It started as a reunion. It became a quiet movement.

Voice: Arpita Desai, Founding Member · TAP Charity Inc.
Source: Team Disha interview, Feb 2025

In 2020, a college class from Bombay regrouped on a Zoom call — not to reminisce, but to ship oxygen concentrators across India. Five years later, that small act of classmates-helping-strangers is a 501(c)(3) reaching fifteen states, four causes, and a hundred professionals who refuse to look away.

There is no single founder of TAP Charity. There is, instead, a graduating class — Thadomal Shahani Engineering College, batch of 1989 — and a pandemic that gave them a reason to find each other again. The work has had that shape ever since: many hands, one direction, no spotlight.

“We first got together during the Covid pandemic,” Arpita Desai recalls, “and donated funds towards helping the needy in various ways, including providing oxygen concentrators to different corners of the country.” Out of that one season of urgency came something that, in hindsight, looks almost inevitable: a registered charity in the United States, governed by alumni, funded by alumni, and answerable — in the most literal sense — to the people they had once shared a classroom with.

Today TAP is open to all TSEC alumni and their families. It has grown without ever pretending to be large. Its members are engineers, executives, founders, mothers, retirees. They live in the United States and India and points between. They meet every other month. They vote on every new partnership. And they have built, in roughly five years, a way of giving that is unusual enough to be worth telling you about.

The framework: four letters, four Tees.

TAP organises its work around an acronym — H.E.L.P. Health, Education, Livelihood, Psychosocial. Every partnership the membership votes for has to live inside one of those four pillars. It’s a deliberate fence. “Any partnership forged or activity undertaken,” Arpita says, “is in one or a combination of the above areas.”

The second framework is what makes TAP unusual. Most charities measure their contribution in dollars. TAP measures it in four currencies, and only one of them is money.

The reason this matters — and why it should matter to a prospective donor — is that almost no part of TAP’s structure is about its members and almost all of it is about leverage. Every partner NGO is assigned a dedicated TAP member, called a TAP-principal, whose job is to know that partner’s work as intimately as anyone outside the organisation can. They sit in on programmes. They review utilisation reports. They report back to the membership, and they push back when something can be done better.

Collaboration is the only way that we could have made a difference. To make a difference on the ground, partnership with organisations operating in our focus areas is a must.

Arpita Desai

Where the work actually happens.

The clearest way to understand TAP is to look at the partners. Each one tells you something different about how the model works in practice.

The visits are not for show. They are part of the model. The model assumes that contributors who see the work give more, give longer, and bring others in. So far the assumption is holding.

By the numbers (2025): $70K+ grants distributed · 15+ Indian states reached · 100+ global professionals involved · 4 pillars · 4 Tees · 0% overhead.

The currency that doesn’t appear on the spreadsheet.

If you asked Arpita what TAP runs on, she would not say money. She would say trust. The membership votes on every partnership because trust has to be earned in public. The TAP-principal exists because trust has to be maintained by a single person who can keep faith with both sides. The reports flow both ways, and the moment one of them is late or imprecise, the relationship is one phone call away from being repaired or one silence away from being damaged.

Trust, once lost, is difficult to rebuild. Be honest towards your contributor, including for abnormal situations. Report accurately and in a timely manner.

Arpita Desai, on how partnerships actually last

This is, frankly, a quiet revolution. Charity in the abstract is easy. Charity that survives a difficult conversation about a delayed report, an unexpected expense, a campaign that under-delivered — that is the work most organisations cannot do without losing either the relationship or the discipline. TAP, by Arpita’s account, has done it for five years across four pillars and more than a dozen partner NGOs, because nobody on either side has been asked to pretend.

What it looks like to grow without growing.

TAP has not chased scale. It has chased depth. The bi-monthly meeting still happens. The vote still happens. The TAP-principal still gets assigned, by name, to each partner. When members felt that one particular partner could absorb more — that the marginal impact of an extra dollar was unusually high — TAP ran a special campaign in the offices where its members work. The campaign cleared its target. There will be more campaigns. There will not, by design, be more bureaucracy.

• 2020 — The reunion
  The TSEC class of 1989 gathers on Zoom during COVID. Oxygen concentrators ship across India.
• 2021 — The registration
  TAP Charity Inc. is incorporated as a 501(c)(3) in the United States.
• 2022 — The model takes shape
  H.E.L.P. pillars adopted. The 4 Tees become how members describe what they give.
• 2023 — The doors open
  Membership expands beyond ’89 to all TSEC alumni and their families.
• 2024 — Year of partnerships
  Prayas, GEF, Eklavya, LLF×TMH deepen. TAP-principal roles formalised across the roster.
• 2025 — $70K+ distributed
  15+ states reached. The campaign-in-workplaces model proven. The work is invisible, and it is happening.

Why your gift, here, moves more than it would somewhere else.

TAP is 100% volunteer-driven. There is no fundraising team taking a cut. There is no executive director drawing a salary. Every dollar that arrives is voted on by a roomful of people who will, themselves, also give time and talent against it. When you give to TAP, you are not buying a programme. You are buying a programme plus the months of a TAP-principal’s attention, plus the network they will bring to bear, plus the visit they will make to the field to be sure your money is doing what you were told it would.

That is the leverage. That is the difference.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, work together.

The principle — in Arpita’s words

The next bus ride. The next ration card. The next graduation.

None of it is heroic. All of it is patient. Your gift pays for the social worker who keeps walking back to the same office until the door opens. Choose where on the map your contribution lands.