Who is holding the soul of your organisation?

India's social sector has never had more capital chasing it, or more scrutiny following that capital.

India's social sector has never had more capital chasing it, or more scrutiny following that capital. Corporate India funnelled a record ₹40,794 crore into CSR in FY2024–25, a 17% jump over the previous year. Philanthropic capital keeps deepening alongside it, and the expectations attached to both keep rising, even as the compliance infrastructure meant to hold that capital has been thinning: Only around 16,000 NGOs now hold an active FCRA registration, down from over 40,000 before the 2020 amendment tightened the rules. What hasn’t picked up, in our experience of working closely with social purpose organisations (SPOs) across the country, is the boardroom. It's why we've spent the last few years creating spaces to share and evangelise the need for strong governance — for a genuinely strong executive-board relationship, across the sector.

Funding

Every organisation begins the same way: A founder with a mission, and a handful of people close enough to trust with it. That first board is really an extension of the founder i.e. friends, family, early believers who share the regulatory load and little else. This is not a flaw. It is how almost every institution gets built. The trouble starts when an organisation outgrows that board and nobody notices.

We have watched this arc play out closely wherein the board moved through three distinct stages: A friends-and-family board that shared the earliest regulatory load, a working board that helped the organisation codify the systems it needed to survive its adolescence, and finally the strategic governance body it works with today, built to stress-test strategy and hold the long view. Each transition meant consciously letting go of a board that had served well but had simply outgrown its purpose, accepting that loyalty and shared history are not, by themselves, qualifications for oversight.

Our collective experience has taught us that the board holds the soul of the organisation. If the board allows mission drift or mission creep, that's where everything unravels. Sit with that for a moment. It reframes a board from an oversight function into something closer to a guardianship. A body positioned to notice when operational pressure, donor expectation, or the pull of an easier geography begins to bend an organisation away from its core commitment. A board that simply nods along is not neutral. It is counterproductive to the long-term health of the mission it exists to protect.

That guardianship matters more in the social sector than almost anywhere else, for a structural reason. In the corporate world, the stakeholder is the customer, the shareholder, the market i.e. all present, all able to vote with their money. In the social sector, the stakeholder is the ultimate beneficiary, and has no seat at the table, no market signal, no voice. The board, in a very real sense, must speak for them. In the NGO world, the founder is the fountainhead of the organisation, which is exactly why the board's job is not to defer to that fountainhead, but to hold it accountable to something larger than itself.

What does that accountability look like in practice? At the strongest boards we have observed, it is built into ritual, not left to instinct. Before every formal board meeting, there is a closed, hour-long conversation between the board and the chief executive, a space for complete honesty, where fears and doubts that wouldn't be raised in front of the full team get said out loud. It's a small structural choice, but in a sector where the pressure to project confidence is constant, that kind of transparency is quietly radical. It also reshapes what the board chair's job actually is: less a formal chair, more a bridge - absorbing the founder's frustration, redirecting tension, and championing the management team publicly even when the board has pushed hard in private.

A few non-negotiables tend to separate boards that hold the line from those that drift:

• A five-year strategy, built once every five years through often painstaking, contentious work, that becomes the single reference point for every subsequent decision, eliminating ambiguity about where board authority ends and management begins, and keeping the mission from bending to whatever happens to be fundable in a given quarter
• No donors on the board, so that every discussion returns to one question i.e. what is best for the organisation, not what is best for the funding relationship
• A willingness to take the long view i.e. to consciously transition an organisation from founder-centric to mission-centric, building something designed to outlast every person currently in the room

None of this is an argument against founder-led organisations, or a case for governance as a compliance mandate. It is the opposite. Every rupee of CSR and philanthropic capital flowing into Indian development work is, ultimately, a bet on institutions rather than individuals. And yet, that ideal sits alongside a harder truth: In an SPO, no real conversation happens without the founder at the centre of it. The institution borrows its identity from the founder — its credibility, its relationships, often its very reason for being. However, a social purpose organisation with a genuinely engaged, independent board is simply a better bet - for funders assessing risk, for talent choosing where to build a career, and for the beneficiaries whose interests only a board, never a market, is positioned to protect.

The next chapter of Indian philanthropy will not be defined by how much capital arrives, but by how well it is stewarded. That stewardship starts, and often quietly fails, in the boardroom. Getting it right is the surest way social purpose organisations build institutions that can carry a mission for decades, long after anyone currently in the room has left it.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Safeena Husain, founder and board member, Ujwal Thakar, board chair, Educate Girls, partner and co-founder, Ujwal Impact Advisers and Samina Alam, Lead, Centre of Excellence for Board and Governance, India Leaders for Social Sector.