Udayan Care: Achieving Growth in a Social Enterprise
The case discusses a non-governmental organization, Udayan Care, founded in 1994 by Dr. Kiran Modi to raise orphans in a family environment and re-integrate them into society through its Udayan Ghar program. Udayan Care diversified into providing a variety of other services over time, including education to underprivileged girls through the Udayan Shalini Fellowship (USF) program, which began in 2002, and vocational skills to disadvantaged youth through its Udayan Care IT and SD (Information Technology and Skill Development) centers in 2003. By 2015, the organization had grown to include 13 Udayan Ghars and seven IT and SD centers in and around New Delhi in North India, while the USF program had spread to 10 cities throughout India including Kolkata, West Bengal, in East India, Jaipur, Rajasthan, adjoining New Delhi and Hyderabad, Telengana, in South India. Since 2008, Udayan Care had also established affiliates in Australia, the United States and Germany. While the founder was charismatic, enthusiastic and untiring in her efforts to build resources, generate commitment from the mentor parents who provided support to the children in the orphanages, and forge relationships with the community as well as with multinational organizations, scaling up was a challenge. Key issues involved hiring and retaining top level staff and paying more attention to fund-raising to administer a larger organization and enable continued growth.
The main objective of the case is to illustrate how scaling up and diffusing a successful model in the social sector is just as important for growth in the not-for profit arena as it is in the for-profit sector. Second, the case lends itself to an examination of how social enterprises like Udayan Care can provide access to education and other services to those who are least likely to receive these services - orphan children and young women from poor families - thus providing a pathway to economic self-sufficiency. Third, the case highlights the challenges of entrepreneurship in the social sector - fundraising, risk management, retaining staff and difficulties of leveraging technology effectively while attempting to scale and grow the organization. Finally, the material can be used as a basis for discussing the social sector and its role in the context of addressing the problems of socio-economic development and to discuss strategies in an emerging market, India, where Corporate Social Responsibility is now mandated legally