Case Study
Udayan Care: Leveraging Board Capacity for Strategy, Scale, and Sustainability
Introduction
Journey
Udayan Care began in 1994, founded by Dr. Kiran Modi out of a deeply personal experience and a defining encounter: during a visit to an orphanage, a child held her hand and pleaded with her to take him home. Rather than accepting institutionalisation as the default, she envisioned care built on love, belonging, individual attention, and continuity of relationships, first realised through Udayan Ghar in 1996.
Over three decades, Udayan Care evolved from a single direct-care program into a multi-vertical institution spanning alternative care, education and skilling, and research, advocacy and systems-change work, today reaching more than 70,000 children and young people across 17+ states. As the organisation’s scale and complexity grew, so did the demands placed on its governance.
Structuring Complementary Boards
Board development at Udayan Care was a gradual process driven by need-based insights. They understood the value of maintaining both the fiduciary and an advisory board in parallel. The Trust began with four founding trustees, with provision for three more. The advisory board was intended to support the SPO in specific areas of expertise, such as HR practices, technology, fundraising, finance, and others, while the trust would provide overall compliance and governance oversight.
The advisory board was created at inception to bring meaningful contributors from the start of Udayan’s journey, broaden perspectives, expand existing networks, and constructively challenge established organisational narratives. To gain a nuanced understanding of the programs, most advisory board members joined as volunteers, supporting day-to-day decision-making and handholding teams.
Quick facts
By 2021–22, this had grown into a seven-member Board of Trustees and a seven-member Advisory Board spanning program strategy, HR, marketing, and legal and compliance expertise. This practice continues to date, except that the board is now supported by specialist subcommittees consisting of invited domain experts and chaired by members of either boards or the Executive Director.
The evolution can be understood through four phases:
Phase 1 – Foundational governance: the board provided institutional legitimacy, fiduciary oversight and strategic direction as Udayan Care moved beyond being purely founder-led.
Phase 2 – Mobilisation of expertise: as programs and geography expanded, board and advisory board members were deliberately engaged according to their professional expertise and networks.
Phase 3 – Strategic engagement: board members became active contributors to organisational strategy, including the five-year vision, scale-up, and major strategic reflections such as the five-year workshop.
Phase 4 – Distributed governance: increasing complexity led to additional board members, specialist committees and external experts. Governance capacity was distributed according to organisational need rather than concentrated within a small group.
Central Challenge
Growing Governance Needs and Honest Introspections
Solution
Using the Board as a Strategic Problem-Solving Resource
- Opening doors and strategic relationships: board members created access to government, philanthropy, corporates, institutions, and networks, which became especially important as Udayan Care moved beyond direct service delivery.
- Five-year vision and organisational direction: as the organisation grew, the board provided a space to test assumptions, challenge the founder and leadership team and shape a rolling five-year vision.
- Scale-up: board members helped assess replication, geography, partnerships, quality and organisational readiness, reducing the risk that growth would overstretch systems or dilute the model.
- Financial oversight and risk: board scrutiny strengthened budgets, resource allocation, sustainability and financial controls.
- HR and organisational capability: board expertise helped Udayan Care move from informal, founder-dependent practices toward stronger recruitment, leadership, roles and people-management systems.
- Technology: board expertise helped position technology as an enabler of information management, efficiency and decision-making.
- Whether a problem was real and systemic rather than a one-off program issue;
- What a credible solution might look like, visible in the board’s role in challenging and shaping the evolution from Udayan Ghar to family strengthening, reintegration and aftercare;
- What would make a solution sustainable and scalable, from funding and partnerships to HR, technology, and government relationships.
Consequences of Structural Changes
Decision-making: within the organisation, decision-making shifted from founder-dependent to evidence-informed and collectively tested: questions moved from ‘Can we do this?’ towards ‘Is this the right problem to solve?’ ‘What does the evidence tell us?’ and ‘Should it be scaled?’
Process maturity: Financial oversight, HR systems, technology adoption, and risk management matured as direct results of board involvement and specialist committees, openness to external experts, and distributed governance capacity rather than concentrating it in a small group.
Advocacy: At the outcomes level, Udayan Care’s governance evolution paralleled its shift from direct implementation to evidence and systems change and enabled over 100 publications, partnerships with 6 state governments, and platforms such as an academic journal and an international conference on family strengthening and care reform.
Conclusion
Several lessons emerge from Udayan Care’s governance journey. An advisory board should never be a ceremonial body; its value lies in providing strategic capital, expertise, networks, perspective, and constructive challenge, and it should be created as soon as an organisation’s ambitions exceed the capacity of its founding team, rather than waiting for it to become large. Matching individual board members’ expertise to specific organisational challenges makes engagement substantive rather than symbolic. Governance capacity should be distributed over time through committees open to external experts, rather than concentrated in a small, formal board. And perhaps most importantly, a mature governance culture is one willing to question a successful model, not just an unsuccessful one. Udayan Care’s 2016 decision not to expand Udayan Ghar remains its clearest demonstration that governance exists to serve impact, not organisational growth for its own sake.
Advisory Board
Arvind Gupta
Advocate
Akansha Arora
Director of Human Resources
Sanjeev Gupta
Entrepreneur
Sameer Mehta
CEO and Managing Director
Naveen Narayanan
CHRO, BICON International
Pooja Mehra
HR Professional
India Leaders for Social Sector is a Section 8, non-profit company registered as Dor Education Foundation. Registration Number - U80904HR2018NPL075363
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