Following her Dharma

Megha Desai’s commitment to ensuring empowerment and dignity to women and children through her foundation.

ABHIJIT MASIH

Megha Desai heads the Desai Foundation, an organization that works to elevate the health and livelihood of women and children through community programs, both here in the United States and in India.

Set up as a family foundation in 1997 by Samir and Nilima Desai, it has footprints in the metro areas of Boston, New York City and in about 1,400 villages across India. Impacting about 5 million people, it is focused on general health, livelihood and menstrual health. In the recent past, it has focused more on the COVID response, especially in India, but its larger commitment is to ensure the dignity of women and children it serves.

Desai is also the founder of MSD (marketing. strategy. dharma) which is a branding and strategic partnership advisory serving social good brands. Before being an entrepreneur, Desai spent more than a decade in mainstream advertising, bringing brands and entertainment together on film, television and the internet. Increasing involvement in the foundation led her to transform the family foundation to a dynamic public foundation.

It hosts Diwali on the Hudson, an annual event that showcases the work done to empower women and children. This year the event, held on October 12, drew the city’s most renowned South Asian influencers.

Desai shared with SEEMA details of her personal and professional journey, and her foundation’s work in India and the U.S.

How did you remain in touch with your culture and South Asian heritage?

I’m really grateful to my mother for always connecting us to our culture through our faith, dance and singing. I feel like I wouldn’t have as steep of a grasp on some of our culture if it wasn’t for the folk dancing and the singing. So I’ve been lucky to continue that practice well into my adulthood and, funny enough, later in life, become a professional singer. I’ve been singing with the Resistance Revival Chorus and have been performing all over the country for the past few years.

Tell us about your varied professional roles, past and current, and which one of these is closest to you?

I never feel like any professional role should define you. The things that should define you are the pieces of you that make you – your dignity, your dharma, your family. So I think my professional roles have spanned my interests. Initially, my interests were around marketing and communication, then evolved into branded entertainment and that evolved into social impact. Now with the nonprofit I lead with, the Desai Foundation, I think that for me it is not about being boxed into any definition. Everyone’s life is a journey, and it has twists and turns, I’ve just been lucky enough to take advantage of them, and to recognize them when they came up.

You had a comfortable job in advertising. What made you take the leap into entrepreneurship and then social work?

I had a really great career in advertising. I was in that industry for a little over a decade and I loved the pace of it. I loved the creativity involved and working with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. But for me, my experience in advertising was that the bigger the account that I was put on, the more frivolous the product was. I just wasn’t sure about spending

Lessena, ne morte comnium, qui stra re ad fuidemquit, ac tem con Ita Sciam incur ad Catius, utem nore

Playing a part in response to COVID

Providing skill development and training for women

90 hours a week and spending time on marketing. It was not sitting right with me and my constitution. So I left to start my own agency, not because I was trying to be an entrepreneur, but because I wanted the opportunity to choose the projects that I worked on. For me, this was the only way that I could do it. The pivot into social work full time was pretty natural, because it’s a lot of what I was already working on.

Tell us a little bit about the foundation and what work does it do in the U.S. and in India?

The Desai Foundation empowers women and children through community programming to elevate health and livelihood. We do this in about 1,400 villages across India in seven states and in the metro areas of Boston and New York City. Our work is really focused on three main verticals. One is health. One

“THE IDEA THAT OUR WORLD IS TRULY CONNECTED HAS NEVER BEEN MORE EVIDENT THAN NOW. IN 2020, WE CREATED THE MASKS OF HOPE CAMPAIGN, WHERE WE WERE ABLE TO PROVIDE LIVELIHOOD OPPORTUNITIES TO 500 WOMEN WE HAD ALREADY TRAINED IN SELLING, PRODUCING AND DISTRIBUTING OVER 1 MILLION MASKS.”

is livelihood. The third is menstrual health. Of course, over the last two years, we’ve been focused a lot on the COVID response, especially in India. But overall, our work is around health, livelihood, and ensuring that we’re cultivating dignity for the women and children that we serve.

The idea that our world is truly connected has never been more evident than now. In 2020, we created the Masks of Hope campaign, where we were able to provide livelihood opportunities to 500 women we had already trained in selling, producing and distributing over 1 million masks. We were able to develop a COVID hotline connecting thousands to vital information. We’ve distributed 52,000 [items] and supplies like ventilators, oxygen concentrators, PPE kits, hygiene kits, and food rations that feed an entire family all at the peak of the crisis, as we continue to invest in women and girls in rural India, for COVID recovery and beyond.

What began as a family foundation has evolved and pivoted over the years to being a public organization now. How does it operate and encourage participation?

We operate just like any other nonprofit. We fundraise and participate in partnerships. You can definitely participate with the foundation by visiting www.thedesaifoundation.org. or emailing us at info@thedesaifoundation.org. We host lots of events like the Diwali on the Hudson event we just hosted in New York City, and the Lotus Festival in Boston. These are really fun galas that celebrate our culture and our heritage and connect with the work that we do on the ground. If there are businesses that are trying to promote, our audience is really strong. We are always inviting different companies to participate with us and see how we can all achieve our goals of elevating the lives of women and girls in India together.

Share with us a few specifics about the programs of the Foundation for women and children?

We have lots of livelihood programs around sewing, candle-making, beautician classes, which many NGOs do, which is wonderful because it is so needed. What we do is add entrepreneurship training to all our livelihood programs. We do this is because we serve these rural areas where it’s not really an option for a young girl or a woman to get that 9 to 5 job at the sewing factory. She has to come up with her own way of using this new skill. We want to provide the tools to do that. Most of our women start micro companies where they service the people in their village while sewing, doing beautician work or candle-making. On the health front, we provide access and awareness to a lot of different medical care [options]. We have

Regular eye camps organized by the Desai Foundation

“WHEN YOU HAVE FAILED AT SOMETHING, YOU BRING IT TO THEM AND HAVE THEM GIVE YOU FEEDBACK. IT’S A REALLY BEAUTIFUL SOUNDING BOARD TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND. THIS IS WHERE I COULD HAVE IMPROVED. THIS IS WHAT I DID WRONG.”

health camps, health fairs, gynecological, children’s vision, etc and provide 1,000 villages with access to health care. With our menstrual program, we are providing awareness about menstrual products and care, as well as producing retail quality pads and distributing them door to door so that women have less difficulty using and consuming these products.

What inspired you to start a branding company?

Marketing. Strategy. Dharma was a branding shop I built after my career in advertising. I felt like I was able to provide the skill set in marketing, communications, branded entertainment and partnerships that I had learned in my decade-long career. I really wanted to choose the partnerships I was working on. And dharma for me has always been about my duty. I like to think a little bit about the righteous path and how we all build and evolve our dharma over our lives. I think that’s really important for a brand to think about. What was your reason to start? What is your reason to evolve? And what is your why? How do you take that journey, and bring people along for the ride? Those were the brands I wanted to work with, I wanted to work with brands that were thinking about this path in a really ethical way. So I put it right in my name.

What would be your advice to young women entrepreneurs?

One piece of advice I give every young woman I meet is, have a personal board of directors. This is a group of somewhere between six and 10 people, some that are your friends, some that are mentors, some that are really old colleagues or bosses. When you have failed at something, you bring it to them and have them give you feedback. It’s a really beautiful sounding board to help you understand. This is where I could have improved. This is what I did wrong.

The second is to be really honest with yourself about what went wrong. What were the implications, what were the external factors that you could not control? What factors could you control? And how

would you do it again? I think it’s really about resilience, and being willing to pick up the pieces.

How can a person can get involved and participate in doing social good for the community?

Well, my first piece of advice is to join with an organization you’re passionate about, even if you don’t have the dollars in your bank. Everybody has something to offer, whether it is time, expertise, connection or advice. The Desai Foundation, along with so many other NGOs, is doing incredible work on the ground to uplift women and girls in India. To join us and bring other girls with you bring other women with you. There’s plenty of room at the table for all of us. We want to know the other amazing organizations that do similar work. We want to share information. We want to help everyone in this space and do great work.