he’s hoping that the next India Giving Day does even better.
“Going to triple in the next five to 10 years”
“Indian Americans, I think, recently surpassed Jewish Americans as the highest per capita income ethnic group in the country,” Counts said. “It’s kind of happened quietly. One in 8 doctors in the U.S. is Indian or Indian American. They have a very big foothold in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and going back some decades, in hotel management.”
IPA’s chairman, Deepak Raj, is the founder and managing director of the New Jersey-based private investment firm Raj Associates. Raj is a major supporter of Pratham and funded the Deepak and Neera Raj Center on Indian Economic Policies at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Raj, Counts said, is also a major donor to Democratic politicians and launched Indian American Impact to elevate the voices of Indian Americans, South Asians and all historically excluded communities.
The 10 national co-chairs of the India Giving Day effort, listed here, are some of the biggest donors in this space in the U.S., and include Boston-based tech entrepreneur Desh Deshpande, creator of Sycamore Networks, whom Counts said was one of the major reasons Akshaya Patra got off the ground. Sapphira Goradia of Houston works as the executive director of the Vijay and Marie Goradia Foundation. Her father Vijay Goradia, who made his wealth through international chemical trading company Vinmar International Limited, established Pratham USA in Houston in 1999 after an inspirational visit to one of Pratham’s urban literacy programs in Mumbai. Ajay and Lata Krishnan-Shah were early backers of American India Foundation and derive their wealth from SMART Modular Technologies, a computer components manufacturer, which was acquired for $2 billion by Solectron.
While Indian American donors give in many ways, there are some general observations to be made about how they’re deploying their philanthropic resources. Many tend to start, Counts said, by giving to their ancestral village. Sometimes this work is easy to facilitate, sometimes not. Many Indian donors also have an interest in doing something related to the industry where they made their money. So if they’re a technology or agribusiness entrepreneur, they might want to support similar efforts in India. Other causes Counts mentioned include domestic violence, healthcare (including for Indigenous populations), education and livelihoods — getting more people to participate in the national and local economy. India is also on the verge of becoming the diabetes capital of the world, so that’s a niche effort within healthcare philanthropy that some donors are keen on tackling.
Among very wealthy Indian Americans, Counts estimates that about half of them have picked their favorite charity. Some donate publicly, but others are quite private. But Counts said we should also be focusing on the other half, those that haven’t yet gotten around to major philanthropy. “If you’re running Microsoft or Google, for example, you’re kind of like, ‘I’ll do that later in my career.’ So that’s why we think Indian American giving is probably going to triple in the next five to 10 years.”
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