Hello,
The last two months have been filled with travels, events, making and breaking tech experiments here at Tech4Good Community. The July - Aug updates are detailed below:
Hiring
We are expanding our engineering team as our conservation program formally moves into its implementation phase. Job details can be found here: https://www.tech4goodcommunity.com/_files/ugd/7dc063_32fad391756a4f91acc9f6b87d7d9ebe.pdf
Fellowships
Rinju Rajan, our co-founder has been undergoing the Acumen Fellowship programme and recently took part in the first in-person immersive gathering in Alibaug, Maharashtra. This convening focused on adaptive leadership and created space for exchange with other nonprofit founders navigating complex social challenges.
Anusha Bhargava, our other co-founder, travelled to Italy for the second convening of the Big Bets Fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. These gatherings are designed to equip us with the tools to refine our theory of change, strengthen the design of our programs and shape the way we, as an organisation, approach strategy and long-term impact for conservation.
Tech for Social Impact Fellowship
We’re thrilled to relaunch the Engineering4Good initiative as the Tech for Social Impact Fellowship this year. With support from Azim Premji Foundation (APF), T4GC visited Don Bosco Undergraduate College in June 2025 to prepare for the launch of a Tech for Social Impact Fellowship—an initiative designed to equip early-career technologists with the skills and mindset to build scalable, user-centric solutions for nonprofits using open-source tools.
A group of 21 final-year B.Sc. Computer Science students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds participated in the engagement, many expressing a strong interest in applying their technical skills to the social impact space. 4 students were selected to join T4GC for a paid, 18-month fellowship that began on August 1, 2025. Fellows will gain hands-on experience by working alongside the engineering team, receiving mentorship, participating in shadowing opportunities, and contributing to live open-source builds tailored to nonprofit needs. Upon successful completion, fellows will have the opportunity to either join the T4GC team or pursue careers in the broader social impact tech ecosystem.
The fellowship is a step toward strengthening intent-driven tech talent in the social sector, creating meaningful pathways for students from underserved communities while contributing to a more equitable and ethical technology ecosystem.
.
Conservation Coalition
In August, the conservation team spent time in the field visiting Keystone Foundation in Kotagiri. The visit offered valuable insight into how community involvement is integral to conservation work and how restoration efforts can scale when community-led approaches are supported with the right tools. We spent two days speaking to the Keystone team to surface immediate gaps that necessitates a tech intervention. Prototype development for Keystone is planned to begin in the month of September.
.
Second field testing of the photo monitoring application for monitoring restoration in Valparai is scheduled for September 2025. In preparation for this, we redesigned the UI/UX based on the feedback from the NCF Team and have gotten it ready as a downloadable app in the app store.
We have also been in conversation with the PlantWise team to explore ways to localize species distribution model outputs to guide native species planting decisions.
We held an internal workshop with the Tarkam team focused on strengthening our data practices. The discussions explored how to better organize partners’ data, retain attribution and ownership while enabling responsible data sharing, and develop a common data dictionary that could serve the conservation sector across organizations. These efforts have been instrumental in shaping an implementation pipeline for restoration initiatives across the Nilgiris.
IdliStack
Project Defy, an organisation enabling communities to reclaim agency over learning and education, recently adopted the Fundraising Management System (FMS) we have built for Indian nonprofits. We are continuing to run demonstrations of the system, raising awareness about the importance of standardizing fundraising processes and reducing the technical barriers that nonprofits face in adopting internal operational systems.
Our engineering team has been researching and experimenting with new approaches to cloud infrastructure tailored for nonprofits, with the goal of making it both cost-efficient and sustainable. This work is part of a larger strategy to develop technology that is equitable, community-centered, and built with a long-term vision for social impact.
Events and Workshops
Fundshui
Engagements at events and workshops over the past two months have been a significant part of our work. In July and August, we organized two editions of Fundshui in Mumbai and Delhi, which brought together 22 organisations. These gatherings have increasingly taken the form of community-driven conversations rather than one-way presentations, with nonprofits openly discussing the challenges of building strong organizational frameworks, streamlining fundraising operations, and adopting technology to track donors, donations, and expenses systematically.
Panelist at IIIT-D and release of the first report on FOSS In India
At the IIIT-Delhi Roundtable on FOSS in India, hosted alongside FOSS United and NLSIU, our co-founder, Akhila Somanath, spoke on the panel “The Role of FOSS in Indian IT,” sharing the story of how the Tech4Good Community made the deliberate shift to becoming an open-source-first organization. The event also marked the release of NLSIU’s report, The Rise of FOSS in India: Empirical Evidence and Insights from Cross-Sectoral Case Studies and T4GC was featured as a case study, contributing to the sector-wide reflections on the role of open-source software in India.
.
New Venture Partner’s Saturday Skill Ups
In collaboration with New Venture Partners, we went on as speakers in their Saturday Skill Ups session on technology roadmaps. The T4GC team shared perspectives on when nonprofits need to invest in technology and recommended a range of open-source tools. The session drew 50 participants on a Saturday morning and several organisations requested for tech support in streamlining fundraising operations.
T4GC x Nudge Tech Roadmap session
With the Nudge Foundation, we conducted a Tech Roadmap session for around 40 of Nudge’s incubatees, returning as speakers after having been among the first cohort of Nudge incubatees ourselves, a moment of both gratitude and reflection.
Akhila Somanath also represented us at the Nudge Foundation’s Alumni Meet, in a panel discussion along with the founder of Sajhe Sapne, creating space for diverse perspectives on leadership and social entrepreneurship.
Fundshui x Sumit Chauhan virtual event
Around 30 participants attended the virtual event. Sumit Chauhan, Head of CSR at Mphasis was the main speaker. The event was candid, where many organisations were able to speak about the challenges in CSR fundraising, how to navigate funder propositions, impact measurement and delivery.
Events Participated
Our Partnerships team attended the Dialogues on Development Management (DoDM 2025) in Delhi, a space where hundreds of practitioners and thinkers examined the pressing question of how to scale what works without losing sight of people and purpose. In the same period, we were also present at SusCrunch 2025, continuing to engage with broader debates on sustainability in the sector and JP Morgan Tech for Social Good event, aimed at harnessing technologists’ skills to give back to the community and social impact organizations.
New article
Akhila Somnath penned down her first blog reflecting our journey from a capacity building organisation to an open-source forward implementation organisation. Read more: https://www.tech4goodcommunity.com/post/our-moment-of-courage-building-an-open-source-suite-of-tools-for-nonprofits
