Trust-Based Philanthropy and Social Impact: How EdelGive's GROW Fund Helped Strengthen India's Grassroots NGOs

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it wasn't only governments that showed up. Across India, thousands of grassroots nonprofits stepped in — delivering food, connecting families to welfare schemes, supporting migrant workers, helping farmers hold on to their livelihoods. What stands out, reading EdelGive Foundation's case study on this period, is how many of these organisations were falling apart while doing exactly that.

There's a version of the "capacity building" conversation in Indian philanthropy that goes in circles: everyone agrees NGOs need stronger systems, and almost nobody wants to pay for them. It's easier to fund a school meal programme than the accountant who makes sure the meals actually get delivered on time, every time, for years.

EdelGive ran into this problem from the inside. For over a decade, its grants had funded exactly what you'd expect — education, health, children's issues — and funded them well. But sometime before the pandemic, CEO Ms. Naghma Mulla noticed a gap no single project grant could fix: NGOs were meeting deadlines, not building resilience. Staff were being paid out of dwindling reserves because nobody's grant covered salaries as a line item.

COVID made the gap impossible to ignore. A 2021 Bridgespan study of 388 Indian NGOs found most were running on a few months of reserves at best, with almost no funding for indirect costs. Private giving in India actually rose 23% that year — but nearly all of it went toward emergency relief, not toward the invisible plumbing — payroll, transport, admin — that keeps relief possible in the first place.

EdelGive's answer was the GROW Fund, reportedly India's first pooled fund of its kind. Thirty-seven funders — including the Gates Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Ms. Rohini Nilekani, and Mr. Amit Chandra — came together behind a simple, almost radical idea: give 100 grassroots NGOs unrestricted money and trust them to know what they needed. Over two years, each organisation received roughly Rs. 80 lakh in non-programmatic funding, paired with a structured capacity-building programme built around organisational health rather than project output.

The results speak for themselves. 86% of the 100 organisations showed measurable growth. More than half raised additional funding on their own — a combined ₹147.9 crore in two years. 94% reported stronger donor relationships by the end. Numbers like that don't happen by accident; they happen because someone finally paid for the plumbing.

What's easy to miss is that GROW's real innovation was as much procedural as financial. One shared report replaced 37 separate ones. Quarterly meetings let funders and NGOs question each other openly. EdelGive absorbed the operational risk of unrestricted giving before asking anyone else to. It's a good reminder that trust isn't the opposite of accountability — it's often what makes real accountability possible in the first place.

As climate change, migration, and inequality keep colliding in increasingly interconnected ways, this model feels less like an experiment and more like a template. GROW+, EdelGive's newer climate-focused iteration, is already carrying the same logic forward — proof that strengthening institutions today is what makes tomorrow's harder problems solvable at all.

Whether you're a philanthropist, a CSR leader, or a nonprofit practitioner trying to figure out what "sustainable funding" actually looks like in practice, this case study is worth your time. Read the full story to see exactly how EdelGive got 37 very different funders to row in the same direction — and what it took to make trust-based philanthropy actually work at scale.

Read the full case study https://transformphilanthropy.wingsweb.org/case-studies/edelgive-foundation

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