When we moved back to Chennai about ten months ago, we noticed something missing: a place where social sector professionals actually gathered to talk about the work. Living on the outskirts of the city, and running a foundation with just the two of us, we had no way to get a pulse of Chennai’s social sector — who was doing what, what challenges people carried, where the loneliness and the burnout lived, and where the small wins went uncelebrated.
Our approach to social impact is collaborative by design. We believe in wholesome interventions built with others, not around them. But collaboration needs context — you have to know who’s who in the city, and understand the lived experience behind each organisation’s vision, before you can see where paths cross, overlap, or complement each other. We looked for spaces built for that kind of knowing. We didn’t find any.
So we became cold-callers. We showed up in people’s offices, a little awkwardly, trying to build the very connections we couldn’t find a ready-made room for. It worked, in its way — but slowly, and it put the entire weight of connection on us alone.
Then, in one such meeting, with the founders of Vidhya Vidhai Foundation, we discovered we weren’t alone in the search. They had already tried building this kind of space through their Untitled Club, and found, as we were finding, that it’s easier imagined than built. Two organisations, one shared itch. So we decided to scratch it together. More the merrier. Less lonely.
That’s how our hi-tea gathering came to be: a Friday evening, a potluck of snacks and coffee, an open invitation to social sector leaders across Chennai.
The evening itself
We held the gathering on July 17th, at the Vidhya Vidhai Foundation office, co-hosted with Regila. The rain poured through most of it — it felt, if anything, like a blessing. We were pleased with who showed up.
We began by sharing what brought each of us into this work. As it turned out, nearly everyone traced their path back to a personal, formative moment. Some remembered a school counsellor who changed the course of a struggling student’s life, and it was that memory that pulled them toward social work. Others had lived the difference a good government-school education makes — and had built careers trying to widen that access for more children. Others still arrived here through life circumstances, and found purpose along the way. Different roads, but the same destination: people and purpose, placed at the centre of everything.
Then we played. Adults rarely do, and social sector professionals — deep in service to others — do it even less. Arasu facilitated the play, using it as a way to peel back the layers: how we form our identities, how we frame our challenges, how we define purpose, even what kind of coffee we’d each be. Underneath the lightness, real things surfaced — personalities, boundaries, and the areas that need our conscious attention as active professionals in this field. From there, the conversation deepened naturally, into harder questions: what do funder and donor field visits actually mean for the people on the receiving end? How do we build genuine partnership and tandem, rather than conforming to a market-driven way of doing social work?
By the end, everyone in the room felt they had truly met one another — not just exchanged introductions. There’s a particular kind of relief in realising that the exhaustion you carry alone is, in fact, shared — and that naming it out loud, over coffee and someone else’s home-cooked snacks, is its own small act of repair.
For Regila and us, the evening confirmed something we’d suspected for a while: this is a real and pressing need. It gave us the motivation to keep holding this space — a safe, and brave, one. A few of us are already asking whether it should reach beyond Chennai, into neighbouring districts too.
Who was in the room
Part of the point of an evening like this is simply to know who else is doing the work. Some of the organisations who came:
- CSR Box — csrbox.org
- Aadhi Inidhu Foundation — inidhueducation.com
- Vidhya Vidhai Foundation — our co-hosts for the evening — vidhyavidhai.org
- A Chennai-based orphanage running an after-school programme for children from underprivileged homes
What’s next
We’ve decided to make this a monthly gathering, ideally on the third Friday, with the occasional shift to the fourth when needed.
If you’re in the social sector and looking for community — a place to feel nourished, heard, and seen for who you are; connected to others and to yourself; a space to put your heart and head together and build a genuinely collaborative work ethic in the sector — this might be for you.
Join us for the next Social on August 28th. Save the date — venue and details to follow soon.
Watch this space.
— Jayashree (Inner Companion Foundation) & Regila (Vidhya Vidhai Foundation)