Making Every Dollar Count: The Soondra Foundation’s Formula For Success

“Why should we choose to trust you over a larger nonprofit organization?” 

At Soondra Foundation, we often hear this question from first-time donors. The assumption underlying this question is that bigger means better. More resources must translate to more impact, or so this logic goes. However, this thinking ignores how small organizations such as Soondra use their localized knowledge and agility to provide instant, tailored solutions to global health crises. 

Since 2018, we have used our size to our advantage.

Rather than using the resources of our team to independently locate and serve families, we have focused on forming strong relationships with local Indian organizations, such as Teach for India, the Leukemia Lymphoma Foundation, and Milaan Foundation. These partnerships are mutually empowering. While Soondra works to provide capital, these partner organizations identify families in medical crises and ensure that Soondra’s grant money goes to healthcare costs. Through these partnerships, Soondra can tap into already existing aid networks and benefit from the hyper-local knowledge of our Indian partners. Thanks to our local partners, we can provide sensitive, personalized healthcare solutions from across an ocean.

Moreover, our size has helped us to remain agile and respond efficiently to the ever changing nature of global health. During the initial Covid-19 crisis, we were able to respond quickly to India’s March 2020 lockdown, broadening our reach to provide food rations while still responding to various medical emergencies—from blood cancer to TB. Most importantly, we responded to these requests in real time, ensuring that money was there for people when they needed to get to a doctor. This agility is crucial, since in a healthcare emergency, a delay can mean the difference between life and death.

Bigger organizations tend to work on large, logistically complex situations, throwing their weight behind several different problems or regions. While this strategy is effective—especially for disaster relief, these larger organizations can struggle with last-mile delivery. For a large operation, the guarantee of delivering aid to individuals can be an insurmountable barrier. 

At Soondra, we are proud to trust the expertise of our local partners.

We are proud to have provided over $72,000 in cash grants to Indian families since our founding. Most of all, though, we are proud to be a small organization, for we understand that often the key to making big changes is thinking small.