Do poverty, homeless and illiterate children, hunger, appalling slums and crippling disease overwhelm compassion when the scale is immense, the odds seemingly hopeless?

It would be easy to turn away from these challenges in places like New Delhi (Delhi, Haryana) and Jaipur (Rajasthan), India.  Visionary, committed, highly professional leaders and staff of nongovernmental organizations in India are hard at work however solving these problems, one person at a time and through civic action. 

I learned about their bold tactics, saw children on their way to being educationally mainstreamed out of their industrial slum, and witnessed impoverished, limbless men and women fitted in a day or two with advanced prosthetic devices and sent walking home.

I’m not competent to comment on the treatment methodologies used in India, being untrained in social work, childhood education or medicine.

However, I do recommend your attention to the communications and fund development strategies of NGOs I visited there this winter.  They offer significant models for review, testing and adoption in the USA in culturally appropriate ways. 

A visit to the web sites provided below will give you a taste of the clarity of mission statements, engaging Internet presence, use of social media, and all the usual tools of fund raising and communication used in creative ways.  HelpAge India’s new web site is particularly impressive for its graphics that capture the viewer’s imagination and thus interest.  All of the sites make it easy to find how to donate or volunteer.  The transparency of financial reports, often online and in printed annual reports, is heartwarming for donors.  Even the smallest agency I visited, caring for fewer than two dozen children with AIDS, offered a clear, compelling mission and informative web site.

I returned home inspired by the tireless leadership of these agencies and impressed by how much we can learn from their application of best practices and from their innovations.

See for yourself by visiting these web sites of agencies I visited and refer to in this post:
http://www.deepalaya.org/
http://www.udayancare.org/
http://www.helpageindia.org/
http://www.jaipurfoot.org/
http://www.faithindia.net/index.php

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Note: Len’s visit to these NGOs was organized by the People to People Citizen Ambassador Programs, a USA-based endeavor.  

Len Iaquinta, a member of the Alliance for Children and Families’ Resource Development Advisory Commitee and Executive Consultant Select Group, is a career fundraiser of millions of dollars in major gifts, grants, and annual funds. He is recognized as a strategic and tactical thinker, often contributing to professional practice journals and presenting at professional meetings. He has created successful fundraising programs at public and private institutions from New York City to Milwaukee and Chicago. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from Northwestern University (Medill School) and Columbia University in the City of New York (Pulitzer School), respectively.

Len is president of Excellence in Communications.