Dear Karya supporters,

We are thrilled to share Karya's latest updates and achievements with you. Your ongoing support continues to empower us in our quest to build a sustainable and inclusive pathway out of poverty for rural Indians.

This month, we got the opportunity to share the Karya Story with philanthropists in San Francisco as a part of the 2023 Fast Forward Demo Day. We are excited to share the video of the talk below:

🌟 Highlights

1. We just wrapped up the Fast Forward Accelerator. This was Karya’s first accelerator program outside India, and we feel so grateful to have found a community of global social leaders.

2. The/Nudge Institute is one of our most supportive partners. This past year, we were a member of their Incubator Program (designed to be like a Series A for non-profit startups). We are excited to share that we are one of the 4 organisations chosen by The/Nudge this year, to be a part of their Accelerator Program (closest thing to a Series B for non-profit startups in India).

3. Karya is one of the 8 global impact initiatives chosen to be a part of the 100x Accelerator’s inaugural cohort. Powered by London School of Economics, 100x Impact Accelerator has a mandate to create the next generation of “social unicorns”– nonprofits working to achieve positive impact on the scale of billions. The accelerator begins in September in London and we cannot wait to share more updates!

4. Design is essential to our work at Karya, and we are exceedingly proud of our incredible team that designs the Karya App to be intuitive and inclusive. Turns out we are not the only ones obsessed with our Design Team! The folks at iF Design, one of the most important and prestigious design awards in the world, agree with us and we are excited to share that we are one of the global winners of the iF Social Impact Prize. A huge shout out to Nitin Jerath, our incredible Head of Design for leading our design work. You can view a snapshot of Karya’s winning entry below:

5. We just wrapped the very first Karya Learn pilot (in collaboration with Parinaam Foundation) where we offered villagers across Maharashtra income and critical financial literacy through our learn-to-earn model. Initial results suggest that this model creates a statistically significant increase in learning & content retention. This is especially exciting as we start building more and more apps to provide skilling opportunities for our workers.

6. We are thrilled to share that the Karya Team will be in Toronto this month for the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Conference. We will also be exhibiting our work at the Interspeech Conference in Ireland next month. As we continue on our mission to make the world of AI more ethical, these conferences give us a critical stage to speak directly to technologists.

7. Finally, work on the ground is happening in full swing. This month, our partnership with Karnataka Health Promotion Trust and USAID brought Karya to 30 new villages across Karnataka. We are also excited to share that this month, our partnership with IIT Madras has allowed us to bring digital work to an additional 60 new villages across the country. As the month of June ends, we are excited to share we are now growing at a pace of 3 new villages/day.

🙏 Asks

Champion: Champion the cause of ethical data generation by joining our Ethical Data Pledge at ethicaldatapledge.com.

Invite: We need all the help we can get in acing our B2B sales, storytelling and marketing efforts. If you are an expert in any of these areas, we invite you to join Team Karya by emailing us at givework@karya.in

Invest: Support our workers with hyper-local skills, career guidance, and job opportunities by donating directly here. For more information, contact Safiya Husain at safiya@karya.in. Your contribution makes a difference!

We want to end today’s newsletter with a special shoutout to one of our most incredible supporters, Rekha Pai Kamath. Rekha sits on the board of Fast Forward, and is one of the most prolific impact investors in the world. Here’s what she has to say about Karya:

“In a near future world where power and capital is stacked up against the small town rural communities, Karya is trying to level the playing field of redistribution of wealth into the hands of the data creators and owners while lifting the ultra-poor out of poverty.”

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We are incredibly grateful for your unwavering support, which enables us to make a real difference in the lives of thousands of people. Stay tuned for more updates and exciting news from Karya!

With gratitude,

Manu Chopra

Team Karya