When Two Causes Meet: What Project Khushi Taught Us About Collaborative Funding

Every July, as Disability Pride Month draws to a close, we're reminded that inclusion isn't a single line item in a grant agreement - it's a practice that has to show up in how we engage with an ecosystem and promote collaboration. At Upadhyaya Foundation (UF), we work across two areas that don't always get invited into the same room: arts and culture, and disability inclusion. Project Khushi emerged from an attempt to bring them together.

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The idea didn't come from us - Baithak Foundation, a UF partner, has spent years bringing Indian classical music and dance to children from underprivileged backgrounds. Its founders, Dakshayani Athalye and Mandar Karanjkar, had noticed a gap: their programs did not include persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).

Music and dance therapy exists for this community, but largely as a clinical, cost-intensive intervention. As Dakshayani puts it, "We feel that it is important that every child accesses music, and in this particular case, with persons with IDD, it is the parents, the caregivers, and the people around these children and youth who can truly enable that access - and we want to work with them."

Baithak approached us in December 2024 wanting to test something different, and asked whether we knew an organisation working closely enough with adults with IDD to try it with.

Mann, another one of our NGO partners, works closely with adults with IDD across India, exactly the kind of on-the-ground relationship Baithak's idea needed. We could see a fit that neither organisation was necessarily positioned to see on its own: a partner in the arts and culture space with a philosophy about access, and one in the disability inclusion space with the trust and daily proximity to test it.

As Dilshad Mehershahi, co-founder of Mann, says, "We believe no single organisation has all the answers. Lasting impact happens when organisations come together, share their knowledge, and build on each other's strengths instead of reinventing the wheel. Through this collaboration, Mann and Baithak Foundation hope to create greater opportunities for the people we serve by learning from one another and combining our strengths."

The two organisations also brought on board Goalkeep to design an independent monitoring and evaluation model to generate a report for the pilot. Our role wasn't to prescribe the model - it was to make the match and support the space to experiment. Baithak brought content expertise; Mann brought participant relationships and ground realities; Goalkeep brought the rigour to track whether any of it was landing. None of that required us to have the answers. It required us to notice who should be talking to each other.

Project Khushi, launched formally in December 2024, is structured as an exploratory pilot rather than a proof-of-outcomes exercise. Developmental progress doesn't move in straight lines, and three to six months is not enough time to claim it does. So instead, the pilot is asking narrower, more honest questions: Are young people engaging with these sessions - are they attentive, expressive, visibly enjoying themselves? Are caregivers willing to learn the activities and confident enough to try them at home? And which activities actually work, across different functional levels and needs?

The design reflects that caregiver-first philosophy throughout. Sessions are run separately for youth and for parents, mapped to functioning level, and built to be low-resource and simple enough for caregivers with no music or dance background. Data collection follows the same spirit - session observations capture engagement in the room, but the more revealing conversations happen afterwards, in interviews with parents

It would be easy to publish this piece once we have a tidy set of outcomes to report. We're choosing not to wait. Two organisations that are from different focus areas are mid-pilot. That, to us, is what collaborative philanthropy should look like: less about directing partners toward a predetermined result, and more about using the vantage point a portfolio gives you to connect people who wouldn't otherwise be in the same room.

As Disability Pride Month closes, Project Khushi is a reminder that philanthropies can do more than write cheques into inclusion work. Some of the most meaningful access we can build for the disability community may come from partners who weren't originally in that conversation - brought in because someone holding relationships across both spaces chose to connect them.

We'll share what the pilot teaches us, including what doesn't work, once the evaluation is complete later this year.