What comes to mind upon hearing ‘nongovernmental organization (NGO)’s finance’? Some people who worked with NGOs before might think that NGO’s financial supports are endless. In fact, there are less and less NGO – especially those led by youth – that survive after two years. Most of them collapsed due to lack of funding. Partnering with other institutions, @america organized an event under Youth Circle event series with an objective to improve one’s elevator pitch and to get quality feedback from potential investors.
Three spokespersons participated in this event’s panel where they all share the experience in managing their organizations.
Isra Ruddin, the Executive Director of Yayasan Sahabat Pulau Indonesia, opened his talk with the word “change”. He chose that word since he believes every human has an opportunity to make a good change. He proceeded to explain his milestone in preparing and establishing the foundation within two years. Today, his foundation has some projects in several provinces in Indonesia. Some of them are Youth Voluntary Camp and Desa-Preneur.
Andrew Ferdinand Hallatu, Public Affairs and Community Manager of Coca Cola Foundation Indonesia, started his talk with the word “sustainable.” His talk highlighted the importance of making sure that each program has a sustainable design to address the concerned social issue and to have the desired impact and benefit as much as possible. The talk enabled the audience to view from a corporation perspective, i.e. what makes the donor give their trust for beneficiaries to utilize their grants. Usually, every donor has an annual issue that they want to tackle. If a beneficiaries able to show the linearity of the proposed program and touch the heart of the donor with that specific issue, there is a bigger opportunity for the beneficiary to get the trust from the donor, thus the grant.
In the last talk, as the representative from Social Innovation Acceleration Program (SIAP), Aghnia Banat delved into the importance of the organization legalization in increasing opportunity of getting grants. It is vital since the grant-makers usually need to know about the beneficiary’s legalization before it got funded. Therefore, potential beneficiaries must have their certificates (as legalization) from the official bureau although they must spend their own resources.
