Donor field visit with Artemis

We were delighted to welcome representatives from Artemis Fund Management to India in October 2019.  This was our third “Family Field Visit” where each member of staff is accompanied by one of their teenage children.  The main purpose of the visit is to show our major corporate donors the impact of their donations, but the added element of involving the young people brings a whole new dimension to the trip.

Parents are keen to show their children another side of life, away from the privilege and comfort of ‘normal’ life.  The experience of walking into the home of a desperately poor family with little in the way of possessions, and where every day is a struggle to make ends meet, is one that will not be easily forgotten.  And the humbling effect this had on the whole group was palpable.  The young people spoke of a ‘life-changing’ experience, something that had altered their perspective on life completely.  There was an appreciation of how challenging life is for children of their own age just because of where they are born.

To get a real insight into the lives of some of our beneficiaries, we set the young people to work.  Their task was to complete impact surveys on all the families they met.  With the help of our India colleagues Joe and Chandrani, they completed the task admirably and made a lot of friends too, as you can see from the photo above.

One member of the group, Peter Saacke, had been on a previous trip with us in 2017.  At the end of this latest trip he reflected on the changes he had seen:

“Having visited Kolkata in 2017 to see the work Shivia is doing, I was delighted to see how much progress has been made in the intervening two and a half years. Back in 2017, I saw many families live a hand-to-mouth existence and particularly women only begin to make their first steps out of financial illiteracy, whereas this time I was struck by the increased scale achieved in many of the poultry and agricultural projects; by the entrepreneurial drive shown by many families to diversify their income stream and, most importantly, by the number of families which had created a sustainable livelihood on the back of the initial help from Shivia. Once again I was both impressed and reassured by the methodological rigour with which the Shivia team measures the impact of their work and by their preparedness to test, and if need be re-think, their approaches in order to maximize the impact they make.”

Photo gallery