Your Visibility Is an Asset: Shilpa Alva on Leading Out Loud

Shilpa Alva ran Surge for Water for six years while still working full time in the corporate world. Nights, weekends, whatever hours she could find. She founded the organization, built the first programs, managed the early board, and kept it all moving without ever fully stepping in.

When she finally left the corporate world and committed to Surge completely, the organization doubled and tripled in size within a couple of years.

In this episode of Missions to Movements, I sat down with Shilpa, founder and executive director of Surge for Water, to talk about what it takes to find a distinct story in a crowded cause space, how a board member’s honest feedback changed the way she thinks about her own role, and what 15 years of building an international nonprofit really teaches you. If you have ever wondered whether showing up publicly as a leader is worth the time and energy, this conversation is for you.

---

Who Is Shilpa Alva and What Is Surge for Water?

Shilpa’s path to nonprofit leadership runs through chemical engineering and the corporate world. She managed a global department with its own P&L, oversaw budgets and staff expenses, and built real financial fluency before ever running her own organization. The cashflow statement is still the one she looks at most. That background is not incidental to how she leads Surge. When the scale of the global water and sanitation crisis starts to feel overwhelming, the engineering instinct kicks in: break it into smaller pieces, treat each piece as something addressable, and move forward.

Surge for Water works on water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programs with a specific design principle at the core: everything is community-owned and led by women. The global water and sanitation crisis disproportionately impacts women and girls. They carry the water. They manage household water use. They absorb the health consequences when sanitation fails. Surge’s conviction is that the most ethical and most effective path to solving this problem runs through the people who live it every day, and that means women at every level, from grassroots implementation to organizational management to board governance.

That model is what has helped Surge build a real identity in a cause area where many organizations are working on related problems.

---

Finding Your Story When Your Cause Space Is Crowded

The global water and sanitation crisis is well-documented, and there are many organizations working in it. When Shilpa started Surge, that raised an immediate question: why this organization?

In the early years, the answer was personal trust. Donors gave because they knew Shilpa or knew a board member. They believed in the people at the center of the work. That is how most grassroots organizations get started, and it works. Relationships carry you a long way when you are small and growing.

As Surge has expanded toward foundation grants, corporate funding, and broader public audiences, the story that consistently resonates is the model itself: everything is community-owned, led by women, and built with the people who live the problem every day.

“We’re solving the issue with the people closest to the challenge,” Shilpa said. “And in our opinion, that’s really the best way to do it.”

That clarity did not arrive immediately. It developed through years of doing the work, refining the approach, and paying attention to what made people lean in. For any nonprofit trying to differentiate in a crowded space, the distinct story is usually found inside the model and the values rather than in a tagline. It takes time and iteration to find the language that makes it land with the audiences who matter most.

---

The Board Conversation That Made Visibility a Strategy

Shilpa did not arrive at leading out loud on her own. The push came from her board, specifically from Sarah, who served as marketing chair and is now board chair, who told her directly: you are Surge’s biggest asset. Your warmth, your energy, your passion need to be heard in wider spaces. We need to invest in your voice.

Shilpa had always been naturally enthusiastic when talking about the work. Anyone who spent time with her got the full picture of what Surge does and why it matters. That passion came through in recruiting board members, volunteers, and staff. But turning it into something intentional, with structure and real time allocated to it, took someone naming it out loud and the organization choosing to treat it as a strategic priority rather than a nice-to-have.

Surge has been operating for over 15 years. Shilpa is candid that they only got serious about nonprofit leader visibility in the last few years, and she wishes they had started earlier. The platforms available now make it more accessible than it has ever been.

In practice, it looks like this: Surge built a dedicated landing page on their website that aggregates podcast appearances, articles, and speaking engagements. The development team uses that page in donor conversations. Specific episodes or articles get shared when they reinforce a point in a funding conversation. The credibility builds gradually and compounds over time.

At conferences, people now come up to Shilpa and mention a podcast they heard or an article they read. The visibility is doing work in those moments even when there is no obvious direct line to a donation.

Shilpa is candid that a clean, traceable line between visibility and revenue is genuinely hard to draw. What she can point to is that Surge has doubled in revenue over the last couple of years, and the investment in her public presence is written into their 2030 strategic plan. The organization believes in it enough to keep building it.

For any nonprofit leader sitting on the fence about whether to show up more publicly, the framing Shilpa’s board gave her is worth borrowing. There are things only you can do. The rest can eventually be delegated. This cannot.

---

Letting Go of Operations to Step Into Advocacy

Choosing to invest more time in visibility means releasing other things. For Shilpa, that has been years of operational responsibilities she held simply because there was no one else to hold them.

It was only about a year ago that Surge hired a dedicated global programs WASH manager. Before that, those responsibilities sat with Shilpa. Finance, administration, and operations followed the same pattern over the years. As the organization has grown to the size where it can bring the right people into the right roles, Shilpa has been able to step back from what others can do well and put more energy into the things only she can do.

She is still figuring out the balance. The 2030 strategic plan asks her to go even further into the advocate and awareness-builder role. That evolution is ongoing, and she is the first to say she has not fully worked it out yet. But the direction is clear, and the team around her is what makes it possible.

---

Fifteen Years of Inflection Points

Surge for Water has been around long enough to have lived through a lot: economic cycles, a global pandemic, shifting donor trends, evolving public conversations around equity and women’s leadership, and the sustained complexity of international program delivery.

A few moments stand out as genuinely defining.

Going full time was the first. Six years of nights and weekends produced steady, real work, but the moment Shilpa committed fully, leaving behind the corporate world and her income security, growth accelerated in a way that simply had not been possible before. Full investment changed what was achievable.

The pandemic was the second. Surge saw a 10% revenue reduction, which was disorienting and painful, but the organization survived when many did not. What it forced was an honest look at financial sustainability and operational processes the team had been taking for granted. Coming out of that period with more discipline created the foundation for what followed.

The third was a deliberate investment in brand and fundraising. After years of focusing on operations and program delivery, Surge put real resources into telling its story. The board pushed back on ROI, as boards often do. Shilpa and her leadership made the investment anyway. The doubling in revenue that has followed is what she points to when explaining why it mattered.

“We’ve done the operation side. We went through a crisis. Then we intentionally invested in marketing and development,” Shilpa said. “And now I think we’re seeing the benefits of those investments.”

---

What She Would Do Differently

If Shilpa were starting Surge today, she would invest in brand and fundraising from the beginning. She came into nonprofit leadership from engineering and corporate operations. Marketing and storytelling were unfamiliar territory. She learned them later than she needed to, and she would change that.

She would also narrow focus earlier. In the early years, Surge worked across 12 countries, chasing reach numbers because that felt like what donors wanted to hear. Over time, the organization pulled back and went deeper in fewer geographies. The work is more meaningful. The story is more honest and easier to tell with integrity.

“We’re truer to who we are,” she said. “We’re not after those numbers. We’re after depth and true impact.”

There is no way to arrive at that clarity without going through the earlier, less focused version of the organization. The lessons come from the journey. Shilpa carries them forward.

---

For the Leader Who Hasn’t Stepped Forward Yet

If podcasts, panels, or public speaking feel like a lot, Shilpa’s advice is to start wherever feels accessible. A LinkedIn post counts. A local event counts. A conversation at a conference counts. The platform does not have to be large to matter, and each organization has to find the channels that fit its audience and its leader.

Her favorite speaking moments are not the big corporate stages. They are the college students still figuring out what they want to do. She has had people reach out years later to say that something she said shifted their path, helped them start an organization, or gave them permission to pursue work they cared about.

“Something I could say has influenced someone else who’s trying to figure out what they want to do in their lives,” she said. “That’s the true ripple effect.”

For any nonprofit leader sitting on the sidelines of their own visibility, Shilpa’s experience makes a practical case: start earlier than feels necessary, with whatever platform is available to you right now, and build from there. The ripple effect is real. You just rarely get to see the full reach of it.

---

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes Surge for Water different from other water and sanitation nonprofits? Surge for Water is built around a community-owned model with women’s leadership embedded at every level of implementation, management, and governance. Their approach to WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) programming is grounded in the belief that the global water and sanitation crisis, which disproportionately affects women and girls, is most effectively addressed by the people closest to the problem. Over time, Surge has narrowed its geographic focus from 12 countries to fewer regions in order to go deeper and deliver more lasting impact.

How has Shilpa Alva used nonprofit leader visibility as a fundraising strategy? Surge for Water treats founder visibility as a formal component of their 2030 growth plan. Shilpa’s podcast appearances, speaking engagements, and published articles are aggregated on a dedicated landing page on Surge’s website, which the development team uses in donor conversations to build credibility and reinforce key messages. Surge has doubled in revenue during the period of increased investment in public presence, though Shilpa acknowledges the direct correlation is difficult to isolate from other organizational investments made in the same period.

What were the biggest growth inflection points for Surge for Water? Three moments define Surge for Water’s growth history. The first was Shilpa Alva leaving the corporate sector to lead the organization full time, which produced a doubling and tripling in organizational size. The second was navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a 10% revenue reduction but forced a deeper focus on financial sustainability and operational processes. The third was a deliberate post-pandemic investment in brand development and fundraising infrastructure, which Shilpa directly connects to the significant revenue growth Surge has seen most recently.

What advice does Shilpa Alva give nonprofit leaders who are hesitant to lead out loud? Shilpa recommends starting with whatever platform feels most natural, whether that is a LinkedIn post, a local panel, or a podcast conversation, and building from there. Nonprofit leader visibility and fundraising growth are connected, but the relationship is gradual rather than direct. Visibility builds organizational credibility, opens doors in donor conversations, and creates connection with audiences in ways that institutional communication cannot replicate on its own. Her strongest recommendation is to start earlier than feels necessary, because the impact accumulates over time and the ripple effect is rarely visible all at once.