Getting to Know the Quirky Idealists Turning the Tide for Fish in India
7 minute read — Published 16th July 2024
Aidan’s Visit to FWI, Part 2
This January I visited one of our super-effective charities, Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI), in India. In Part 1 of this blog I discussed how witnessing fish farming firsthand deepened my empathy for both ‘the farmed’ and ‘the farmer’. But what about the charity itself? Who is FWI, and what makes them so impactful? This time, I aim to distill what I observed about what makes FWI tick. It boils down to three things that, while they may sound simple, are rarer than you’d think.
1. A tight-knit team with the right set of backgrounds
Initially, it was just the two founders doing everything. But as they repeatedly told me, they wouldn’t have achieved anything alone. They have since assembled a team of over 20 people, including former fish farming insiders, fish welfare scientists, marine biologists, experts in large-scale poverty alleviation, and Andhra Pradesh locals. Each person’s background adds a crucial piece to the puzzle that allows FWI to execute smoothly. For example, fish farming insiders bring an understanding of the business and emotional realities of being a fish farmer and how to communicate effectively with farmers. Those with animal welfare and marine biology experience know how to design and test programs that are scientifically informed and likely to improve fish welfare. Experts in large-scale poverty alleviation might seem like a strange addition to the team, but they bring experience scaling small programs like FWI’s to reach millions of beneficiaries, plus they bring valuable insights from a more established field to the nascent field of fish welfare. Local recruits, like some of the data collectors, provide essential cultural insights and ensure efficient navigation within the community.
Most of the FWI team at a strategy retreat.
Most of the team aren’t local and so many have relocated to FWI's hub in the suburbs outside the city of Vijayawada, sometimes uprooting their entire families for the job. The sleepy neighbourhood isn’t exactly famous as a top most exciting place to live, but that hasn’t stopped FWI from making it fun through their infectiously positive and cohesive team culture. In fact, “fun” is one of the organization’s official values, which they consider when interviewing potential staff members. And they’re clearly doing something right, with “the colleagues” being the top scoring benefit of working at FWI in their last 3 annual culture surveys.
At the FWI hub, the team share daily meals, play games (often instigated by the ever-jovial Subrata) and spontaneous dancing (generally started by research consultant Teja, who has some serious moves in his repertoire). All of this fuels the sense of camaraderie they bring to their work — and it’s much needed, as campaigning for fish welfare in a world that couldn’t care less about fish is an uphill battle.
It was quite a beautiful team dynamic to behold, and one I hope to emulate in the teams I work in.
2. Selfless founders
Co-founders Tom and Haven have worked tirelessly to improve animal welfare since 2019. But hard work isn’t what makes them special. Most charity founders work hard, but the work is made far easier by the support of people around you, who respect the fact you’re trying to make lives better.
It’s not quite the same when your charity helps fish. People mostly think you’re a weirdo and what you do is pointless. But Tom and Haven are willing to do it anyway, powered by their deep inner determination to make all farming kinder, even fish farming. For them, it’s not about praise or prestige — it’s about doing as much good as possible.
They often spend over half the year away from loved ones (Tom is British, Haven is American), doing profoundly unsexy work, like driving around rural India trying to convince farmers to sign up to their program or collecting and testing endless water samples to inform recommendations to farmers.
Co-founders Tom and Haven.
3. Radical honesty
When you put your heart and soul into a charity, you desperately want your programs to be successful and make a difference - but that doesn’t mean they are.
Unlike most charities who assume they're having an impact as long as they execute programs that sound good in theory, FWI obsessively scrutinizes whether their efforts are genuinely improving fish welfare and by how much.
Firstly, they take measurements. LOTS of measurements. For example, as part of their Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture program, they’ve taken thousands water quality measurements. They measure each step along the path to impact to make sure it’s working:
Are welfare indicators actually poor in a given time period to begin with? In 27% of measurements, they are.
Are farmers actually implementing their recommended corrective actions when welfare is poor? Yes, 89% of the time.
Do the welfare indicators actually improve when action is taken? 96% of the time, they do!
But rather than generously interpreting ambiguous data as evidence of impact, FWI always errs on the conservative side. They try not to count any improvements that could be attributed to external factors like changing weather conditions, ensuring their reported impact represents a well-vetted lower bound, not an optimistic projection.
This radical insistence on rigorously quantifying outcomes is, unfortunately, deeply unusual in the nonprofit world. Yet it's a core driver of FWI's demonstrated effectiveness at creating positive change. Meanwhile, in their typical self-effacing fashion, Tom and Haven deny that they’re all that harsh as critics of themselves. In fact, when I ran a draft of this blog by Haven, his main piece of feedback was to question whether FWI is worthy of being described as “super-effective”.1
Wrapping things up
As my time in India came to a close and I headed to the airport, I had a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions to process. Witnessing the realities of fish farming conditions firsthand was eye-opening, even disturbing - I may never be able to look at a tuna melt the same way again. But one thing that hit me immediately, without needing much reflection, was that while FWI seems to have cracked their own powerful recipe for effective charity work, my broader experience has shown there is no single formula that defines success across the most impactful organizations. There is, however, a common ingredient.
FWI's potent combination of selfless founders, a cohesive team with the right set of backgrounds, and radical commitment to honest self-evaluation clearly works a charm. But it’s the last of those ingredients that stands out as the common thread shared by the most impactful charities: The best in the game are willing to do the hard work of trying to quantify their impact and the uncomfortable work of honest self-critique, even when that means publicly admitting flaws and mistakes.
It's this truth-seeking, numbers-driven approach that allows organizations like FWI to consistently improve and generate positive change for the animals they fight for. Sure, it’s not everyone that wants to dedicate their life to the welfare of farmed fish, but that’s why FWI’s work is so vital - without them, who else is there to look after these animals?
As the plane lifted off, I felt inspired and motivated to continue supporting charities dedicated to creating change for underserved populations, even if they number in the billions, like the fish FWI aims to help.