Rotarians learn about the Acumen India Fellowship
Bavidra Mohan
Bavidra Mohan is the India Fellows Manager at Acumen India and spends his time working closely with some of the country’s most promising change-makers to train them in leadership and accelerate their vision for transforming India.
Mohan holds a BA in Sociology from Queen’s University, Canada, and an MA from Kingston University, UK. He started his career as a Social Strategy Consultant with JWT, helping Fortune 500 companies create shared value by aligning social impact with overarching business strategy.
Mohan expressed his honour to be present at such a dignified platform. He said, “Before I jump into telling you about Acumen and our leadership initiative, I want to share my story with you. 10 years ago, I was a CSR consultant and at that time, CSR was not as evolved as it is today. But to me, it was a dream job because I was looking to combine the public and private sector and CSR was right at that intersection. However, after three-and-a-half years, I realised I did not believe in what I was doing anymore. My last client was Walmart and I felt that I was not helping anyone but manipulating the CSR work they did so that they could sell more products. When I realised I was not doing any good, I walked into my office and quit and the reason I am telling you this is because the next step in my life was where I met Acumen.”
He then went on to explain his association with Acumen and how the company’s work benefits the industry and the people it should. He said, “I was looking for an opportunity that was a union of two polarities — the efficiency and scalability of the private sector with the empathy and intention of the public sector. At Acumen, our mission is to change the way the world tackles poverty by investing philanthropic capital in three things. The first is to invest philanthropic capital in companies, so we invest in companies that are directly delivering goods and services to the bottom of the economic pyramid. The second is to invest in ideas; the lessons that we have learn from making these investments to not just help ourselves but push the whole sector forward. The last is to invest in leaders and develop a new form of leadership that the world needs.”
In the interest of the topic for the talk, Mohan focussed on the leadership angle. He said, “For Acumen India, our flagship programme is the Acumen India Fellowship and through this, we find, connect, train and inspire a set of leaders to build and strengthen the future of India. Now, when I say leadership, I do not mean a title or a position of power. I mean a set of beliefs and core characteristics. At Acumen, we have a manifesto that captures our essence of the intangible leadership qualities that we look for in our fellows. We launched the Acumen India Fellowship two years ago and take in 20 fellows per year. The Fellowship is a one year programme, broken down into five seminars. We design the programme to be a part-time commitment because we realise that people cannot afford to take a whole year off of their cause or community.”
In closing, he spoke about the essence of the leadership quality that Acumen looks out for and, subsequently, cultivates in all its fellows. He said, “The magic, the moral imagination, the piece of leadership that you cannot read about in books, watch in movies, the kind of leadership that takes 30 to 40 years to understand, rests in three things that we believe in deeply and cultivate in all our leaders. The first is a sense of self; an authentic understanding of who you are and a willingness to honour and accept your flaws and understand the fundamental truth about who you are. The second is purpose. Our fellows come to us with a deep sense of purpose and we cultivate and nurture it and provide them with a shield that guards them from the failures and difficulties they face travelling across the rural parts of India and the reality that the problem they are trying to solve has been proven statistically impossible to solve. The last is a sense of belonging. In 10 years of doing leadership work with Acumen, this is probably our single greatest learning.
“Our fellows come to us and say that leadership in this space is lonely. Their families and friends do not always respect their choices. However, our seminars help them meet 19 other individuals who have taken the same risks, made the same choices and left the same things behind and they suddenly feel a sense of community and being a part of something beyond themselves. That community we create debates some very difficult moral conversations and to make this happen is the real magic of the fellowship. We believe that these values; honed, harnessed and practiced, not only make a great leader but a great person.”