MBA Alum Raj Gilda Puts His Money Where His Heart Is

Raj Gilda, MBA ’01, and his wife, Sunanda Mane, grew up in small villages in India where opportunity is as sparse as shade trees and watering holes. It was only through the attention and help of others that they escaped the fate of many rural Indian children and achieved the current level of success they now enjoy.

Now, they feel, it’s time to give back.

Three years ago, with a mere $500 pooled by five friends, Gilda and Mane launched Lend-A-Hand-India, a nonprofit organization that calls them back every six months to the Western Indian state of Maharashtra to be the force that lifts up the next generation of disadvantaged children.

The numbers are staggering: 400 million youth in India, 36 million unemployed, 24 million of those living in rural areas. Many Americans read the headlines about jobs going to India and picture a country with a rising economy whose future looks bright. Yet large swaths of India’s population remain untouched by the development in urban centers like Bangalore and Bombay.

“With the size of India’s population, any amount of [philanthropic] work you do is not going to be enough,” stresses Gilda. “The need is just so high.” While India’s public education system is quite good, Gilda believes its focus on academics rather than on practical work and life skills, is a problem for rural youth. “Unlike in the U.S., there are no summer internships or part-time jobs,” he says. “Most kids are sheltered from real life, and when they get out of school, they don’t have any practical skills. They can’t fend for themselves.”

And like other rural-to-urban migrations that have occurred in developing countries over the past century, waves of unskilled workers moving to urban centers in search of work results in more problems, not fewer. The mission of Lend-A-Hand is to anchor young people in their rural communities by providing them with vocational skills, mentoring and small-business bridge loans— thereby not only increasing their job opportunities but also serving as a catalyst for economic growth outside the cities.

“We’re not talking about people who are going to get a call-center or research job,” Gilda points out. “For these kids, the issue is survival, not higher learning, and they need to know basic rural jobs like poultry farming, setting up food stores or bakeries, doing electrical repair work, that sort of thing.”

Working with existing nonprofit organizations on the ground in India, Gilda and Mane are bringing their unique skills—Gilda in business strategy and marketing, Mane in social services and operations—to grow programs that have already proven successful on a small scale.

Their most ambitious goal is a project, called PLAN 100, aimed at equipping 20,000 girls and boys from 100 high schools in rural India with job and life skills by the year 2008. So far, Lend-A-Hand India has been able to launch eight of these multi-skill vocational training centers.

The organization has also reached two other major milestones in the past several months—opening up an office in India in November 2006 and disbursing the first enterprise loan to a graduate of its vocational training program in January 2007.

While still a small enterprise, Lend-A-Hand-India has grown exponentially, turning, in three years, its initial $500 starting fund into a budget of $50,000—85 percent of which goes to programs in the field. “Because we depend mostly on volunteers, less than 15 percent of our budget goes to administrative and fund-raising expenses,” Gilda points out.

Any business would envy that exponential growth rate, and Gilda says he owes a great deal of his success to his business education at the McCombs School.

“Through my experiences at B-school, I learned a lot about how to work with people and how to influence them—the way you deal with people so that they will want to work for you and with you is really important, especially when you’re working with volunteers and donors,” he says.

Raising money for a cause whose payoff is years in the future is also a challenge, Gilda says. How you present the value proposition and position the organization is very important, especially when there are so many other worthy causes out there for people to give to. “Some of the things we learned at McCombs about presenting ourselves well in a short period of time—doing elevator pitches and that sort of thing—have really paid off,” he says.

Perhaps the most valuable by-product of MBA school is Gilda’s job. As vice president in the eBusiness group for Citi Cards at Citigroup in New York, he routinely brushes elbows with the company’s top brass and other influential people in the financial industry.

“At one point, I considered quitting my job and doing nonprofit work full time,” Gilda admits. “But then I realized that being a part of Citigroup, and corporate America, I can apply lessons from my for-profit job to the nonprofit world (and vice versa) and also have access to all of these highly placed executives.” To wit: Lend-A-Hand’s advisory board includes Vik Atal, chairman and CEO of Citi Cards, and Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Consumer Banking for Citigroup Asia Pacific.

So, for now, Gilda is satisfied with tending to his labor of love a few hours a day, while Mane focuses full time on the organization. “I couldn’t do this without the support of my manager at Citigroup, who has really given me the flexibility I need to be involved in Lend-A-Hand,” says the two-time winner of the company’s President’s Award for volunteerism. “I have to admit, volunteerism is a very selfish activity. You do it to feel good about yourself, but in the process other people benefit.”

—Pam Losefsky