Session I: 22 Years Since Inception, Is Dasra Surviving or Thriving?

Key takeaways:

1. A thriving ecosystem will require cooperation, collaboration, and perseverance.
2. To rebuild a resilient India, it is critical to keep the community voices at the center, as they know the ground realities the best. 
3. The pandemic led Dasra to pause, listen to the organizations it supported, and provide flexible support to NGOs that are most proximate to marginalized groups. ​

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Session II: Dare to Lead: Empowering Local Women Leaders For Inclusive Cities

Key takeaways:

1. There is a need to strengthen the capacity of councilors by increasing access to training and experiential learning opportunities for them. 
2. Women councilors are often perceived as an extension of male figures who lack the agency to work independently, which calls for a need to shift the societal narrative toward women’s participation. 
3. The role of councilors, though critical, is often neglected, especially that of women, in transforming cities from the bottom-up. Their work needs to be recognized and adequately compensated.

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Session III: Economic Recovery For Rural Women: Reimagining Sustainable Consumption

Key takeaways:

1. It is essential to create institutional frameworks within which artisan producer groups can operate, which provide a cushion for vulnerable communities to remain resilient in times of crisis. 
2. Resilience in today’s day and age means maintaining an online presence and a consumer base through the proper marketing, branding, design, etc. while building technical skills and knowledge of the producer community.  
3. The relationship with the producer community cannot be merely transactional but needs to include building relationships with them and actively engaging them throughout the value chain.

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Session IV: Powering Through The Pandemic: Collective Action To Build Stronger Communities

Key takeaways:

1. Systems to involve adolescents as decision-makers need to be created to have their voices heard on issues that are often lived experiences to create focused interventions in place. 
2. For young people to advocate for themselves, it is essential to equip them with the proper knowledge, build agency, and relevant skills to meaningfully participate in a solution.
3. It is vital to facilitate collaborative action through a multipronged and multistakeholder approach by bringing together key stakeholders such as young people, civil society, corporate, the government, and more, to share learnings and solve for the complex issues.

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Session V: Leaving No One Behind: Ensuring Inclusive Sanitation For Every City

Key takeaways:

1. Equitable costs for sanitation services are necessary to ensure that the low-income communities don’t bear the burden of paying extra for these sanitation services.
2. Community participation is the key to achieving sustainable and safe sanitation solutions for all communities and identities. 
3. Accountability and data are needed at the grassroots level, especially in terms of last-mile service-delivery access, and representation.

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Session VI: Empowering Communities Through Data: Reimagining The Future Of India

Key takeaways:

1. Collaborative action is an essential aspect of bringing together diverse actors across different sectors to provide tools and resources that can be leveraged at the community level.
2. Incentivising the primary data collectors working on-ground is essential; they need to be given the right tools.
3. Customer-centric and beneficiary-focused approaches to scale social innovations are needed to make a more significant impact. It is critical to demystify data, create resources for the community, and build communities of practice.

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Session VII: Building Philanthropic Infrastructure: A Clarion Call For India To Step Up

Key takeaways:

1. Private domestic giving has increasingly stepped in to fill the gap created by the reduction in foreign giving.
2. Greater transparency and standardization of impact metrics are needed to strengthen the ecosystem.
3. While UHNI giving has been volatile, affluent and HNI households are rising on the back of economic growth but need to be more strategic.

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Session VIII: Giving With And For Youth: Exploring Participatory Approaches To Philanthropy

Key takeaways:

1. Participatory approaches where people who matter the most are involved lead to greater accountability and sustainability.
2. We need to shift away from viewing young people through a deficit lens and be more intentional about focusing on their aspirations, assets, and abilities.
3. Learning from other successful models and approaches is vital when we set out to adopt more participatory approaches so that we don’t keep reinventing the wheel.

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Session IX: Let’s Go Home: A Family For Every Child In India

Key takeaways:

1. Co-operation and collaboration between stakeholders will be vital to sustaining the efforts within the child protection space.
2. Funders need to be invested in child protection space for the long term to achieve desired outcomes.
3. While allied sectors remain essential, the primary focus should remain on child protection.

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Session X: Pay What It Takes For Impact - From Insights To Action

Key takeaways:

1. PWIT’s research identified three distinct funder archetypes based on mindset and practices- Program Proponents, Adaptive Funders, and Organization Builders.
2. There is a divergence between NGO and funder perception on investment in organization development.
3. Funders need to reflect on internal policies and have deeper conversations with Partner NGOs.

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Session XI: Walking the Talk: Stories Of Collaboration For India’s Informal Workers

Key takeaways:

1. Industries have human resource management, where we treat all employees as resources. But the same services are not extended to contractual workers.
2. The convergence of initiatives such as Social Compact and BRSR could be a win-win for companies, communities, and the government.
3. We need to see the 200 million informal workers in India as a strength rather than a burden and identify ways to harness their potential.

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Session XII: Road To Resilience: From Breakdown To Breakthrough

Key takeaways:

1. Access to long-term funding is essential to create agility for organizations to be relevant to the changing needs of communities.
2. It is imperative to channel resources towards relief activities and create interventions for prevention and decreasing vulnerabilities to strengthen the communities’ economic safety. 
3. Funders need to broaden their vision of trust-based philanthropy and explore different approaches toward giving.

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Session XIII: Accelerating Large-Scale Social Transformation in Livelihoods

Key takeaways:

1. There is a need to bring together key stakeholders to unpack the bottlenecks in land, labour, capital, and most importantly innovation to be able to build resilient livelihoods for all.
2. Education and skilling cannot be divorced from where the needs of a country are and where the demand is. What is taught in the education system needs to be relevant to the economy.
3. We need to create large-scale platforms, skill women in sectors that have shown immense potential for growth, and provide the flexibility for greater participation of women in the labour force.

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Session XIV: Prioritising Lives in Philanthropy

Key takeaways:

1. We need more champions in the sector to make long-term bets and focus on meeting the needs of the most marginalised.
2. There is a need to trust the smaller NGOs in the ecosystem to nurture them to grow and create an impact at scale.
3. Seasoned funders are looking to engage in place-based philanthropy. They need to be supported with deeper community engagement and more sophisticated tools of giving.

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Session XV: Around the World In Intersectional Ways: Exploring Layers And Practice

Key takeaways:

1. It is pivotal to look at power dynamics and structural inequalities that impact people, thus influencing their experiences. Organizations that come together and work in partnership can have the edge over others working in silos.
2. Multisectoral alliances, contextualization, and localization of intersectionality are the key to solving the real problem at hand.
3. Formulating a broad framework of principles to acknowledge the decentralization of decision-making and understanding people’s diverse perspectives is essential for organizations to affect change.