Philanthropic Advisory
Philanthropic advisory is the work of guiding a family from philanthropic intent to a functioning philanthropic institution — one with a clear mission, a governance structure, defined beneficiary frameworks, and the operational capacity to sustain impact beyond the founding generation’s energy. For Indian UHNW families, this is increasingly where the most consequential questions about legacy and purpose converge. The intent is rarely absent. What is absent, in most cases, is someone who has made the journey from intent to institution themselves — and can guide the family through the specific, practical decisions that journey requires.
Most wealthy Indian families have a philanthropic impulse. Many have been giving informally for years — to temples, to educational institutions, to individuals in need, to causes that matter to the patriarch or matriarch. Some have set up charitable trusts, often on the advice of their CA or legal counsel, as part of tax planning or CSR compliance. But the distance between a charitable trust and a functioning philanthropic institution is significant — and it is in that distance that most good intentions stall.
The stalling happens in predictable places. The family does not have a clear philanthropic vision — it has an impulse but not a strategy. The trust was incorporated but no one designed the programmes it would fund. Beneficiary selection is ad hoc rather than structured. Governance is informal — the founder decides, and no one else has authority or responsibility. Impact is unmeasured. And over time, the initial energy fades, because there is no institutional structure to sustain what was started by an individual’s conviction.
Vedicology Advisors works with families at every stage of this journey — from the first conversation about what the family wants its philanthropy to mean, through the structural and operational work of building an institution, to the governance that keeps it functioning across generations. The advisory is grounded in direct experience. The Vedicology Foundation — a Section 8 non-profit organisation founded by Praveen and Vandana Praveen — is an active institution supporting orphaned youth across India through scholarships, aftercare, and vocational enablement. The guidance offered to families comes from having made every decision that building a foundation requires: writing the founding documents, designing scholarship criteria, selecting beneficiaries, managing relationships with Child Care Institutions, building a team, reporting to regulators, and sustaining operations across years. It is not a model observed from outside. It is one built from the ground up.
The Challenge
Philanthropy for India’s UHNW families exists in a paradox. The intent is widespread and often deeply held — rooted in dharmic values, family tradition, a sense of duty to community, or the next generation’s evolving relationship with wealth and purpose. But the infrastructure to translate that intent into sustained, structured impact is almost always absent.
The reasons are not hard to identify. The family’s existing advisory circle — CAs, lawyers, wealth managers, bankers — can incorporate a trust or a Section 8 company. They can ensure compliance with the Companies Act, advise on FCRA considerations, and handle Section 80G registration. What they cannot do is answer the questions that actually determine whether a philanthropic institution succeeds or fails: What population does this foundation serve, and why? How are beneficiaries selected? What does impact look like, and how is it measured? Who governs the institution when the founder’s attention moves elsewhere? How does the foundation sustain itself financially beyond the founding family’s direct contributions?
These are operational and strategic questions, not legal ones. And they are precisely the questions where the gap between theoretical advice and lived experience becomes most consequential. A consultant who has studied philanthropic strategy can describe best practices. An advisor who has personally built and governed a non-profit institution can describe what actually happens — the decisions that look simple on paper and are difficult in practice, the governance structures that work and those that become ceremonial, the beneficiary frameworks that create independence and those that create dependency.
This is the space Vedicology Advisors works in. Not as an institutional consulting firm with a research team and evaluation frameworks — there are established organisations that do that well. The work here is at the practitioner level: guiding families through the specific, practical, often deeply personal decisions that building a philanthropic institution requires. The credential is not a methodology. It is the Vedicology Foundation itself.
Philanthropic Strategy
The first decision a family faces is not structural. It is philosophical. What does this family want its philanthropy to mean? What cause, what population, what geography? Is the philanthropic vision a reflection of the founding generation’s convictions, or does it need to accommodate the next generation’s evolving values? Is the scope focused — deep impact with a specific population — or broad, addressing community needs across multiple dimensions?
These are not questions that can be answered in a single meeting. They involve the family’s identity, its relationship with the communities it operates in, its sense of what it owes, and its understanding of what lasting impact requires. For families where the founding generation and the next generation hold different philanthropic visions — the patriarch wants to build temples, the daughter wants to fund education for girls — the strategy work also involves alignment: finding a philanthropic identity that the family can hold together, even if the specific expressions differ.
Vedicology Advisors approaches philanthropic strategy from the intersection of advisory experience and psychological understanding. The financial background — over two decades at HSBC and ASK Wealth Advisors — means the conversation about funding, sustainability, and the relationship between the family’s wealth and its philanthropic ambitions is grounded in reality. The psychological training — a doctorate in clinical psychology — means the family dynamics underneath the strategic discussion are visible and addressable. The result is a philanthropic strategy that the family has genuinely built together, not one presented by a consultant and signed off under time pressure.
For families whose philanthropic vision aligns with CSR obligations under Indian law, the strategy work also encompasses how the family’s personal philanthropy and the enterprise’s CSR commitments can be coordinated — serving different populations or geographies but governed by a coherent set of values.
Foundation Establishment
Once the philanthropic vision is clear, the structural question follows: what kind of institution does this family need to build? For most Indian families, the answer is a Section 8 company (a non-profit under the Companies Act, 2013), a charitable trust, or a Section 25 company — each with different governance requirements, regulatory obligations, and operational implications.
The legal mechanics of incorporation are handled by lawyers. What they do not handle — and what determines whether the institution functions or remains a legal shell — is the design of the institution itself. How is the board composed? What authority does the founding family retain, and what is delegated to independent members? How are decisions made — by the family, by the board, by a professional team? What are the founding documents designed to enable, and what are they designed to prevent?
These are governance design questions, and they are consequential. A foundation whose board is entirely composed of family members will govern differently from one with independent directors. A trust deed that gives the managing trustee absolute discretion will create different dynamics from one that requires board consensus on programme changes. The choices made at the founding stage shape the institution’s character for decades.
Praveen Saanker has made these choices himself. The Vedicology Foundation was incorporated as a Section 8 company with a governance structure designed to sustain operations beyond any single individual’s involvement. The practical guidance offered to families establishing their own foundations draws on this direct experience — what worked, what required adjustment, and what the legal framework does not prepare you for. This includes FCRA considerations for foundations expecting international donations, Section 80G registration for domestic tax benefits, banking and financial infrastructure, and the practical realities of running a non-profit’s finances in a regulatory environment that is exacting about compliance.
Programme Design and Beneficiary Frameworks
The most consequential decision a foundation makes is not how much money it distributes. It is how it decides who benefits, on what criteria, through what programmes, and with what conditions. This is where most family foundations struggle — not from a lack of generosity, but from a lack of structured thinking about what impact means and how to achieve it systematically.
Programme design involves defining what the foundation does in specific, operational terms. Not “supporting education” — which could mean anything from building a school to funding a single scholarship — but the precise population served, the nature of the support provided, the eligibility criteria, the selection process, the duration and renewal conditions, and the expected outcomes. The more specific the programme design, the more defensible the foundation’s decisions become — to regulators, to donors, to the public, and to the family itself.
Beneficiary frameworks are where this specificity matters most. Who qualifies? How are applications received and evaluated? What happens when there are more qualified applicants than available resources? How does the foundation avoid the two most common failure modes — ad hoc selection driven by personal connections, and rigid criteria that exclude people the foundation was created to serve?
The Vedicology Foundation operates six scholarship programmes covering higher education, vocational education, and competitive examination coaching (NEET, JEE, UPSC, and CAT) for orphaned youth and single-parent adolescents. Designing these programmes required answering every one of these questions — and revisiting the answers as the Foundation learned from its first cohorts. The advisory work with families draws on this operational knowledge: what beneficiary criteria look like in practice, how selection processes work at the ground level, how to build relationships with Child Care Institutions and educational bodies, and how to design aftercare frameworks that ensure the support does not end when the scholarship does.
Aftercare is a dimension that most philanthropic strategy documents mention and few address in operational detail. What happens to a beneficiary after the programme concludes? What ongoing support is needed — housing, employment guidance, mental health, legal documentation, social integration? The Foundation’s work spans nine areas of youth welfare beyond scholarships: housing insecurity, aftercare support, mental health, social acceptance, gender disparities, legal documentation, and employment challenges. This breadth of experience informs the advisory work with families whose foundations serve vulnerable populations.
Governance and Operations
A foundation without governance is a chequebook with a name. The founding family writes cheques when the impulse strikes, a board meets annually to sign what has already been decided, and the institution drifts — not into failure, but into irrelevance. It continues to exist on paper, but it does not function as an institution. This pattern is common enough to be predictable, and the cause is almost always the same: governance was designed for compliance rather than for operations.
Operational governance for a non-profit involves several structural decisions. How often does the board meet, and what does it actually decide? How is the professional team structured — programme management, coordination, finance, reporting? How does the foundation evaluate its own impact, and to whom does it report beyond the statutory requirements? How does it handle the inevitable tension between the founding family’s emotional ownership of the institution and the governance structures that the institution needs to function independently?
This last question is directly parallel to the governance challenges in family enterprises — and the work Vedicology Advisors does on foundation governance draws on the same structural expertise. Family constitutions, governance forums, decision-making frameworks, and the management of family and non-family leadership are governance disciplines that apply to a family’s philanthropy as much as to its business. The connection between philanthropic governance and the practice’s broader Governance & Ethics advisory is not incidental. It is structural.
The operational dimension extends to financial sustainability. How is the foundation funded — from the family’s annual contributions, from an endowment, from external donations, from enterprise CSR budgets, or from revenue-generating activities? The Vedicology Foundation is funded in part by the Vedicology India Academy — a model where an educational enterprise directly supports a charitable institution. This kind of structural thinking about sustainability is part of what the advisory offers to families building their own philanthropic institutions.
The Next Generation and Family Philanthropy
For many UHNW families, philanthropy is where the next generation first finds purpose in relation to the family’s wealth. A 25-year-old who feels no connection to the family enterprise may feel a strong connection to a cause. A young heir who is ambivalent about inheriting a business may be passionate about building a foundation. Philanthropy becomes the space where the next generation can exercise agency, develop institutional skills, and define their own relationship with stewardship — without the weight of the enterprise’s commercial expectations.
This generational dimension of family philanthropy is connected to the practice’s Next Generation Advisory. Working with young heirs on philanthropic engagement is not separate from the broader work of preparing them for the responsibilities they will inherit. It is one expression of that preparation — often the most effective one, because it gives the next generation a domain where they can lead before they are expected to lead the business.
The advisory work here involves designing governance structures that give the next generation meaningful roles in the foundation — not ceremonial positions, but decision-making authority over specific programmes, budgets, or beneficiary selection. It involves facilitating the conversations between generations about what the family’s philanthropy should become as values evolve. And it involves building the institutional capacity for the foundation to survive the transition from one generation’s leadership to the next — a philanthropic succession challenge that mirrors the business succession challenges the practice addresses elsewhere.
Families who want their philanthropy to endure beyond the founding impulse need to think about philanthropic succession with the same rigour they apply to business succession. The structures, the governance, the documentation, and the conversations are parallel. Vedicology Advisors brings the same integrated approach — financial understanding, psychological insight, and operational experience — to both.
The Vedicology Foundation runs six scholarship programmes covering higher education, vocational training, and competitive examination coaching for orphaned youth and single-parent adolescents. Its work spans aftercare support, housing insecurity, mental health, social acceptance, legal documentation, and employment challenges. It is not a model observed from outside. It is one built from the ground up. When Vedicology Advisors advises on philanthropy, this is where the advice comes from.
If your family has philanthropic intent that has not yet become a functioning institution — or if you have an existing structure that is not operating as it should — a confidential conversation is the first step.