Lending a helping hand
Yayasan Hasanah is in the business of helping non-profit organisations become sustainable, writes
the relatively mundane things — paying the gas bill or the rent — the so called “core funding” that most organisations have sleepless nights about.
But for six Malaysian non-profit organisations, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. In an effort to help non-profit organisations achieve self-sustainability, Yayasan Hasanah, the impact-based foundation of Khazanah Nasional, has collaborated with Acumen, a global nonprofitimpactinvestmentplatform,toprovide these organisations with an opportunity to participate in the Acumen Nonprofit Earned Income Accelerator programme, which is a six-week bootcamp for non-profits looking to develop a social enterprise revenue stream for self-sustainability.
Khazanah Nasional Berhad, incorporated in 1993, is a government-owned investment organisation that manages the sovereign wealth fund for the Government of Malaysia. While its overarching aim is to enhance government-linked companies’ performance, institutionalising good governance and delivering broader, impactful contributions to the national socioeconomic development, its sister entity,
Yayasan Hasanah focuses on addressing the country’s pressing community and social issues.
“We have an overall mandate of nation-building and specifically, we’re trying to champion the social wellbeing of Malaysians. That’s the broad Yayasan Hasanah storyline,” explains Samuel Siva, Yayasan Hasanah’s senior vice-president.
The foundation, says Siva, strives to create real and positive social and environmental changes for Malaysia, focusing on education, community development, environment, arts, heritage and culture, knowledge and public spaces. Within these focus areas, Yayasan Hasanah partners with civil society, communities, corporates and government agencies to design and implement initiatives that will deliver the greatest impact.
“We support organisations operating within our focus areas,” he explains, pointing out that while giving grants help these organisations carry out their work and impacting the nation, Yayasan Hasanah wants to go beyond the traditional grantmaking and enable them to overcome the challenges they face, be it fundraising, talent development, organisational management and more.
“Giving out grants shouldn’t be the only support they receive,” reiterates Siva. “What we’ve discovered along the way is that these organisations could use help in how to be better programme managers, how to run projects effectively, improve governance, financial management and be able to measure the kind of social impact that they’re doing. We found we needed to bolster the funding support we extend to our partners with capacity-building initiatives.”
Self-sustainability has long been the struggle of many non-profit organisations out there. Many non-profit organisations find it difficult to garner sufficient and continuous funding for their work. Gaining access to appropriate donors is a major component of this challenge. They may have limited resource mobilisation skills or lack the ability to diversify their sources of income. So they become largely dependent on grants.
When current donors shift priorities and withdraw funding, it impacts the organisation negatively. Without clear direction and planning, non-profit organisations might find themselves suffering from a general lack of project, organisational and financial sustainability. Siva agrees, saying: “We felt that while we can continue giving financial support, if the organisation doesn’t grow, they’ll be quite limited in the impact that they’re hoping to create.” For most of the 20th century, non-profits had a reputation, for better or worse, of being slow to adapt to shifting demands and reluctant to adopt practices typically associated with for-profit corporations. Then, in the 1990s, donors and consultants started urging charities to become more efficient and business-like.
So what if non-profits could generate unrestricted capital to make them less reliant on philanthropic funding? Increasingly, non-profits are seeking to develop fee-for-service models or new product lines to subsidise organisational