How youth get the inspiration to serve instantaneously when they have an opportunity on hand? Without much search, I could understand the phenomenon during the Sewa Sangam. The band of youth which was taking care of the delegates-serving them the food, helping the delegates with whatever they need-had all the youth from the engineering college hostel, the venue of the Sewa Sangam.
The beneficiary can never be looked down and serving him can best be defined as serving the Divinity by serving his manifestation before one’s
own eyes.
Most of the NGOs look up to the national governments or international aid agencies to fund their projects. Apart from the governmental financial support, some of the NGOs raise funds through fund raisers, sales of the goods produced by the disadvantaged groups and services provided, and lastly through public donations. Everyone is aware that several governments of the developed countries are funding NGOs in the developing and underdeveloped countries.
The corporate sector has started investing good amount of funds through its Corporate Social Responsibility programmes for supporting the NGOs. To some extent this has come as a relief to the NGOs as national governments have started reducing on their funding to the NGOs. ASK any non-governmental organisation (NGO) about need of a volunteer and you can expect an affirmative answer in most of the cases. Volunteers contribute in a big way though through smaller tasks. Many tasks in the non-governmental sector do not call for a full time paid person. Every organisation seeks volunteers for such tasks and interface with the local community. Language is important to some extent but more than that it is the heart-to-heart relationship that volunteers easily build and connect the organisation with the local community. Familiarity with the local situation is also important apart from the grasp of local social traits. Simpler tasks are executed efficiently and economically by the volunteers. The more the volunteers, the better would be interaction with the beneficiary and local community.
Orienting, training and deploying volunteers is a considerable task for many and needs some sort of specialisation. It is always simpler to handle employed staff than handling volunteers. Professional staff fails to achieve the results sometimes that the well oriented and trained volunteers can achieve. Of course, the professional staff will fare better in many given situations and demeaning their importance can be avoided.
Not all people who work in the NGO sector are volunteers. Volunteers are not always philanthropic as some of them have their own benefits at the back of their mind while they serve. They bring immediate benefits to themselves as well as the community they serve, including skills, experience and contacts.
However, Youth for Seva in Bengaluru city or Seva Sahyog in Pune engaged only the volunteers who were out just for serving selflessly and did not expect even a certificate from the organisations they were engaged through. Hindu society has a splendid tradition of sewa and getting volunteers at a modest call is enough in reaping good response from the society, especially the youth. It is amazing to understand that girls are outnumbering boys if figured out among the young students and professionals.
Engaging large force of volunteers is where the Rashtriya Sewa Bharati (RSB) affiliates have an advantage. The funds available are spent mostly on the beneficiaries and less on the salaried staff in all these projects. However, there is a disadvantage where the weakness of these organisations is exposed sometimes. The volunteers do not match the schedules for the reporting as well as quality of the reports so produced through volunteers fails to match the one through the professionals, I feel.
How youth get the inspiration to serve instantaneously when they have an opportunity on hand? Without much search, I could understand the phenomenon during the Sewa Sangam. The band of youth who were taking care of the delegates, serving them the food, helping the delegates with whatever they need, were all from the Engineering College hostel, the venue of the Sewa Sangam, and had no exposure to the sewa activity or voluntary action earlier, I found out. This was spontaneous response from the students as they saw some other volunteers, who were part of the Youth for Seva programme, making arrangements for the delegates. The local students cooperated in the best way they could, including offering their own rooms for the delegates, shifting themselves to some friend’s room. Astounding, is it not?
Funding for NGOs
It is vital for any voluntary group to raise funds, particularly when these organisations are not trying to get funds from governments or international funding agencies. Most of their energy is utilised for raising funds and naturally the other part-effective implementation-is less taken care of.
Most of the NGOs look up to the national governments or international aid agencies to fund their projects. Apart from the governmental financial support, some of the NGOs raise funds through fund raisers, sales of the goods produced by the disadvantaged groups and services provided, and lastly through public donations. Everyone is aware that several governments of the developed countries are funding NGOs in the developing and underdeveloped countries.
Though these organisations are called non-governmental organisations meaning independent of the governments, most of the topmost international NGOs depend on the government funding heavily. The famous Christian relief and rehabilitation organisation, World Vision, receives goods worth millions of US$ for their projects while OXFAM, receives millions of US$ support from the British and EU governments. “Medicines without Frontiers” (Médecins Sans Frontières), the Noble Prize winning NGO receives close to 50 per cent of their annual budget through various national governments, it is said.
Distinctly different
One needs to be very unambiguous here in comparing the voluntary bodies with the NGOs. Most of the above said NGOs spend at least 35-40 per cent of their budget on the administration while the voluntary organisations spend less than 10 per cent on administrative expenditure which speaks a great volume of the difference. It becomes essential here to state that the NGO sector has become a major sector for employment in some of the countries world over.
The corporate sector has started investing good amount of funds through their Corporate Social Responsibility programmes for supporting the NGOs. To some extent this has come as a relief to the NGOs as national governments have started reducing on their funding to the NGOs. Observers have also stated that the CSR funding is being utilised by the corporate companies to pre-empt the NGO run campaigns against some of the corporate companies. The logic here is simple, if the corporate is supporting an NGO, the NGOs will not work against the corporation. This logic similarly applies to the governmental funding and the supported NGOs. That is mutual interest being protected on both sides, biding a good-bye to the interest of the beneficiary society.
In many cases, monitoring and control is being utilised effectively by the funding agencies, be it governments, international aid agencies or corporations, in safeguarding their own interests to the extent of curbs on the NGOs or the beneficiaries, it is understood.
Paradigm shift
There is a paradigm shift when I tried to compare the above with the voluntary organisations attending the Sewa Sangam. During the valedictory session of the Sangam, Shri Bhaiyaji Joshi, Sarkaryavah of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, assured the conference that there would be no dearth of funding for sewa projects and that the society would support any creative activity worth it’s purpose provided they are done with a pure heart and mind. “Go out and seek the person, not just the money,” he elaborated, “A person is more important than the money.”
Shri Bhaiyaji Joshi further said that, “the numbers are important as RSB is serving the society through more than 1.5 lakh of programmes and projects but this alone is not important. More significant is the quality of the programmes and projects through which sewa is being offered. Qualitative growth of the karyakarta has to be improved for enhancing the quality of the sewa. One has to offer the best one can and not just whatever one offers is best.”
Mahatma Gandhi had stated this very emphatically, saying, “It is the quality of work that pleases the Creator, not the quantity.” This is something stirring. A volunteer has to improve on his own quality for providing quality service and this becomes an obligation for every volunteer.
The beneficiary can never be looked down and serving him can best be defined as serving the Divinity by serving his manifestation before one’s own eyes. Swami Vivekananda wants the youth of this country to serve the manifestation in a best way possible when he defines the beneficiary as Daridra Narayana.
Every delegate at the Sewa Sangam had a bagful of experiences to share as almost all of them had started as micro efforts in serving voluntarily and have grown into huge projects with large expanses. For every endeavour had a goal set before them, not just serving the society but to bring in metamorphosis in the society, the Parivartan-as it was all the time being talked about. “Sewa Sangam” was an earnest effort, I could understand, at bringing the Parivartan in the minds of all the beneficiaries, the volunteers and benefactors as well as the society around!
(The writer is International Coordinator of Sewa International and has an experience of three decades in the voluntary sector. He can be contacted at shyamparande@gmail.com)
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