There is no template. Only listening.
Dilip Kumar Sivasankar - Advisory Board Member, Missing Link Trust and Veruschka Foundation
In Brief
- Start by listening: The first step into the social sector is often simply showing up and understanding what organisations need.
- Use what you know: Corporate experience can offer valuable institutional memory and problem-solving expertise, without imposing corporate playbooks.
- Start with small contributions: Useful support does not have to be grand; a timely connection, question or insight can help unlock scale.
- Build relationships before boards: Working alongside an organisation helps both sides understand the value they can bring before a formal board role.
The morning after the ILSS course ended, I was still in Mumbai, so I went to Veruschka Foundation, a culinary school for young adults with learning differences that teaches them to cook, bake, and eventually earn. I first sat with the team and then with the students. Somewhere in that conversation, someone mentioned, almost in passing, that they were getting ready for a Christmas fair where they would sell what the students had made.
I had spent 16 years at Amazon, and instinctively I blurted out, ‘Why aren’t you selling this on Amazon?’
What I did was small. A few emails connecting them to people inside Amazon who could hand-hold a first-time seller through onboarding. But onboarding did something bigger than open a sales channel. To sell online, they had to work out packaging, delivery, search, and customer service. Those became the foundations of scale, and the pillars for these young adults to sustain themselves in the future.
That morning changed how I thought about all of this. I had walked into The ILSS Board Leadership Program a week earlier, unsure what I had to offer.
I had never volunteered in my life; I was a year away from retiring, and every organisation I heard about during the program seemed to need funding or scale, neither of which I had. But that day I walked out of the conversation at Veruschka knowing that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I had been waiting for a template.
Which is why the Christmas fair mattered so much. It was the first time I saw that a useful thing was not always a grand thing.
The year I did not try to join a board
So I made a decision. For the first year, I would not try to be on any board. I would just help, in whatever way an organisation asked, and see what I learned.
ILSS opened a lot of doors, and the questions were tactical — build or buy, how to scale a program, how to migrate platforms. Twenty years in a place that obsesses over first principles turns out to be good preparation for exactly that. And once the right question was on the table, the team almost always had the answer. The expertise was always theirs. I was just holding the whiteboard.
Mentoring cohorts of The ILSS Digital Transformation Program in the same period gave me the other half of the picture — a much sharper sense of the constraints these organisations live inside. Small teams, thin budgets, no slack, and a technology decision that goes wrong is not a quarter’s setback but potentially a year of the organisation’s life.
What I learned
The entry point is listening, and the ask is smaller than you fear. Your first asset in this sector is not your strategy; it is your willingness to show up.
The corporate gift is not efficiency. It is memory. Large organisations have seen every failure mode many times over; a small social purpose organisation is usually seeing it for the first time. Same problems, different constraints, no collective memory. Bringing that memory — not the playbook, but the scar tissue — can save an organisation months or years of wasted iteration.
The board comes after work, not before. I joined Missing Link Trust’s advisory board after six months of working alongside the whole team, not just the founder. By the time the invitation came, both sides knew the value proposition. ILSS’ own report calls this the courtship period. I didn’t know it had a name. I just knew it worked.
Where this has led
I joined Missing Link Trust’s advisory board in early 2026. Missing Link Trust works on one of the most under-appreciated and increasingly urgent problems in the country: the safety of girls, first in the real world and now, unavoidably, in the digital one. Years of grassroots work in the high-vulnerability hotspots of India have given them a perspective on the problem that no report can. I am helping them think through how to take that hard-won learning and scale it more widely across India, using technology as the medium.
I am also joining Veruschka Foundation’s advisory board at a point where their impact is scaling, and it is adding programs to close every gap on a neurodivergent young adult’s path to real independence.
I am still actively learning and unlearning, which, after 25 years in the corporate world, is a significant challenge to face. If you are where I was, a year out, curious, and quietly convinced you have nothing to give, I would say this: ‘Don’t look for the template. Go visit an organisation. Sit with the team. Somebody might mention something in passing. And that might be your way in.’
Dilip Kumar Sivasankar focuses on technology for education, skilling, and child safety. He serves on the advisory boards of Missing Link Trust and Veruschka Foundation, and mentors nonprofits on their technology choices. He has been building and leading data- and science-led products for 25+ years, from statistical models to machine learning to today’s AI, 16 of them at Amazon.
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