Megha Desai On Helping Women To Build Prosperous Livelihoods And Tackle Stigmas Surrounding Menstruation

Megha Desai President of The Desai Foundation.jpg

Megha Desai is the President of the Desai Foundation, an organization that empowers women and children through community programming to elevate health, livelihood, and menstrual equity in rural India.

The organisation focuses on cultivating dignity so that everyone can dream beyond their circumstances. The organisation has directly impacted over 8 million lives to date, in 8 States in India. The organisation was recognised at the Clinton Global Initiative Meeting in 2022 & was visited by Secretary Hillary Clinton in 2023.

The Desai Foundation was recognised as one of the Top 20 Most Trusted NGO’s by CSR Universe. Previously, Megha worked in advertising, branded entertainment and marketing. Megha proudly sits on the board of directors for TIE – Boston & Take Two Media Initiative. She advises many companies – her current favorite is SpiceWell.

Megha is a contributor to publications like The Boston Globe, MSNBC, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fast Company and delivered a TEDx Talk. She is a singer and performs with the Resistance Revival Chorus (signed to Righteous Babe Records) at venues like Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Newport Folk Festival and more. She enjoys listening to podcasts and the NE Patriots. You can find her @Meghatron5 on all the socials.

Megha discusses Running non-profits And Community Programs which cultivate dignity for disadvantaged communities, and how reducing stigma surrounding menstruation will lead to the empowerment of women and girls globally.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in non-profits and social impact?

[Megha Desai] - I was born in Massachusetts to two immigrant parents who came from India and humble beginnings. We lived a life in the suburbs of Massachusetts, and my father's an entrepreneur. We were always trying to build and bridge two different cultures and communities.

Living in the very Catholic Massachusetts community, I was also trying to thrive in my own culture. I was trying to learn about Indian culture while surviving and assimilating to what was happening in Massachusetts. There’s an American term, code switching, which I become very familiar with. Monday through Friday I was as white as could be, I pretended not to be Indian at all. Then, Saturday and Sunday, I was at language, religion, and dance school learning about my culture.

I was brown on the weekends, and it was both lovely and difficult. I'm proud that my parents thought about and pushed to ensure I held both cultures, because over the years what that meant was, I was able to pick and choose which parts of both I connected to the most. These parts both make me who I am.

I can say today I am a brilliant mix of both being very Indian and American, and it's been a lovely ride from a cultural perspective. Professionally, I left college and started working in corporate advertising. During that journey, I was successful for the first 10-11 years, and I'm super grateful for this experience because I learned so many hard skills through building those businesses, making advertisements and performing brand and entertainment work.

Every time I was promoted however, I always felt like something was missing. The reason I say this is because the huge companies and brands people want to work for are usually beers and sodas. I'm super happy for other people to connect with those companies, but for me, I just couldn’t connect. I remember I got this major promotion, and I was the youngest person to be awarded this level of responsibility at the company.

I was promoted and put onto working with this beer brand, and it felt like every time I got promoted, the brand felt less important. I felt this disconnect, and if I'm being honest, I didn't realise it was the brand’s fault.

I kept thinking it was the company that was not suitable for me, so I moved and hopped between advertising companies to try and find the right fit. What was not working for me was marketing something my whole body didn't connect with or believe in.

I left the corporate advertising world to start my own marketing business, and we focused on building brands by working with start-ups and brands who were trying to tell an impact story.

On that journey, I was able to discover how powerful the storytelling aspect of working in impact is, especially for some of these companies who maybe thought they weren't working in impact. There was this huge computer company we used to work with, and they had very quietly reduced their paper consumption across the company by 30%.

They had removed this single page in their annual report framing it as a cost saving exercise, but I went to them and said, “this is awesome! But it was a cost saving exercise. Do you realise what a beautiful message this is you're sending as one of the leaders in technology and paper?”

Many of these personal computer companies also become paper companies. How could they tell their story impactfully and connect with their consumers? That's where I started, and it's where I began being exposed to non-profits. I have advised several, some of them were my clients, and that's where I encountered the Desai Foundation.

As President of the Desai Foundation, can you share how this non-profit is empowering disadvantaged women and children?

I'll first tell you about how I encountered the organisation, because I think it speaks to what we do now. The Desai Foundation was originally what it sounds like, a small family foundation. Originally it was a family writing checks to organisations supporting women in rural communities in India and the United States.

At the time, what they were figuring out is how could they create a meaningful impact that is repeatable, scalable, and measurable? Through that process, the organisation was basically investing in projects and then asking, "how do we improve this project by dismantling or rebuilding it?"

Full disclosure, I'd encountered the Desai Foundation because it is my family’s foundation, but also because over the first 15 years of the organisation's existence they were building and reprogramming they’re on the ground. I came into the picture about five years before I left my corporate job, where I was visiting these programs in India with my parents.

What we were analysing was what’s working in this village that was not working in this other village? Why is it that women are taking jobs after their sewing program in this village, but not in this other village. We were able to benefit from this geographic spread (albeit only in one state of Gujarat) and analyse the programs.

What that led us to do was reorganise and build new programs from scratch that helped us understand what the actual beneficiaries needed. I think that oftentimes in the West, we go to developing countries and saying, " I know what they need," and even though my dad came from one of the villages we were serving, he wasn't even so bold to say, "I know what they need." He hasn't been there for 30 years; he wasn't sure what they needed.

When you take the time to speak to the beneficiaries, you're able to rebuild programs that truly serve their needs. In this reinvention, the Desai family had rediscovered they'd built 15 programs, and we realised we didn't have the capacity on our own to scale them.

We made this bold decision to convert our family foundation into a public programmatic organisation, and through this conversion process is where I came into the picture.

My family came to me and said, "can you help us build a website, rewrite our mission, and better describe our programming?" I thought to myself that this was my dream project, I loved this idea. I started working on this project and visiting the villages where the programming was unfolding more. Then, I started talking to the team on the ground while my family started to build out an executive board.

During this time, I was charged with finding the right executive director, so I looked to find the right executive director for us. I looked for a year and a half, and this was when the impact space was not quite as sexy as it is today. The applicants for the job were wonderfully qualified people, but they were people who had been in the industry for 15-20 years.

Their resumes would say, “I've been at CARE for 15 years,” or “I've been at UNICEF for 20 years,” and my father and I are both entrepreneurs. We had already built the programs, and we now knew more about the communities, but we needed to execute. We were looking for someone who was willing to build the plane and fly it at the same time and simply because of the way the non-profit industry has been built, that's not the way their DNA was built.

The applicants couldn’t imagine doing this, so we just couldn't find someone. Ultimately, I realised that person was me. I took the helm and started running the organisation. We opened it up to be programmatic, not only because we wanted to implement the programming in our vision, but also, when you open it up to being a public foundation, your table extends.

We were able to bring smarter people to the table who have experiences we did not have, and that was important to us. We were always asking, “how do we bring more people into the fold so we can have all of that knowledge, experiences and connections?” When I started with the organisation, we were in one state across 250 villages operating 15 programs. Today, we are in eight states operating 33 programs, and we have just reached 8 million lives impacted.

When working with communities from diverse cultural contexts, do you encounter opposition to your activities? How do you navigate/mitigate this to help you effectively catalyse systemic change?

First, I'll start by telling you precisely what it is we do at the Desai Foundation. We are a women's empowerment organisation focusing on three verticals. The first is health, and this involves us going into remote villages to provide education, access and screening for a variety of different health issues, such as anaemia, gynaecology, and vision repair.

Our second vertical is livelihood, and for us that means skilling, entrepreneurship, banking and savings. There are a lot of layers around skilling particularly that we participate in. Our third vertical for programming is around menstrual equity.

Menstrual equity in my opinion is the largest solvable economic and health issue of our time. This is the reason why we focus so much of our programming, funding, and energy on addressing it. the Desai Foundation provides the most robust menstrual equity program in India, because we tackle all the areas of issue, awareness, stigma, and the accessibility of menstrual products.

We are breaking the stigmas around menstruation. I know that often in the West we think that we have enough education, so we don't have those stigmas, but that's not the case. One in five girls in the United States drop out of sports after she gets her period. One in five girls in America say they have stayed home from school because they couldn't afford or access menstrual products.

There is a litany of these different stigmas, and of course, women are told from the day they get their period not to go swimming in the ocean because they're going to attract sharks. There is a litany of different stigmas which exist in the West. In India, those stigmas are a little bit more debilitating, they might that you are not allowed to go to school or work, or you're not allowed to sit at the same dinner table as your family.

Stigmas around menstruation are much more severe in India, and it can alter your health journey and life by impacting your likelihood finishing school and participating in the workforce. When it comes to regional cultural differences, there are many.

We work across eight states, and I can't even count the number of languages we straddle when it comes to the work we do. The cultures in Tamil Nadu are very different than the cultures in Orissa, Uttar Pradesh or Gujarat. Our team members in India are all from the places in which we work, which helps a lot in delivering our programs.

The number one priority is having boots on the ground who can understand what is happening where, how and why. But even those folks who come from those villages often aren't aware of the nuances of what these people need. To highlight these programmatic experiences, and I'll give you two examples.

Our first example is around livelihood, and we were wondering why people were not getting jobs after they learnt sewing through our program. It's a three-month, robust course on how to use sewing machines and create patterns, but the reason why some women in one village were getting jobs and not in the other was simply geography. There were no places for these people to go and get a job, because there were no sewing shops, tailors or factories for them to take their skills.

Another reason we saw women not getting jobs was because their community was more traditional. Their mother-in-law or husbands wouldn't allow them to go get a nine to five job, so they could go and become skilled through training, but they couldn’t go and get a job! How do you navigate around this?

At the end of the day, our job is to cultivate dignity and create economic opportunities for these women. So what we did was bake entrepreneurship into our programs, meaning we taught these women how to calculate a bill, measure how much their time is worth, and follow up on material purchases. There is a litany of different skills we instil in these women so they can run a micro business within their home or with a friend.

What this does is allows us to listen to beneficiaries, and we learn how they need to use our programming rather than dictating how our programming should be used. That approach has been successful for us across many of our vocational skilling, whether it's for beauticians, sewing, or computers.

We're providing them opportunities to use the skill that suits the lives they live, because what we're not trying to do is go into these villages and say, "you have to get a nine to five job, you have to speak English, and you have to move to the city.” We want them to live dignified, fruitful, healthy, and prosperous lives, however and wherever they want to, because that’s what dignity is.

I'll give you another example of listening to communities, this time around menstrual equity. The stigmas that exist around menstrual equity are rampant, and they change from village to village. Despite working in this industry for 15 years, you think you've heard them all, but you haven't. What's interesting about the topic of menstrual equity is when you go from village to village, there's going to be different resistance from different groups.

In the South for example, there's a little less resistance, they're a little more practical about menstruation and culturally they have a celebration honouring when a girl starts her period.

Even in the North or the South, sometimes you go into these communities and it's the women who are more hesitant to teach these courses and classes.

Why? Because shame is carried on and passed down in the women. Men aren't carrying the shame of their menstruation, it's the women who are taught from the day they start their period how it’s shameful, how they can hide it and how they should not talk about it. They’re told if they touch the family pickle jar on the table, they will poison their family.

They're taught these constant barrages which instil so much silence and shame, and that is passed down through women. There are some communities (I'm not saying this happens in all the communities) where we've approached the men first and said, “this is a major issue. It's preventing girls from staying in school and jobs, so how do we ensure we can teach this is just a biological process?”

Once the men are on board, the women elders come on board and suddenly the program moves forward. We've seen this several times, so you never quite know who your ally is going to be. The cultural differences from region to region are very vast, and it's why we've grown quite quickly in my opinion. I've been trying to slow down the geographical growth a little. It's because we have community members who work at our company that know these communities, and I think that is the number one reason we can navigate these cultural differences.

In the past you have founded strategic branding firms helping organisations embrace social responsibility. Where did you observe these organisations commonly making mistakes and how did you help them more effectively communicate their impact?

The company was called Marketing. Strategy. Dharma, MSD, which are coincidentally my initials. I started the firm after I left the corporate advertising world, because as you mentioned, I was trying to apply the skills I'd learned in corporate advertising with brands and companies I felt aligned more with my values. That led me to working with many start-ups and large corporations. I already gave you one example, the computer company who had missed it was doing something profound in the impact space.

Sometimes, they are unaware they're doing something brilliant for the impact space, which happens less now than it did back then, but it was equally as important to help them tell that story back then. Where I saw the most mistakes was with start-ups. Whether they were early stage or already in their Series B/C Stages, there were two profound mistakes I was seeing in relation to impact.

One mistake is founders thinking to themselves, “when I make my money I will participate in philanthropy and make an impact.” They were not asking themselves, “what is my value system around impact? What are the things that are important to me? Is it the environment? Women? Workers’ rights?”

Whatever the case may be, think about your values and whether the company you are building is upholding those values. I can't tell you how many times I’ve spoken to entrepreneurs and founders who were ready to exit or in their Series D stage who realised they had built a company that wasn't necessarily aligned with their impact values.

One thing I would recommend is from a founder’s perspective to bear down and take the time to say, "here are some absolute no's when it comes to my company. I will not participate in X, Y, Z as we move forward and grow.”

Or there is the opposite, which is thinking about what you will absolutely lean towards doing. I also watched a lot of companies not recognise the product or service they were building or creating were inherently connected to an impactful pain point of a consumer.

How do you align those values and recognise your impact? It's by talking to the consumer, and saying, "so you might want to buy this type of a widget, would it be okay if this widget also did this? How does this one product become two different products for you?”

That is the other mistake I see, inconsistencies between the founder and their company’s values, where they weren't seeing the long-term value of investing in impact, especially as an investment in their consumer.

How did you help remedy the impact storytelling mistakes these organisations were making?

Unfortunately, I must speak in ‘euphemisms’ of some kind because I can’t reveal specifics. A lot of what I did was work with senior teams to realign and reset their values to see how these two things could be true at the same time.

At the end of the day, I've never met a single start-up which doesn't pivot; you’re building and growing something, so you end up pivoting. The Desai Foundation pivoted many times in fact, and it's because you learn and then grow into offering what is right for your consumer or client.

You cannot pivot responsibly if you don't have your company’s values as guardrails. Those values are not just about your company, product, or revenue, it's about the impact you and your company to leave on the world.

It’s difficult to pivot if you don't have those guardrails and values, so I’ve helped a lot of companies through those floundering moments where they were forced to make a pivot but weren't sure where to land.

Regardless of what their investors or the consumer is telling you to do, you should be thinking about what your values are telling you to do? That was something helpful for me to help guide my clients.

What advice would you give to an aspiring change maker who wants to make a difference in the world or create an impact, but they have no idea where to begin?

I love this question because I spend a little bit of my time every week making sure I make space to mentor people who are trying to change the world. It's so important to me, so thank you for this question. I think there are a handful of guiding principles I always repeat. The first is always assume you know nothing.

Assume you know nothing, and while you be passionate about whatever it is you're passionate about know that you know nothing. I can't tell you the number of times I still to this day use the phrase, "I don't know anything." It is important to stay curious and keep learning, not just in the vertical you're passionate about, but all the verticals which touch yours.

I can't tell you how much I consume still, I set aside almost one evening every night to just read, consume, and learn, because you are never done learning. Especially when you're trying to make a difference in other people's lives, remember we are constantly evolving. Business practices, technology, and how we communicate is constantly evolving, so if your knowledge is stuck back five or ten years ago, you're not going to be able to continue to make an impact.

Assume you know nothing and learn are my two biggest lessons. My third piece of advice is (and unfortunately it does come with a little bit of privilege) if you are able to travel to some of these conferences where people are talking about their impact on the world, go to them.

I always make it a point to go to the talks that have nothing to do with the topics I am interested in, and the reason I do this is because you learn how people think, solve problems, and approach issues you didn't even know existed. Maybe that one piece of knowledge will help you three years from now anticipate a problem that you never would have anticipated before, so stay open minded about where you're learning from in terms of people and topics.

I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts and reading newspapers which don't typically align with my values. I want to be sure I'm understanding the other point of view, and I think that’s important. We've lost a lot of that in our culture right now, where people are in these echo chambers of, "I'm just going to listen to the people I agree with."

You don't learn from people you agree with, you learn from people you don't agree with. Surround yourself with the best group of people who believe in and challenge you. My friends are always telling me when I mess up; surround yourself with people who are honest with you about when you make mistakes, because you will. They're also able to believe in you so hard it makes you believe in yourself.

I can tell you that for me what has been the single most valuable thing I have done for myself is create a personal board of directors. My personal board of directors, yes it has a couple of my friends, but then there are also a couple of folks who are not my friends, they are either past employers, mentors or people I admire, people who I know I can always go to and say, "listen, this is a thing I'm struggling with, this is what I need to understand better and solve."

They will tell you the truth, because they know what their role is, and having that personal board of directors, I cannot tell you how valuable that's been to me, especially when you get off track. I'll give you a hardcore personal example of this. I did not transition well from being an in-person boss to being a Zoom boss. I was super transactional, assignment and deadline driven.

I wasn’t considering what my teammates were going through, and at the same time we were all going through the same things. How ignorant of me to not think that if I'm going through these things they must be going through these things too! I made a lot of mistakes those first couple of months of the pandemic when we transitioned into this new way of working and thank goodness, I had a past employee call me and say, “I got a phone call, and you need to hear some hard things right now."

These are the types of people you need in your life, truth tellers. In the non-profit or impact space, you can be surrounded by people who will say how good of a job you are doing. What you need to hear sometimes is that while you're doing something noble, you went about it the wrong way.

Those are my pieces of advice, keep learning, listen, and surround yourself with people who will tell you when you screw up.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?

There are many different inspiring projects. One is a woman named Olivia Watkins who is running an organisation called the Black Farmer Fund, which I find incredible. She is reinvigorating black farmer culture and she herself has a mushroom farm. She is an incredible human being, I met her when she interned at the Desai Foundation many years ago, and she is one of the most inspiring people I know. I’m proud of the work she's doing.

I've always been in awe of Reshma Saujani and the work she's done at Girls Who Code. I have been impressed by the movement she's made at Moms First and how she's been able to move the needle in such a short amount of time; she is pushing a policy agenda forward. I am always inspired by people like Jennifer Weiss-Wolf who is the foremost expert on period policy in the United States.

She and I have partnered up many times, and we are continuing to break down the unfortunate advancement of regulation on periods in America. There are four groups who are fighting their fights, and as they're fighting their fights, they are accidentally (or intentionally in my opinion) infringing on the rights of our periods.

Right now, in the United States, periods are more regulated than they've ever been in my or my mother's lifetime, and that is a problem. I am always passionate about not just the work we do in India or the work we're inspiring around the world with menstrual equity, but also the problem here in the United States.

What books or resources would you recommend to our audience?

I'll start with the books, that's easiest for me. This is going to sound cliche, but I read The Alchemist every Christmas. It's my favourite book, and every time I read it it's totally different; that's something I love about it. I also love to read the Stanford Social Innovation website. It has so many inspiring and interesting things that are happening in the world, I find that to be powerful.

The last thing which surprises people that I recommend, because those of us in the impact space apparently know nothing about money, is to read the Wall Street Journal from top to bottom every day. It will teach you a lot about what is happening in the world and where funding is from and too.

I find that my time reading the front page of the Wall Street Journal teaches me a business and money perspective, because remember, at the end of the day (for me at least), I'm raising money from people who are making money from markets. It's important for me to know what's happening in the markets, and I think some of us forget it's important for us to know what's happening in the world.