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Alexandra Christy, Executive Director of Acumen Fund Partner The Woodcock Foundation, recently traveled to India to see Acumen Fund’s work on the ground. She captured some of her insights in the following letter.
Greetings from the Woodcock Foundation where founding Acumen Fund investor Lindsay Shea and I are still basking in the powerful memories of our two weeks in India this past spring visiting three Acumen investments. As you might imagine, having the opportunity to see investees at three stages of involvement (Aravind past, Drishtee in process and Scojo about to sign) enabled us to “get” Acumen in a way that all the annual meetings, PowerPoint presentations, quarterly score cards, travel journals, and other excellent materials just cannot do.
What really grabbed us was the power of Acumen’s central vision of “serving the poor with dignity.” Dignity is a word that kept coming up during our entire trip, and in fact, in Bangladesh, where we were prior to India, our local host Professor Rounaq Jahan told us this the night we were leaving:
“What I want you take back is this: You have seen some incredible poverty, but I do not want you to think that just because these people are starving and poor, that they are leading any lesser lives than you are. They are not half people. They have joys, they have sorrows, they have hopes, just like you. They have dreams for their children, just like you, and they have dignity.”
Whether through a Scojo Vision Entrepreneur being invested in and trained to bring the power of sight through reading glasses to the rural poor; or an elderly person being tested for diabetic retinopathy in the Aravind telemedicine van; or through a Drishtee Kiosk owner changing how education, health and other services are delivered, Acumen starts from this place that Dr. Jahan captured so well…this place where you see each client as a person of enormous dignity and worth, and you create systems and opportunities based on preserving and enhancing this dignity.
So thank you, Acumen, for this opportunity,
Alexandra Christy, Executive Director of the Woodcock Foundation
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