When I was in India, I saw something I couldn't unsee.

Women on roadsides, children in their arms, asking for money. You see it, you feel something, maybe you drop some coins, and you move on.

But what stayed with me wasn't the poverty itself. It was what sat underneath it.

Some of those women don't want charity. They want to work. They want to provide for their families. They have skills and determination. But the system isn't designed for them.

A €40 sewing machine can be the difference between dependence and earning a living. But when you have no access to credit, no collateral, and no safety net, €40 might as well be €4,000.

I grew up in Norway. I didn't earn that - it was given to me by circumstance. And at some point, that privilege stopped being something I just acknowledged and became something I had to act on.

Not out of guilt. Out of frustration.

Because the gap between what these women are capable of and what the world lets them do - that's not a charity problem. That's a systems problem. And systems can be changed.

Dharma didn't start big. It started with a question: what if we could support women who want to help themselves? Not with handouts, but with the tools and training they actually need?

I didn't have a team, a plan, or funding. I had the question and the stubbornness to keep going.

I also had a full-time job. That hasn't changed. Dharma gets about six to eight hours of my week. Sometimes less. Sometimes those hours happen at 11pm on a Tuesday because that's when the spreadsheet finally made sense.

I say this not because it's impressive - it's not - but because there's a dishonesty in how people talk about starting things. As if you need to burn the boats first. You don't. You just need to be stubborn about showing up, even when the work is deeply unglamorous.

And let me tell you, the work has been unglamorous. Nobody tells you that starting a nonprofit involves a surprising amount of reading about organisational law. Or that writing articles of association is less "crafting a vision" and more "what does quorum actually mean and do we need to define it twice."

Slowly, a small group of people joined. Not the people who say "that sounds amazing, let me know how I can help" and then you never hear from them again. The people who just keep showing up.

We found AIM Foundation in Kolkata. An organisation already doing the work on the ground. They didn't need us to tell them what to do. They needed someone to fund the materials that made their training possible.

That's where we fit.

Today, Dharma is still small. We're funding our first course - 20 women learning tailoring over five months in Kolkata. It's not a global operation. It's a beginning.

People ask me about our growth strategy and I tell them it's "slow and nice." They usually laugh. But I mean it seriously. There's a version of Dharma that grows ten times faster if I quit my job and fundraise aggressively. There's also a version of that Dharma that burns out in two years because the foundation was never solid.

I'd rather be small and real than big and fragile.

If this resonates with you - if you've ever felt that same frustration, that same sense that privilege should go somewhere useful - then maybe Dharma is your duty too.

Ronny Wisløff Andersen
Founder