The Cheque and the Hour

On giving time, giving wisely, and the causes that wait at the back of the queue

RAJMOHAN KRISHNAN · FOUNDER TRUSTEE, ENTRUST FOUNDATION · MANAGING DIRECTOR, ENTRUST FAMILY OFFICE

Last week, Roopa Kudva made a compelling case in The Economic Times. Philanthropy, she argued, is the one large pool of capital that owes nobody a return. No investor waits for a multiple. No board waits for earnings. It should be the boldest money in the country. Mostly, it is not. Founders, she wrote, must shed the habits of caution that cancel out the very freedom that makes their giving special.

I agree with almost every word. I want to add one thing she did not have room for. The most patient capital a family owns is not its money. It is its time.

Our culture of giving keeps score in rupees. The lists are of donors. The plaques carry names next to numbers. The rankings tell us who gave the most crores this year. Nobody ranks the retired teacher who spends every Saturday with children who cannot afford tuition. Nobody honours the doctor who gives two evenings a week to a free clinic, or the young professional who sits beside an old neighbour so that the afternoon passes a little less slowly. These people are philanthropists in the oldest sense of the word. It means love of humankind. It never required a bank account.

Our own tradition understood this long before the word arrived. We speak of daana and seva in the same breath, and seva was never ranked below daana. The temple, the patasala and the sabha were held up as much by those who gave their hours as by those who gave their gold. Someone arranged the chairs for the kutcheri. Someone cooked for the Vedic students. Someone sat up at night with the sick. Somewhere along the way we outsourced giving to the chequebook. A cheque is quick. It closes the transaction. Time does not close anything. It binds you to the cause.

A cheque closes the transaction. Time binds you to the cause.

Read Roopa’s five habits again with this in mind. Demanding proof before funding. One-year grants for ten-year problems. Refusing to pay for salaries and systems. Micromanaging the work. Needing to claim credit. Each of these is the habit of a donor who stands at a distance. Distance breeds distrust, and distrust breeds paperwork. A donor who has spent a month inside an organisation does not ask for another spreadsheet. He has seen the work. He knows why the overheads matter, because he has watched what happens when there is no accountant, no driver, no second nurse. Time is the cure for the very caution she describes. I would go a step further. A cheque given without time is very often a cheque half wasted.

There is a second imbalance, and it troubles me more. Indian giving, and CSR in particular, has flowed toward education, health and livelihoods. Rightly so. But certain causes sit permanently at the back of the queue. Elderly care is one. India is ageing faster than it is preparing to. The joint family has thinned. Children live in other cities and other countries. Parents grow old in quiet houses. Few funders want to back the last chapter of a life, because there is no graduation photograph at the end of it.

Art, culture and classical music are another. No impact dashboard can measure what happens in a hall when a great musician finds the raga. A Veda patasala does not fit a logframe. A goshala has no scale-up story to tell. These causes do not need funders. They need patrons. The difference matters. A funder buys outcomes. A patron sustains a tradition, year after year, without asking it to justify its existence in quarterly metrics. India once had patrons in its kings, its temples and its merchant families. Today the artist and the pundit too often wait on the charity of a CSR budget that was never designed for them.

I write this not as an observer but as someone who has learnt it slowly. Through Entrust Foundation, we have run Ekatvam since 2015. It hosts Carnatic and Hindustani music, honours eminent and upcoming musicians every year, and records the stories of musical families before they are lost. Ekatvam also supports elderly care, the education of underprivileged children and critical medical care for families who cannot afford it. Through Sanmaargam, we support Veda patasalas, goshalas and the devotional traditions that hold communities together. We are now planning a small home for elders in a village in Palakkad. In each of these, the money was the easy part. The hard part was showing up. Sitting with an elderly man who has no visitors. Learning which young musician needs a stage more than a purse. Understanding why a patasala teacher stays when the city would pay him three times as much. None of this can be measured. All of it matters.

This is the conviction we bring to the families we serve at Entrust. Our Wise Wealth philosophy rests on a simple belief: wealth without purpose becomes a burden to the generations that inherit it. Philanthropy, done well, is where purpose becomes visible. So we approach a family’s giving the way we approach its investments. We begin with the family, not with the product.

In practice, that means helping the family write a philanthropy policy, often as part of its family constitution. Why does this family give? Which causes, and why those? How much, as a share of wealth or income, and over what horizon? Through what vehicles: a family trust, a foundation, direct gifts, or alongside the businesses’ CSR obligations? Who decides, and how is the next generation brought in? And how will the family judge itself, over what period and by what measure? A good policy answers these questions before the first cheque is written, so that giving becomes a discipline rather than a series of requests answered at dinner parties.

We then walk the journey with them. We help with diligence on partners. We structure multi-year commitments, so a family does not commit to a ten-year problem one year at a time. We encourage them to fund institutions, not just programmes. We help them review without micromanaging. And when a bet does not work, as some must, we help the family have the honest conversation about why, rather than the quiet retreat into safer giving.

We ask every family to pledge hours alongside rupees.

Most importantly, we ask families to write time into the policy. A pledge of hours alongside rupees. A grandson who spends a summer volunteering at a care home. A daughter who joins the committee of a music sabha. A patriarch who mentors the chief executive of the non-profit he funds. This is how values travel across generations, more reliably than any trust deed. Children do not learn generosity from the cheques their parents sign. They learn it from what they see their parents do.

So I would make a modest request of our institutions, our award committees and our media. Honour the hour as you honour the cheque. And I would make the same request of families, at their own dinner tables. Celebrate the son who gave his weekends as warmly as the father who gave the endowment.

Roopa ends her piece on the freedom to be wrong. I would end on something quieter. Over the years I have signed many cheques, and I remember few of them. I remember every evening spent with an old person who had waited all week for a visitor. I remember every young musician who walked onto a stage we had built. The cheque was what I gave. The time was what I received.