Art of Play Foundation: A reflective journey of a nonprofit startup

Introduction

Art of Play Foundation was started with a vision to make the right to play a reality for all children in India. It was co-founded by three Gandhi Fellowship alumni in February 2016. With all its ups and downs, through a journey of five years, Art of Play got merged in January 2021 with another organization called ELMS Sports Foundation, which works with the same vision.

ELMS Sports Foundation has now launched a separate initiative called Project Chhalaang. Its goal is to promote grassroots sports and play initiatives. One of the co-founders of Art of Play currently heads the initiative.

As part of Project Chhalaang, we now work with close to four lakh students across 2,500 schools in nine states. We have also launched a two-year, full-time fellowship program, called Sports for Transformation Fellowship. Its flagship batch has already completed its first year.

The setbacks along the journey

March 2020 was a landmark month for everyone. The entire world had come to a standstill. We faced a pandemic, the likes of which we had never seen or experienced before.

Just a couple of months ago, in January 2020, in the then Art of Play Foundation office in Delhi, my other two co-founders and I were discussing strategies for the future. We were hopeful and all geared up for an exciting year ahead. We had almost closed the deal with two new, big funding partners recently. We had also closed the continuation of two other programs with our existing funders. We were looking at at least three more potential funding conversations heading in a positive direction. We were discussing how 2020 is going to be the breakthrough year for the organization. We were looking at three-fold growth in terms of the scale of our work.

Cut to August 2020, we had already let go of 80% of our team members. All the funding partnerships that I mentioned earlier had been discontinued indefinitely by the funders. All our attempts at raising some distress funding to survive through the pandemic had failed.

While all of this was happening, we had suddenly started seeing gaps in our product and the programs, which we had been unable to see earlier. Even we, as co-founders, were neither confident nor certain about continuing the efforts to save the already sinking ship.

Throughout the first four to five months of the pandemic, we kept on playing the waiting game. We hoped that things will get back to normal someday. We conducted relief initiatives, ration supply initiatives, and a few efforts to take our program to the children and parents through digital media.

But all of this was not enough. We were doing all of this only as an immediate and essential response to the existing situation. We were not thinking through what was happening around us. We were also not being able to strategically plan for the long haul. This was a major requirement at that point.

On the back of all this, the opportunity for merger was presented to us. Initially we were skeptical of the idea to merge with another organization. For us that meant Art of Play in its current form would not exist anymore.

However, we also thought that the idea and the vision with which we started will continue to flourish. It seemed to be a great opportunity for us to take what we had started forward. With a few concerns and deliberations, we decided to merge Art of Play Foundation with ELMS Sports Foundation in November 2020.

While reflecting through the journey later, we realized that there was some pattern in the way we had approached many such decisions in the past.

A project in Delhi NCR, in partnership with a big CSR, is another example of it. We were running a very nice boutique project. We felt we were able to make some changes in the lives of children who were a part of the program.

The partnership continued for more than three years. There were constant negotiations with the funding partner. Their feedback was that it was a very cost-intensive program. They felt, with the same budget, we needed to reach out to thrice as many children as there were in the program at the time.

We were convinced with the program’s model. We tried to negotiate with the funding partner to continue with slight modifications. The funder decided to discontinue the program. They did not see the value of putting in so much money into a cost-intensive program. With the lack of funds, we also decided to not continue with the program. We stopped working with the children we have been involved with for so long.

Another similar case happened with our flagship program in Ambala, Haryana. We worked there with about 40 schools from April 2017 to Mar 2019. We had finally started seeing some positive impact through our interventions in the schools. The teachers had started taking initiative in the program. The students had started showing interest. There were more girl students coming up through the program. Some of our program students had gone on to represent the state of Haryana in national level tournaments.

On the back of all this, because of the change in the CSR leadership and shifts in the funding strategy, the only funder for this project suddenly withdrew their financial support with only 15 days’ notice.

Throughout the year leading up to this decision, we were hoping for at least 1.5 to 2 times scale-up. This expectation was based on the successful two-year pilot. Again, even here, we decided to stop the program and pulled out the team from the location.

We moved them to another project that we were starting in another location. In another case of a program, we started in Varanasi with 12 schools. The program ran really well for almost a year. The teachers had started showing good results. The Varanasi district education office was also keen on continuing the project. However, we again failed to get the funders to continue the support. We had to prematurely close the project.

The unique part of that project was that it was with Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalays (KGBVs). These are residential governmental schools for girls. We had a great opportunity to build an afterschool sports program for the girls. We had also met a couple of exceptional teachers in this project.

In some of our first projects in and around Delhi NCR, with two to three unique smallscale organizations and another organization in rural Assam, we experienced the best and most intimate programs that we had implemented. The partner relationships, and the relationships with the students continue to remain till date, even though the projects ended in or before December 2017.

Back then, we had decided not to pursue these projects for primarily two reasons. The first was because of lack of funds with both the partners. Art of Play could not raise the funds for these programs. Our partner organizations were also not able to figure out the financial support at their level to continue the programs.

We could have continued with these projects. However, we decided to focus on the projects that we had managed to raise the funds for. I still believe that continuing at least a couple of these projects would have given us the necessary grounding as an organization, which we kept on losing throughout our journey. The two biggest setbacks came following the covid-19 pandemic. One was a CSR partnership that lasted almost four years and it grew slowly year after year. It is one partnership that taught us to be compliant with legal and financial due diligence.

This, by far, remained one of our steadiest partnerships. The project proved to have contributed a lot to the work that we did with only two schools in Delhi NCR. It taught us a lot as an organization. The failure came when we were unable to continue the partnership, as the project closed at the end of 2020 following the pandemic.

The other was a recent, big project that we had successfully started as a big CSR initiative. We were hoping for a long journey with them. However, they pulled out. They stopped the funding, citing the COVID-19 pandemic as a reason.

I have shared here nine stories of setbacks across five different states in India. In a five-year long journey, I am sure I have missed many. However, these are the ones I remember vividly, as the co-founder of an organization that got merged with another organization, to be able to continue the work that we were doing.

Learning from failures

Based on the reflections from the stories, I end with a few insights. These may contribute to the journeys of organizations who are in pursuit of their mission.

Always firefighting and not having a longterm strategic vision is the biggest mistake as an organization: As an early-stage nonprofit organization that always operated in the survival mode, we had to keep looking for the oxygen every six months. Though it was vital for us to do that to keep the work and the team going, it kept reflecting in our day-to-day operations.

We could hardly focus on the larger picture and make decisions in the interest of the organization’s vision. The decisions always stemmed from the survival mode. Thinking back, it is essential for an organization, even in the survival mode, to be able to make difficult, yet strategically important, decisions.

The organization must grow proportionately with the size of the leadership team over the years: We were three co-founders and it proved to be a blessing in the first two to three years. We felt that we were making big strides and things were able to move fast. However, I feel the organization did not grow in terms of scale, work and the budget in the subsequent years to be able to accommodate such a big leadership team.

Documenting organizational experiences and learnings, which helps build sectoral knowledge, is critical: Today, when I sit back and think, I feel we could have done a lot more in terms of being able to document the experiences, insights and knowledge that we were gathering from all our projects.

At that point it probably felt trivial. However, when we look for resources and knowledge in the domain, there seems to be a big void. We could have potentially helped address these gaps.

No matter how inconsequential it may seem at that point, it is essential for an organization to keep documenting the work. It could prove vital for the organization and the entire sector.

Not having dedicated board members and advisors is especially limiting: We enjoyed our independence. We exercised that with every decision we made. However, we lacked someone who we could pass the ball to and look for their advice. We were in a way not accountable to anyone except our program partners.

As an organization, there was no one who was thinking for the growth of the organization other than the three co-founders. We needed an occasional pat on the back, but more than that, a guiding hand when we were confused.

In conclusion Passion to do something can take you only that far. Building an organization is a journey that needs much rigor. It is like running a 100-meter sprint versus running a marathon.