Virtual Classroom Course on Local Fundraising towards sustaining grassroots initiatives and their impact

Smile Foundation, with a commitment to work towards ‘Civic Driven Change’, partnered with Wilde Ganzen in 2016 to co-create Change the Game Academy (CtGA), an innovative blended-learning program for social entrepreneurs and individuals working at the grassroots level. Smile-CtGA is aimed to curate a unique learning experience for them to learn ways to diversify source of resource mobilisation, to help building better, sustainable fund raising plans.




Seven-day virtual training workshop had participants from Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, West Bengal, Maharashtra, and Kerala. The learning cohort included a total 16 individual participants, including development professionals.

Talking about the initiative, Santanu Mishra, co-founder and trustee, Smile Foundation said, “More often than not, we find social entrepreneurs, particularly in low resource settings, are in distress due to lack of technical know-how in raising funds and ever changing avenues for raising funds, which impacts development activities. Unpreparedness creates disruption in the flow of funds for on-ground initiatives, taking them two-steps back and thus, affecting the dependent communities. Therefore, a systematic and structured process of raising funds and maintaining regular flow of funds is critical to create impact at the grassroots.”

Smile Foundation, under Change the Game India uses innovative and creative methods of instruction by trained professionals in designing innovative, high-impact strategies for fund raising.

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Smile Foundation was set up in 2002 by a group of professionals in New Delhi, India. It is a national level development organization that focuses on underprivileged children, youth and women. Currently its interventions are directly benefitting over 15,00,000 children and their families every year, through more than 400 live welfare projects on education, healthcare, livelihood and women empowerment, in over 2000 remote villages and slums across 26 states of India. SMILE Foundation as part of its civic driven approach model also builds capacity of grassroots organisations, with a vision to develop and establish a fully self-supporting in-country funding mechanism.