Type: Article

The Hindu | The Nilgiris is a Shared Wilderness

Exactly 20 years ago, in the summer of 2004, I fell in love again. First with a tree, then with a mountain, and, eventually, with a whole biosphere. On an exploratory journey in Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, my husband and I landed up in a beautiful colonial bungalow with an enormous blue gum eucalyptus at the entrance. Until that moment, I had thought of the species as foreign, as invasive, as water greedy. All its negative labels disappeared as I gazed in astonishment at the girth of this giant, its ghostly branches, and its perfectly balanced canopy. Soon, we had a second home in the Nilgiris, and a new commitment to the conservation of this remarkable ecozone.

The Nilgiri biosphere is the first UNESCO-declared biosphere in the country, covering over 5,500 square kilometres across the three States of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. From the iconic Doddabetta, rising 2,637 metres into the sky, to the 260-m depth of the Moyar gorge, it encompasses a rich biodiversity. It has endemic flora and fauna seen nowhere else in the world, such as the medicinal Baeolepis nervosa plant used by the Irula tribe, the Nilgiri Chilappan, and the star-eyed bush frog.

More human activity, new challenges

Of late, this biosphere has seen more human activity than ever before. Known primarily for its colonial-era tea plantations, it now boasts a thriving agriculture and tourism economy. While both sectors bring in much needed livelihoods, they have also brought in new challenges.

The tourism is less sustainable than local communities and the State would like, with day-trippers adding to the waste and the traffic snarls. Farmers increasingly use heavy pesticides and fertilizers, which contaminate once pristine water sources.

In the face of such rapid change, local communities have galvanised themselves to protect their home. Many civil society organisations in the district have innovated for sustainability, such as ‘Clean Coonoor’, a public-private partnership that creates a circular economy for growing solid waste. And the Keystone Foundation, which empowers indigenous and local communities for climate resilience.

The State government and the district administration too have advanced aspirations for the Nilgiris, including the three hill stations of Ooty, Coonoor and Kotagiri, which attract visitors from across the country.

They plan to go carbon neutral, stop plastic waste, conserve endemic species such as the Nilgiri tahr that roam the high shola grasslands and reduce invasives such as Lantana camara and pine to restore native shola species in the valleys.

Alongside, there is an increasing interest in the culture and the history of the ancient Nilgiris. The settlements of the indigenous Toda community, who have lived in the Blue Mountains for millennia, are a must on the tourism trail. Unfortunately, only a few hundred people remain today, a frail link to the ecological knowledge of ancestors past.

Conservation success, helping the state

A measure of the success of conservation efforts is in the numbers of wild animals that thrive in the Nilgiri Biosphere, the largest forest expanse in the country with protected areas including Mudumalai and Mukurthi.

Increasing wildlife numbers have led to wide dispersal outside protected areas. Wildlife is everywhere now, in new ecological niches created by global warming. Plants and animals have successfully adapted to living almost incognito among us. The best example is that of the elusive leopard, which has developed quite an appetite for domestic dogs.

You can find the Indian gaur in the tea plantations, wild pigs in the garbage dumps, and sloth bears and leopards prowling around bungalows at night. Last year, a rather clever sloth bear broke into our home, wandered around the house, and, no doubt, disappointed by the lack of food, left the house jumping from the first-floor balcony. We were away, but our CCTV cameras recorded the entire adventure.

Neighbours have had wild encounters too, with porcupines and mouse deer, elephants and leopards. Surprisingly, people seem to have adjusted to this development, though human-wildlife conflicts hit the news every so often.

This is part of an emergent global culture where billions of people are becoming nature lovers. They are rediscovering wonder. Citizen science has become a movement. Thanks to democratising technologies, people can share the beauty around them with one click; they can raise issues of concern, about shrinking habitats and human-animal conflict.

Clear evidence has emerged through the work of non-governmental organisations such as the Nature Conservation Foundation and WWF, that simple, yet powerful, technologies, which include early warning systems through mobile phone-based alerts, cameras and GPS tracking of animals, have helped reduce dangerous wildlife encounters.

When animals are so widely loved and so closely tracked, poaching becomes much riskier. Poaching thrives in secrecy, away from the public gaze. When tourists and wildlife enthusiasts wish to immerse themselves in wilderness, there is economic incentive locally to ensure that nature flourishes.

If we want to continue to conserve this unique biosphere, it must be with the help of society, of the samaaj. We have to align also with the bazaar — represented by plantations, farmers, traders and the tourism industry. The state, including the Forest Department, cannot be the sole steward of the wild.

It is impossible for sarkaar to take whole and sole accountability, even if the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972/ The Wildlife (Protection) Amendment Act, 2022 says all wild animals belong to the state. The perception that animals are the government’s responsibility creates a great disaffection in the public mind. Farmers get angry with the forester. Plantation owners become wary. “If these are your animals, you keep them. Why are they eating my crops, or injuring our workers?”

Yet, hard boundaries, fences and walls are neither feasible nor desirable, to keep animals inside the forests.

Instead, what if we assumed that we are all in this together? What if we created a trust network of everyone interested in the conservation of our biodiversity? What if we took advantage of all emerging technologies such as sensitive cameras, satellite imagery, sensors and artificial intelligence, both within and outside of protected areas? What if all citizens of our country were engaged in the regeneration of our natural wealth?

The pivotal role of storytelling

As I have discovered in my 40-year ecological journey, to conserve nature, we first must learn to love. To love, we have to sense. It is not a mere intellectual exercise. If we see the beauty and the frailty of the wild, its flora and fauna — from the tiniest ant to the mightiest elephant, our wonder is ignited. We want to protect, to nurture and be nurtured.

Not everyone can visit every area of wilderness they wish to explore.

Storytelling by the few who can is critical to the process of creating communities for conservation. Our ancestors in the Nilgiris knew this well. In Sigur and Vellerikombai, the rock art created thousands of years ago still celebrates the relationship between humans and animals.

Charcoal and chalk have been replaced by cameras and pixels, but the urge remains the same. To share, to connect, to preserve.

Tomorrow, November 3, is International Day for Biosphere Reserves. In a first such documentary, we at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, together with Felis Films, are proud to present The Nilgiris – A Shared Wilderness. We have dedicated this film to the communities of the Nilgiris and to Forest Departments across the biosphere.

We hope it will spark more curiosity, evoke more affection and spur more action across samaaj, sarkaar and bazaar for the continued protection of the precarious and precious Nilgiris.

Rohini Nilekani is Chairperson, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and the author of Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar – A Citizen First Approach

First Published in The Hindu

The Climate Finance Report – 2024 | Funding for Conservation, Community Resilience, and Climate Adaptation

By Tanya Kak – Portfolio Lead, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies

Farmers for Forests, a Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies (RNP) partner, is working on a mission to increase and protect India’s biodiverse forest cover, while also working on farmers’ livelihoods using a payment for ecosystem services model. While their entry point was forest protection, their community members often asked them, “Aren’t you here to help? Then why aren’t you helping us with our houses and fields being destroyed by elephants and getting better prices for our agricultural and forest produce?” However, the community’s demands quickly helped them understand that working for conservation and climate change is intrinsically linked to the daily livelihood challenges these communities face.

At RNP, our funding approach adopts a holistic lens to deal with the twin challenges of conservation and climate change, while supporting the livelihoods of those most affected. In the initial years, our curiosity led us to expand from the conservation of individual species to looking at wider ecosystems and habitats. At the same time, the reality of climate change meant a certain urgency was attached to addressing these challenges with speed and at scale.

While philanthropic capital can be catalytic and fund riskier innovations, it has allowed us to take a long-term perspective to invest in building resilient networks, local capacities of communities, and facilitating systemic transformation. For example, while India is one of the world’s 17 megadiverse countries, many species are threatened, and land degradation continues to be a challenge. We have also seen multiple small and independent organisations carrying out valuable restoration work and amassing a wealth of experience. In order to make these rich insights accessible beyond the fragmented silos in which they exist, and to create a community of practice that is able to leverage and action this information readily, Rainmatter Foundation and RNP supported the emergence of a platform called Ecological Restoration Alliance (ERA), India. ERA partners are a group of organisations and individuals who have directly engaged in the practice of ecological restoration and generating knowledge about ecosystem restoration. Currently, they operate in 24 states, have over 350 individual members, and 8 institutional partners. From coastal ecosystems to high-altitude mountainous terrains, the alliance’s biggest strength lies in the diversity of practice, the expertise, and the varied landscapes that its members operate in. ERA
has moved from just being a network to a movement that addresses hyper-local restoration challenges while enabling replication and scale through local innovations and peer networks.

This example showcases how philanthropy can support ecosystem-building efforts. We have also found the following levers to be useful in our funding journey:

Multi-year, unrestricted grants: Climate change is a series of compounding risks that will be felt globally as a social and economic reality. Philanthropic efforts need to mirror these concerns by balancing a sense of urgency with the patience and flexibility that is required to affect such long-term changes. With this in mind, the majority of the grants at RNP are multi-year, unrestricted grants that allow us to act as co-learning partners to our grantees. In a survey that we recently concluded with 90+ partners across our different focus areas, almost all of them highlighted how the unrestricted grants have given them the freedom to experiment and innovate with new solutions, provided the cushion to respond to regular organisational challenges, and be agile enough to adapt to future needs, and make new pivots. One of our partners, WELL Labs, highlighted, “The unrestricted support gives us the freedom to experiment; it allowed us to raise 3X the amount of program funding than the previous year”.

Rethinking traditional methods of doing monitoring and evaluation: As we have learned from giving
unrestricted grants, the impact can be a spectrum of tangible outcomes such as collaboration, enhanced reach and scale and intangible behavioural change such as feeling empowered, living with dignity etc. Being tied to traditional notions of evaluating progress on key performance indicators or rigid project metrics can be limiting. Instead, funders can help by focusing on building the resilience of their partners and adopting a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to look at progress.

Supporting networks and platforms that leverage collective wisdom: The climate crisis affects everyone globally, and hence, cannot be solved by one individual or organisation in isolation. While targeted interventions are important, a network that brings different actors together to build and sustain vast, reciprocal connections that enforce mutual growth and leverage collective wisdom is crucial. For example, in 2020, Tata Trusts, McArthur Foundation, Edelgive Foundation, and Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies came together to build a first-ofits-kind climate philanthropy collaborative, India Climate Collaborative (ICC). Building bridges between a diverse set of actors – governments, philanthropies, businesses, civil society organisations, and research institutions, the ICC helped to mobilise domestic funds, scale impactful solutions, and facilitate collaboration across the ecosystem to enable climate action. Given all of these efforts, domestic donors are emerging in the Indian context to catalyse climate action; India has witnessed a 2.2X increase in total philanthropic capital towards climate-related action in the period between 2018-2023.

India faces the challenge of having to respond to climate change while balancing its developmental needs. Philanthropy has the opportunity to root India’s climate story in both – equity and efficacy. Its unique ability to hedge risks, support innovations, and pave the way for other funding makes it well-suited to take on this mandate.

The Climate Finance Report, Climate Capital Network (CCN)

The Indian Express | Rohini Nilekani writes: Can India ensure that its elderly are taken care of?

India needs to take the lead in redefining what it means to be an older adult

What do you think of if someone asks you to describe old age?

At a recent interaction with community service organisations (CSOs) working on longevity, I learnt that your answer would probably depend on how old you are. Younger respondents quickly conjure up words like walking stick, grey hair and nursing home. Financially secure seniors cite freedom from responsibility, travel, the joy of grandchildren, and spirituality. This difference in mental models is important to internalise as India turns from a young country with 50 per cent below the age of 25 years to a country with the largest population of elderly in the whole world.

We are still struggling to reap the demographic dividend of our broad youth base. Soon, we will have to figure out how hundreds of millions of senior citizens can contribute to and be cared for in our society.

Just recently, I turned 65. So did lakhs of other people in India. Sixty-five seems different to me — a new way of feeling old. The country’s average lifespan is 67.2 years. I am sharply aware of both my mortality and my privileges. I can access the best medical care, the best fitness options and nutrition. I can continue to write and work actively. I meditate, I pray. I stay positive with the blessing of many friendships, and a loving family. These are all things that global research has proven to produce better outcomes as one ages.

So, I am determined to make this the best decade of my life yet. To be part of a positive revolution in the mindset on ageing. To give at least as much as I receive; to cultivate and spread faith in human innovation and to nurture gratitude for the miracle of life.

This is what older people want to do for themselves and society — but not everyone gets to do it. In India, 40 per cent of older adults experience poverty, compared to less than 10 per cent of the general population. Only 14 per cent can use the Internet, and less than 5 per cent report being part of a social organisation. The elderly are more likely to be female, have much less education and live more in rural areas. More than one in three seniors still do not have the luxury of retiring, and many continue to do unpaid work, 65 per cent of those in agriculture and allied activities. Those who do retire can feel a sudden lack of purpose, a loneliness. With the rapid nuclearisation of families, in just 20 years, an estimated 80 million elderly will live alone or with just a spouse.

There are reams of data on how much will change in our demographics, and what we can reasonably predict about the quality of life and care, social security, and public amenities. We can share the estimates of mental health disorders among the elderly.

But data do not tell the whole story, or the only story. The good news is that samaaj-based institutions have been very active in India for decades. HelpAge India was set up in 1978 and works with two million elderly, actively advocating better state intervention. Since 1999, the Agewell Foundation has worked with a network of 80,000 volunteers across 768 districts to reach 25,000 seniors daily. Carers Worldwide aims to reduce the burden of 2,00,000 unpaid senior caregivers. The list goes on. These organisations do not just want to help seniors, they want to change the narrative on ageing. Grey Shades showcases many intrepid seniors who are giving back gracefully. Like army veteran and psychiatrist Rajinder Singh, 91, who is setting up a third mental well-being centre to address addiction in young people in Punjab. Like Harbhajan Kaur, 99, who realised her ambition to earn some income by becoming a cooking sensation at the age of 90. CSOs are trying to normalise these exceptions so that longevity and health spans are reimagined in a society that takes the elderly for granted. It shouldn’t. One in three seniors want to actively volunteer and contribute to their communities if they can find the opportunity.

Can India take the lead in redefining what it means to be an older adult? Can we do it in time for the seismic shift in our demographics? It depends. So far, the state is only just beginning to wake up. Less than 5 per cent of senior citizens get any reliable social security payments or services. Some policies, including the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 are simply unimplementable. There is a long way to go.

The private sector has still not tapped the potential of senior citizens to keep contributing productively. Nor has it stepped in to provide better living and recreational facilities, even though the “silver economy” is currently pegged at $7 billion. We have nothing like the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), a strong advocacy body with 38 million members that markets must reckon with in providing senior citizen products and services.

It is the society that must lead the way. And private philanthropy is critical to kickstart the multi-sectoral innovation we need.

At 65, I often turn to the Beatles song that captured the angst of a whole generation. “When I get older losing my hair, many years from now…Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?”

The country will soon have to answer that question to hundreds of millions of folks, on whose shoulders it now stands.

The Indian Express

The Indian Express | Rohini Nilekani writes: How philanthropy can tilt scales towards a more equitable society

The wealthy are not as reviled by the general public as in many other countries. This is a crucial moment for Indian funders to take ownership of our development narrative and make the country the world’s third-largest economy…

Recently, I participated in four unusual philanthropy-related events over just two days in Mumbai. Each one was well-attended, well-executed and well-liked. The diversity was incredible. There were men and women philanthropists from three generations, foundation heads, business leaders, government spokespersons, politicians, foreign invitees, intermediary organisation representatives, researchers and academics, and civil society experts. There were sharp presentations, deep listening and sharing with a cocktail of hope and despair at the state of the world.

In my three decades in the civil society/philanthropy space, I have never seen anything quite like it.

It gave me pause to think. And to celebrate that we are at the cusp of a big wave in Indian philanthropy. This has long been coming, but there is now a convergence of many forces that promises to reshape the landscape of giving.

We all know that there has been a strong culture of giving across all communities and all levels of our samaaj across centuries. But since liberalisation, a new form of giving began to emerge among the newly wealthy, and the old wealthy with new wealth. Yet, it was restrained by some uncertainty about the future. Today, with the sustained rally in the stock markets, and the increasing opportunities for wealth creation in a booming economy, the rich are finally feeling secure enough about their wealth to think of larger issues. I now believe that India’s wealthy elite is turning a collectively serious mind to giving more, better and faster.

And what timing! A report by AIP-BCG titled ‘Wealth with Purpose: A Report on Private Indian Philanthropy’ suggests that if ultra-high net worth (UHNI) individuals would channel just 5 per cent of their annual incremental wealth, they could contribute over Rs 75,000 crores annually, which is five times the total CSR spend in 2023.

Perhaps no time has been as critical for the country’s wealthy to step up. According to a recent report published by Niti Aayog, despite a robust annual growth of around 13 per cent in social sector spending, we will still fall short on the targets needed to meet the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) goals by 2030.

At the same time, foreign funding to the social sector is receding. Thousands of organisations have lost their FCRA licences, which allows them to receive such money. Some international donors are shutting down their India operations. Many others would love to fund in India, especially on climate mitigation and adaptation, but their voice and motives are seen sometimes as inimical to India’s needs. But that means we are turning away hundreds of millions of dollars. Indian philanthropy has a chance to fill some of that gap. Indian funders can take ownership of our development narrative; we can help craft approaches suited to our context and aspirations.

The wealthy in India are not as reviled by the general public as in many other countries, where the growing inequality has unleashed societal conflict, and a resentment towards the rich. In India, people still believe that they too can climb the economic ladder. There is hope and optimism. Recently, millions of people vicariously enjoyed the Ambani wedding celebrations. There was as much pride in their achievements as there was criticism of the use of wealth.

But things can turn. It is up to the wealthy to show the country why wealth creation has been a net positive in India. No society or country will tolerate for too long the continued accumulation of wealth in a few hands, unless that private wealth works and is seen to work for the public good.

The elite can sense the consequence of extreme inequality. It is beginning to respond systematically. The Dasra-Bain India Philanthropy Report 2024 highlights a shift from traditional, faith-based giving to more strategic and impactful engagements led by young, first-generation wealth creators.

Systems thinking is the new mantra. Though it is incredibly hard to actually move the levers on systems change, the very fact that philanthropy is putting in serious risk capital and creating a shared vocabulary around it is both encouraging and exciting.

There is also a clear tilt towards more collaboration among Indian givers. My husband Nandan and I are part of several local and global giving collaboratives, with diverse models such as pooled funding, co-funding and direct funding for exponential change. Funders are also showing more curiosity and sharing more knowledge than ever before. The silos have broken down.

For example, the India Climate Collaborative (ICC), co-founded by several donors including myself, and incubated by the Tata Trusts, is moving strategically to increase Indian investments in the climate sector, in both mitigation and adaptation. It convenes samaaj, sarkaar and bazaar to deepen research, build capacity and create investable opportunities. Overall, India’s fund flows towards climate action have grown 2.3 times during 2017-23. Best of all, new funders like Mirik Gogri are entering the space with bold new ideas.

Intermediary organisations such as Dasra, Sattva and Accelerate Indian Philanthropy (AIP) have also been very effective in opening up minds, hearts and pockets. Decades of patient handholding is finally paying off. For example, Dasra’s GivingPi has more than 300 families signed up for their philanthropy journey, and are willing to invest in under-invested areas such as gender and sports. Family giving was up 15 per cent last year.

At a time when civil society in India is facing multiple crises, the new philanthropic engagement could not be more critical. More trust still needs to be built on all sides, especially with the government. But my Mumbai visit has convinced me that this too can be worked upon.

If we want India to become the world’s third-largest economy, it has to also be the world’s most equitable one. Otherwise, we will not get the peace dividend from economic growth.

Philanthropy done right can tilt back the scales from lopsided wealth creation to equal opportunities for all. The wealthy seem readier to be rainmakers.

The Indian Express

IDR | Investing in communications as a culture and a capacity

By Sahana Jose – Associate Director, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies

A majority of grants made by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies (RNP) are unrestricted: there are no stipulations on how grantees should use them. Nonprofit partners can freely use these funds for organisational development, including core costs, capacity building, communications, and team engagement. On the other hand, programmatic grants are specifically provided to help organisations strengthen and implement their programmes. Yet, a recent survey we conducted for our annual impact report revealed that that less than 30 percent of the organisations we support utilise more than 50 percent of the unrestricted funds for non-programmatic costs. A handful of them, in fact, used 100 percent of it for programme expenses, killing the very intent of an unrestricted fund.

While this finding points towards the lack of sufficient programme funds in the sector, it also reveals a larger need for a straightforward category of grants for capacity building. These grants will nudge nonprofits to strengthen their systems, skills, culture, and resources, enabling them to carry out their work more effectively. Funders such as ATE Chandra Foundation, EdelGive Foundation, and Forbes Marshall Foundation are among the few who have given ‘capacity building’ the limelight it deserves. They have pushed their grantees to categorically spend on building internal fundraising muscle and resilience.

However, much more needs to be done.

The need to focus on communications

Within the umbrella of capacity building, thanks to the efforts of Bridgespan’s Pay-What-It-Takes India Initiative and EdelGive’s GROW Fund, areas such as leadership and talent development, financial management, fundraising, and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are receiving much-needed attention. However, the same cannot be said of capabilities such as communications and storytelling.

Communications, in all its different avatars (external and internal), continues to be viewed as a good-but-not-a-must-have capacity, and sometimes even a luxury. Many organisations struggle to find comms resources, build their capabilities to deliver effective campaigns, and more importantly, nurture a culture of communications internally. It is also an area that is almost impossible to raise funding for; yet it continues to be a line item in grant proposals, which typically seek details of media mentions, social media pages, and outreach efforts.

While some grants require organisations to create an impact video or report, these outputs do not address the long-term need for stronger storytelling capacity. They often only meet the funder’s branding requirements. In order to build a culture of communications, we need to start looking at communications as the wind beneath the wings that helps organisations soar. It is more than social media followers, writing blogs, event management, and YouTube hits.

In the chapter titled ‘Development Communication and the Dialogic Space: Finding the Voices Under the Mines’ from the book Communicating for Social Change: Meaning, Power, and Resistance, authors Christele J Amoyan and Pamela A Custodio trace the origin of DevComs, the academic discipline that studies communications in the development sector, back to the 1950s. The chapter quotes Nora Cruz Quebral, often referred to as the ‘mother of development communication’, stating, “DevComs’ ultimate goal is to empower individuals and communities to realise their full potentials.” The essay goes on to emphasise that DevComs places people at the centre of social transformation by harnessing their collective human capacity. Thereby, it urges us to reassess the function of communications and look at it as a powerful tool for meaning-making, culture-building, and creating a platform for the voices of the communities we serve.

Communications as a culture and a capacity

While several frameworks provide guidance on targeting your audience and crafting the right message, they fail to do their magic unless communications are strategically aligned with the organisation’s objectives. For example, if an organisation’s objective is to influence policy, then their communication efforts need to target the specific government department through one-on-one meetings, roundtables, and op-eds in mainstream dailies rather than a paid Instagram campaign.

Communications is both a culture and a capacity.

Communications is a culture in that it is not the responsibility of the founder or the comms head/team alone, but is a shared task in which a majority of the organisation plays an active role. Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, a recipient of ATE Chandra Foundation’s capacity-building grant for communications, moved from a fragmented approach to one that integrated communications with other teams within the organisation. This change ensured that despite being heavily involved in legal research, Vidhi’s research and programme teams periodically engaged with the communications strategy and participated in building advocacy and dissemination plans to communicate impact. These efforts led to increased media coverage, higher attendance at their events and webinars, and their reports being cited in academic work as well as Supreme Court and High Court judgments.

Development communications is also a capacity because unlike standard marketing, which asks individual customers to like, buy, subscribe, spend, and consume a product or a service, it deals with society and complex social challenges. Communicators in the social sector must find ways to get people to sign up, mobilise, dialogue, advocate, donate, and take concrete action—all of which leads to a change in behaviours and attitudes—with limited resources.

Zenith, an organisation that employs legal tools to help communities access justice, received a storytelling grant from RNP which gave the nonprofit a lens to think differently about how to communicate their story. This support helped them build an internal system to document, package, and disseminate knowledge to both their online audience and the communities they work with. Using this grant, they took up courses, hired a communications team, and acquired camera equipment as well as subscriptions to tools such as Canva and Adobe InDesign. This new lens led to more intentional and consistent platforming—through blogs, documentaries, comics, and theatre—of grassroots stories with increased sensitivity and empathy.

What can funders do to help nonprofits tell their story better?

1. Start with capacity-building grants

Stripped to its basics, communications presents the answer to the question, “What is the core mission of your organisation?” Narrating your organisation’s story and mission in a powerful, easy-to-understand, and accurate manner—by the founders, senior leaders, employees, as well as your key stakeholders—is a telling indicator of an organisation’s health. Capacity building grants can support the development of clear strategies, sound leadership, and robust internal structures and systems. This in turn acts as a foundation upon which an organisation can craft, articulate, and communicate a clear narrative about their work.

EdelGive’s GROW Fund, which aims to build the capabilities, resilience and future readiness of grassroots organisations, collaborated with agencies such as Social Lens Consulting and Grant Thornton to support capacity building and organisational development. Data from their progress reports over the first year shows that nonprofits have used approximately 90 percent of funds to meet the core costs on human resources (HR), which helped them retain people and continue their operations smoothly. A strong HR function fosters a culture of learning, documenting, and sharing that could become the backbone on which a solid communications strategy is built.

2. Storytelling grants as a category under capacity building

RNP experimented with a storytelling grant with a few of our partners. The mandate was to use the grant to build their internal communications capacity and create outward-facing creative outputs. While one organisation used it to create brand videos, another availed of it to hire a consultant to put together a cogent communications strategy and execution plan.

Waste Warriors, one of the recipients, reported, “As a result of the storytelling grant, Waste Warriors could allocate internal comms resources to prioritise PR and media engagement. This moved resulted in garnering significant media coverage with key publications on the pressing waste issues in the Indian Himalayan region and showcasing the impactful work undertaken by Waste Warriors.”

At RNP, we continue to have storytelling as a category under our capacity-building bucket. Our learning has been that emphasising spending that amount on brand building pushes the teams to creatively leverage the grant. 

3. Support different vehicles of communications

Rainmatter Foundation funded Civis to create Climate Voices, a go-to guide for anyone who wants to make a difference in India’s climate policymaking and play a direct part in co-creating environmental laws with the government. The funding also empowered Civis to craft a wide-reaching outreach plan that involved engagement with community radio stations; an interactive voice response (IVR) system initiative with Gram Vaani to reach audiences across 50 districts in Hindi-speaking states; partnership with a PR agency for media mentions; and engagement with influencers, other nonprofits, and civil society organisations.

This is a fine example of funding a novel idea and extending support to include the outreach plan. Such support allows the nonprofit to get creative with community engagement right from the start.

At RNP, we have a small budget assigned for funding our partners’ events. When planned with intention, events can help nonprofits engage their key stakeholders and forge partnerships to meet their goals.

Translation grants is another option to explore: knowledge made accessible in multiple Indian languages allows for greater reach and engagement.

4. Sponsor course fees and modules that will aid the communications team

There are many communications-related offerings available to nonprofits. Chambal Academy offers a Hindi-language workshop on the art of storytelling, specifically tailored for nonprofits operating in the Hindi hinterlands. TerreGeneration, a social impact communications agency, created and conducted a 17-session module on the basics of impact communications for RNP partners. This programme covered topics such as audience mapping, design, influencer management, and PR. India Development Review (IDR) offers customised workshops on writing and messaging.

Underwriting the cost of these courses or fellowships is another way of helping grantees and workshop participants gain knowledge and engage with comms specialists.

At its heart, communications is the intentional exchange of ideas that forms the bridge for a community to unite in pursuit of a common purpose. It plays a fundamental role in amplifying social impact and requires greater support.

IDR

IDR | Funders must prioritise climate-sensitive development

By Tanya Kak – Portfolio Lead, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies

Today, the conversation on responding to the climate crisis focuses disproportionately on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide. This view—held by some wealthier countries, multilaterals, and donors alike—tends to prioritise interventions and technologies based on their ability to avert carbon emissions. While this focus is crucial, taking a holistic approach to funding the crisis in low- and middle-income countries that are fraught with development challenges often gets sidelined.

For example, CARE India, a nonprofit working on issues of gender equality, reported that while there has been a big emphasis on mobilising ‘new and additional’ climate finance in the form of USD 100 billion a year, wealthy countries have repeatedly missed this target. They have also failed to ensure that climate finance is ‘new and additional’ to their support for development. Most of this public climate finance committed by wealthy countries is taken directly from development aid budgets at the cost of pressing challenges in health, education, women’s rights, poverty alleviation, and many others.

Another concern came up in a recent conversation with a CSO partner from our network at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. They posed a simple yet thought-provoking question: “Our main work, around livelihood generation with the local communities, is inherently laden with many challenges such as providing education and vocational training programmes to the youth, and ensuring they’re employable once they receive this training. The primary strength of our work lies in dealing with these issues. While we recognise the threats of climate change, we are not equipped enough to integrate climate as a lens in our work with all the other ongoing challenges. And even if we would like to, we are unsure about how to do this operationally.”

This partner’s concern was reflective of a wider challenge faced by CSOs in India. Many CSOs do not have the means, knowledge, or capacity to integrate climate as a lens on top of their existing work. However, they can be the worst hit by some of these climate shocks. This begs the following questions: How can CSOs respond to climate change in their work when they are struggling with basic livelihood and development challenges? What can we, as funders, do to help build this capacity at a systemic level? And most importantly, how can our funding support the transition from a system that works in siloes to one that integrates climate as a cross-cutting lens with coordinated action across the board?

Donors can help make the shift

In India, donors are still trying to unpack the implications of climate change on the funding landscape. They are exploring how climate finance can be mobilised effectively while also balancing funding to the work that grassroots organisations are already doing. However, adopting a carbon tunnel vision without considering various livelihood and developmental issues can prove to be problematic. 

As funders, we must recognise that the climate crisis is not an additional challenge to be addressed sporadically, but a series of compounding risks that exacerbate existing challenges and that can threaten human survival. Therefore, we must take stock of the current realities that CSOs face and prioritise a long-term perspective to help build a system that supports their unique needs. Investing in climate capacity-building initiatives for CSOs is key to understanding how climate impacts their work. We must also partner with CSOs to help them integrate and deal with its effects systematically.

By doing so, we can begin to move towards a climate-sensitive development approach. This ensures that interventions already in place are sustainable and resilient to climate impacts. Additionally, it allows us to identify new opportunities that cater to our mitigation and adaptation goals.

What could this approach look like? And how can funders enable the emergence of such an approach? 

While this is an ambitious undertaking, here are three considerations that can help get donors started.

1. Climate risk as heightening vulnerability and undoing developmental progress

In 2021, when Cyclone Yaas raged along India’s eastern coast, it destroyed thousands of homes, inundating dozens of villages and rendering 1,50,000 people homeless. Similarly, in 2020, Cyclone Amphan wreaked havoc on the eastern coast, affecting 13 million people and causing damages worth more than USD 13 billion after making landfall.

Climate change will hit us in ways that we haven’t anticipated. It can undo decades of developmental progress, especially for the most marginalised. As climate risks heighten vulnerability, it becomes critical to assess, identify, and monitor these risks to be able to respond in time. However, this can burden CSOs, especially those working directly with individuals worst hit by crises.

As funders then, the first set of considerations to support our partners in unpacking climate risk and vulnerability can include the following prompts/questions:

  • What are the most vulnerable regions in the country and how can our funding enable CSOs in those areas to identify risk hotspots and be better prepared?
  • Will our funding unlock the critical gaps in research, innovation, and predictive analytics that can serve as public goods to be leveraged by CSOs so they are better equipped to handle crises?
  • How can our funding help grassroots organisations understand their impact on and vulnerability to climate change, and empower them to act as agents of change?

This was the thinking that prompted us at RNP to work with CEEW and ICC to develop the Climate Risk Atlas for India. A multi-stakeholder initiative, it provides granular data by region such as insights on the occurrence of extreme weather events, urban heat stress, water stress, crop loss, vector-borne diseases, and biodiversity collapse. It is a public good that CSOs, local governments, and local communities can leverage to map such vulnerabilities. 

2. Climate adaptation as future-proofing development gains

While climate finance is skewed towards mitigation, it is essential to remember that no climate solution will work if communities are wiped out and unable to adapt. For donors, climate change adaptation must be intrinsically linked to the challenges that communities encounter on the ground. For example, the nonprofit Farmers for Forests shared that while their focus is on forest protection programmes, they have started work on two new projects adjacently. These include reducing human–elephant conflict in Gadchiroli and Gondia in Maharashtra, and working with farming communities to ensure the marketability of their agroforestry produce. Both these initiatives stemmed from communities’ demand for deeper engagement. They asked, “Aren’t you here to help? Then why aren’t you helping us with our houses and fields being destroyed by elephants and getting better prices for our agricultural and forest produce?”The nonprofit’s entry point was forest management and climate change. However, the community’s demands quickly helped them understand that working for the same is intrinsically linked to the daily livelihood challenges these communities face.

In another example, SEEDS, a nonprofit working on disaster life-cycle management and sustainable environment, estimated that over 200 climate hotspots will put more than 300 million people at risk by 2030 through disasters and other weather extremes. They are currently building an open data platform, Akshvi, that enables communities to report the impact of climate change and disasters on their lives, thereby providing a platform to create a hyperlocal loss database. This will also help facilitate the transfer of resources directly to distressed communities through partnerships between governments, aid agencies, markets, and communities.

In both these cases, there is recognition of the fact that providing a development-first approach to addressing climate change is crucial in the Indian context. Additionally, better preparedness for climate change adaptation has the potential to future-proof the developmental gains of various programmes currently running on the ground.

Post a climate-risk assessment, a second set of considerations for donors can include the following:

  • Is our funding overly focused on climate change interventions, neglecting livelihoods and other systemic factors integral to the programme?
  • What are the unintended consequences of mobilising climate finance in this manner? What does striving for scale mean in the context of adaptation, which necessarily requires region-specific, customised, and hyperlocal approaches?
  • How can we support more adaptation work that addresses local capacity gaps and knowledge for climate?  
  • How do we create better mechanisms to integrate feedback from our climate adaptation efforts with existing developmental programmes on the ground?

3. Looking at climate mitigation and adaptation as a continuum

The focus of climate finance on mitigation, as opposed to adaptation and resilience, can alienate those nonprofits that don’t directly work on mitigation.

However, it is necessary to approach adaptation and mitigation as a continuum. For example, a smallholder farmer has to adapt to the extreme weather events caused by climate change. The farmer also has to switch to cleaner sources of energy, given the deepening energy and electricity crisis and depleting water resources in India. While funding climate innovations and technologies that look at mitigating greenhouse gases then, we could do well to remember the social, political, and economic realities farmers typically operate in. Even the most effective technologies will fail otherwise.

In that sense, a few key questions that donors can consider are:

  • In our investments, what is the current mix of adaptation and mitigation initiatives? Can we support initiatives that combine climate change adaptation and mitigation?
  • Are there any complementary and multi-pronged interventions that we need to look at? How are we balancing the need to act urgently with some of the longer-term outcomes that need strong institutions and policies? 
  • What is the role of technology in aiding mitigation and adaptation in the areas of work that I support? Can it act as an enabler to achieve both climate and development goals without becoming a silver bullet? What are the local and contextual factors that are important to consider in its application?

India’s climate story is intrinsically linked to its developmental challenges. As funders, while we respond with speed and scale to address the defining crisis of our times, a one-size-fits-all approach will not work. Scaling up effective climate solutions, especially in this part of the world, must go hand in hand with progress on other development markers.

IDR

The Indian Express | Rohini Nilekani writes: If we let ourselves be led by children in play, could we rediscover simple joys?

It is not a frivolous activity, but essential to human development.

Have you observed with attention what a child does when playing on her own? She is absorbed, muttering, doing random things, putting unexpected things together. She may smile, giggle, frown. She is herself and becoming her future self.

You may remember similar moments from your childhood, when tactile observation and imagination were your magic wands, transporting you into a world of wonder.

June 11 is the first International Day of Play. A total of 140 countries were co-sponsors of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution. This is a victory for the advocacy by global samaaj organisations, amplifying the voice of children everywhere. Today, around the world, adults are encouraged to democratise the joy of play.

Why has it come to this, that we need a special reminder to recognise what should be common wisdom?

There are a million reasons, but one seems obvious. Ever since universal mass schooling adopted a competitive model to create workers for the Industrial Revolution, learning became divorced from play. Education became a means to an economic end. Parental attention and anxiety became vested in pushing children to be the best in class, in the examination, and hopefully, therefore, in their careers.

For middle-class and elite children, this meant less time to be left alone to play. Even long vacations had to be crammed with summer camps or serious hobbies. For the poor, play can be a luxury anyway, and often unsafe. I will never forget a scene in Khagaria, Bihar, when I saw four-year-olds splashing about in a small water body. What fun, I thought. It turned out they were catching fish for the evening meal. Across the spectrum, play is undervalued or scarce.

Then new neuroscience emerged to support what our gut already understood. Learning is sharpest and quickest in the early years. Cognition, social skills, emotional well-being and physical growth are largely developed in the first eight years of a person’s life. More than a million neural connections form every second in a young brain. But growth is non-linear. There are dips and surges, many dependent on age and nutrition, others environment-related. Early childhood experiences can impact brain architecture to establish either robust or fragile foundations for lifelong learning and well-being.

Then the scientists told us that play enhances learning. Free play allows children to build explanatory systems — implicit theories or schemas — to help organise their knowledge. It also helps to develop their intuition, which theorists have long established as critical for scientific or artistic discoveries.

But play must be just that — play. The Hindi word “khel” describes it perfectly. Khel is joyful, unmediated. Gowda V K, Ravi Kumar C P, Goyal R and Sidhwani S, in their article, ‘Childhood Development, Learning, and Education: A Focus on Nonlinear Learning and Play’ in the Indian Journal of Neurology, say, “An essential requirement of learning through play is that children should have agency over the experience and must be guided or supported rather than instructed or directed.”

When children play, it can lead to more neuroplasticity in the prefrontal cortex, better information processing and behavioural flexibility. Play fosters many skills, like language development, conflict resolution, collaboration and self-advocacy. In the age of AI, where the future of work is so uncertain, free play could become the surprise differentiator, to unlock young people’s creativity and critical thinking.

Through EkStep Foundation, we recently made a 90-second film called Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao (Celebrate Childhood, Keep Growing). In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, we hoped adult caregivers could turn their minds away from learning loss to the abundance of opportunity around them. Children learn from everything; it is up to us to kindle their curiosity.

Through the short film, we wanted to rekindle wonder as a public good.

One mother in Satara responded with an “aha” moment. “My childhood was free, but I don’t allow my child the same freedom to explore. I will.”

An urban father fretted, “I want my child to play, but where is the space?”

Increasingly, psychiatrists and biologists report dangers from a nature deficit in urban children. If this constrains the middle class, imagine the situation of children in slums. I have met children who have not even seen a butterfly. Yet these future citizens will have to learn resilience against climate change. How can we redesign our cities with more lung space and play space to reconnect children with nature?

Substantial research now confirms that a play-deprived childhood leads to negative personal and societal outcomes. Psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the US-based National Institute for Play, has spent decades studying the connection between play and healthy human development. “The adaptive tolerance and empathy toward others that is learned in early preschool through rough-and-tumble play is really a fundamental part of our having tolerance for people who are different than we are,” said Brown. Play is “not frivolous and not just for kids, but something that is an inherent part of human nature,” he added.

Hopefully, the International Day of Play will refocus the energies of caregivers and educators around the world.

If we mindfully permit ourselves to let children be, perhaps we can lighten the burden of child-rearing. If we let ourselves be led by children in play, could we rediscover the simple joys we have lost?

Why not find out by participating in the UNICEF India and Bachpan Manao campaign — #houroffreeplay challenge — on June 11?

Come, let’s play.

The Indian Express

IDR | Dear 2024, make conferences fun again

Written by Natasha Joshi, Associate Director, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies

Recently, our team put together an Excel sheet of all the events we attended last year. Using a loose method of calculation involving factors such as the number of days, number of team members attending, travel time, and preliminary work put in, I found that as a team we had clocked 60 full days in convenings.

Have conferences and events really increased? And if we are spending so much time convening and being convened, should we critically examine events and their purpose as closely as we look at programmes?

The Planner Pulse survey and the North Star/Cvent Meetings Industry PULSE survey corroborate the fact that in-person industry events have steadily grown through 2022 and 2023. In the 2024 survey, 58 percent of event planners reported that they will be planning more meetings in 2024 than they did in 2023. As it is hard to come by similar data for other countries, that too disaggregated by sector, I reached out to fellow social sector colleagues who shared that they had also noticed an increase in the number of meetings and conferences. However, their larger issue was that the events were not as energising as they hoped.

In-person gatherings, meetings, and congregations offer the space and opportunity for solidarity, ideation, innovation, collaboration, and, most importantly, celebration. So, getting events right feels important. Not to mention that events also take up considerable time, effort, and money. If programmatic impact is tracked and evaluated so closely, shouldn’t events have a strong ‘why’, and a post-op on how closely the event delivered against the ‘why’?

In the spirit of collective inquiry, we approached some organisers whose events we found particularly meaningful last year, and asked them to share how they had gone about designing those spaces and events. These include Agami, a nonprofit advancing ideas of justice; Co.labx, a coaching organisation that helps start-ups build a high-performing leadership team; India Climate Collaborative (ICC), a leading climate collaborative comprising donors, high-net-worth individuals, social entrepreneurs, and nonprofits working on climate solutions; The Gender Lab, a nonprofit working with adolescents and youth in urban and rural communities to reshape existing gender narratives; and Reap Benefit, an organisation engaging young people to solve local climate and civic issues.

We also examined our own practice of convening and, interestingly, some common principles emerged from all of us who are interested in harnessing the real potential of in-person gatherings.

These principles are by no means exhaustive, neither are they fail-proof. What they are is a good starting point to build better, dynamic spaces for human interaction.

three people playing a game-social sector conference
The actions of the organising team can drift away from the intention, and the event can end up feeling inauthentic. | Picture courtesy: Gautam John

Principle 1: Intention is not a lodestar, but a continuous animating force

Anyone planning to host an event comes up with some reason for bringing people together. This is typically called ‘setting an intention’. But this does not automatically mean the intention will be served. Every aspect of the event—from the design to the schedule and from the physical space to the logistics—needs to be constructed in a way that delivers against the set intention.

When we spoke to Varun Hemachandran, senior curator—lead, OpenNyAI at Agami, he emphasised that the intention behind a gathering must trickle down to every level. In many events, there is a tendency to break down roles into operational groups such as hospitality or logistics. However, not enough attention is given to aligning every role to the larger intention of the event. For example, at the Agami Summit in December last year, the volunteers handling food were guided by the following ‘intention question’: How can we make the act of eating together a joyous, connecting, and grounding one? This one question, and similar questions for other roles, ensured that every volunteer was aligned on the larger experience the summit was designed to create versus managing lists of tasks they needed to check off. Similarly, Arhan Bezbora, founding partner at Co.labx, shared that oftentimes intention becomes just a set of words or a high-level direction that is not at the forefront in the minds and hearts of the organisers and facilitators. As a result, the actions of the organising team can drift away from the intention, and the event can end up feeling inauthentic.

According to Kuldeep Dantewadia, co-founder of Reap Benefit, while terms such as ‘collaboration’, ‘ecosystem building’, and ‘safe spaces’ may look impressive on promotional materials, the true test is whether these intentions are embodied in concrete actions and in the collective ethos of the organisers.

From our own experience, we now strongly believe that intention matters, but it needs to be thoroughly queried using multiple ‘why’s: Why are you bringing people together? Why in person? Why for x hours and not more/fewer? Why 100 people and not 2,000 (or vice versa)? Once this is clear, the schedule is designed such that it responds properly to the many ‘why’s.

Principle 2: Light agendas, held strongly

Have you looked at a conference agenda and felt fatigue tug at your temples? You are not alone.

The unanimous no-no from all the organisers we spoke to was in having back-to-back or too many panels. Yet conferences continue to run panel-heavy formats, with too many panelists, shallow moderation, a loss of control over time, and very little real engagement with the audience. This is not to say panels, as a format, don’t work. The point is that good panels are very hard to put together. Even round tables, workshops, showcase events, and networking and pitch events can be designed more thoughtfully.

Here are some concrete design principles and practices that Co.labx follows when arriving at an agenda:

  • Put yourselves in the shoes of the user and visualise their journey and experience.
  • Sense and validate the needs of the participants through a mix of conversations, pre-event survey forms, and observations.
  • Integrate clear routines and rituals in the agenda that build predictability and rhythm (for example, starting with ‘warm-ups’, ending with ‘cool-downs’, doing regular ‘playbacks’ to mirror back the progress and wins).
  • Keep open spaces in the agenda for attendees to take ownership and drive action.
  • Continuously capture key ideas, insights, and turning points that emerge through Post-its, images, screenshots, audio clips, and other mediums.
  • Incorporate stillness practices to help people slow down.
  • Close the loop with participants and follow up on next steps.

If we want attendees to actually participate, lighter agendas work better than busy ones, and three long sessions throughout the day are better than six short ones. A real ‘discussion’ or ‘brainstorm’ cannot happen in 15 minutes, unless the group size is under five people. Having flexibility in the agenda, and trusting the group to fill the time with their own inputs, gets people closer. Moreover, it builds a sense of ownership among participants because they see themselves contributing to the agenda, rather than passively consuming what the host has planned for them.

There are also certain rules of thumb that can guide you towards designing a better agenda and on-day experience. Assuming you know your ‘why’ by now, before deciding the ‘how’, which is usually the panel, session, keynote speech, activity, or discussion topic, ask yourself:

  • Would I want to be in this session at someone else’s event?
  • At which point in this session will people start looking at their phones?
  • Will the main contestations happen inside the room or outside or on the sidelines/more privately?
  • Are people sitting in one place/space for longer than 90 minutes without any change in energy? This in and of itself isn’t a bad thing but the quality of conversation needs to be high if people are to stay grounded in one place for a long time.
  • Is the session that is likely to run over slotted right before lunch?

According to Urvashi Devidayal, senior adviser at ICC, multiple formats are key to sustaining the attention of the audience. Having something completely off topic, something that is fun or emotional, also helps add to the stickiness of the event. For instance, ICC has hosted drum circles, sharing circles, boat rides, and numerous other sessions that have no direct relationship to the topic everyone has gathered to discuss.

Principle 3: Execution eats design for breakfast

Every idea, no matter how good, fails when executed poorly. This sounds banal because no one sets out to execute badly. Yet, repeated internal dry runs, dress rehearsals, and run sheets are not part of the run-up for many organisers.  

When we reached out to Akshat Singhal, co-founder and director at The Gender Lab, he emphasised the importance of inclusivity while planning any event. This comprises considerations for dietary preferences; translations; disability inclusivity (guide for visually impaired individuals, wheelchair access, seating arrangements); toilet access for all; volunteers to guide the participants; programming activities that are mindful of accessibility; and being collaborative and flexible with participant engagement to make it comfortable for people who might find these challenging.

Overall preparedness also helps in being nimble on the day because participant needs emerge, especially when diverse groups are brought together. Say you want to organise a discussion with a group of farmers focused on nature-based solutions. One approach could be to randomly divide them into groups, moderate the discussion, do the work of enumerating and synthesising each group’s points, and then share it back with the whole group. The other could be to speak with them before the meeting or event, look at all the data generated through those conversations, organise these into a few themes/tracks, and run a deeper discussion on the day based on what has already been established.

This takes more effort, and may not always be feasible, but it dramatically improves the progress one can make in group sessions. The use of pre-designed materials including worksheets, cue cards, and surveys also helps take the load off a bit on the day, and leaves one with handy pieces of knowledge that are easier to digest post the event.

Given the fast pace of business and society today, getting people in a room is a luxury in itself.

At our recent active citizenship portfolio retreat, we tried using written notes taken on Day 1 as raw inputs into designing the discussion topics and flow for Day 2. Active citizenship is one of our key portfolios and we were keen to understand how our partners were responding to the rapid digitisation of civic life. To mine the experience of 20 partners, we used cue cards where they wrote their experiences from their specific contexts. On Day 2 we collapsed the insights into broad buckets, omitted parts where full consensus already existed, and managed to have a spirited discussion on grey areas in just 45 minutes because a lot of the background had already been established.

Principle 4: The shelf life of a conference can be extended

The final piece is about what happens once the event is over. We ourselves have seen the value in sharing materials back, making good on conversation threads that were opened in person, and doing offline follow-ups. Last year, we hosted an all-partner gathering in Kochi, where we brought together 100 partners (250 people) to explore synergies and build solidarity. Six months after this retreat, 70 percent of attendees shared that they were initiating or collaborating with organisations that they had met there. This gave us confidence in the power of intention and design, and in the value of building on moments from our convenings much after the event had ended.

Given the fast pace of business and society today, getting people in a room is a luxury in itself. And so how to gather well is a question worth considering irrespective of the industry one belongs to. As we mark events in our calendars this year, I am curious about ways in which others think about bringing people together with a deeply human purpose.

ವಿಶ್ಲೇಷಣೆ: 2024ರ ಚುನಾವಣೆಗೆ 2014ರ ಕಥೆ

ಸರಿಯಾಗಿ ಹತ್ತು ವರ್ಷ ಗಳ ಹಿಂ ದೆ ನಾವು ನನ್ನ ಪತಿ ನಂ ದನ್ ನಿಲೇ ಕಣಿ ಅವರಿಗಾಗಿ ಬೆಂ ಗಳೂರು ದಕ್ಷಿಣ ಲೋ ಕಸಭಾ ಕ್ಷೇ ತ್ರದಲ್ಲಿ ಚುನಾವಣಾ ಪ್ರಚಾರಕ್ಕೆ ಇಳಿದಿದ್ದೆವು. ಆ ಕಥೆ ಕೊನೆಗೊಂಡಿದ್ದು ಹೇ ಗೆ ಎಂ ಬುದು ಎಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಗೊತ್ತಿದೆ. ಆದರೆ ಅಂ ದು ನಾವು ಕಲಿತಿದ್ದು ಈಗ ದೇ ಶದಾದ್ಯಂ ತ ಕಾಣುತ್ತಿರುವ ಆ ಕಥೆಯ ಮುಂ ದುವರಿದ ಭಾಗಕ್ಕೆ ಬಹಳ ಸಂ ಗತವಾಗಿದೆ.

ರಾಜಕಾರಣವು ವಿಶ್ವದ ಅತ್ಯಂತ ಕಷ್ಟದ ಕೆಲಸವಾಗಿರಬಹುದು ಎಂಬುದು ಸಮಸ್ತ ಮತದಾರರು ಒಪ್ಪಿಕೊಳ್ಳಬಹುದಾದ ಮೊದಲ ಸಂಗತಿ. ರಾಜಕಾರಣಿಯು ವರ್ಷದ ಅಷ್ಟೂ ದಿನ, ಹಗಲು–ರಾತ್ರಿ ಹೇಗೆ ಕೆಲಸ ಮಾಡುತ್ತಾನೆ ಎಂಬುದನ್ನು ನಾವು ಖುದ್ದಾಗಿ ಕಂಡೆವು. ಹಲವು ಬಾರಿ ಯಾವ ಪ್ರತಿಫಲವೂ ಇಲ್ಲದೆ, ಮತದಾರರ ಬೇಡಿಕೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಸ್ಪಂದಿಸಲು ಅವರು ಕೆಲಸ ಮಾಡುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಹೀಗಾಗಿ, ನಾವು ಹತ್ತಾರು ಪಕ್ಷಗಳ ಸಹಸ್ರಾರು ಅಭ್ಯರ್ಥಿಗಳಿಗೆ, ಅವರಲ್ಲಿ ಗೆಲ್ಲುವವರ ಸಂಖ್ಯೆ 543 ಮಾತ್ರ, ಒಮ್ಮೆ ಮೆಚ್ಚುಗೆ ಸೂಚಿಸೋಣವೇ?

ಎರಡನೆಯ ಸಂಗತಿ, ಬಹಳಷ್ಟು ಮತದಾರರು, ಅದರಲ್ಲೂ ಮುಖ್ಯವಾಗಿ ನಗರಗಳ ಸ್ಥಿತಿವಂತ ವರ್ಗದವರು, ಚುನಾವಣೆಗಳನ್ನು ಬಹಳ ಹಗುರವಾಗಿ ತೆಗೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತಾರೆ ಎಂಬುದು. 21 ದೇಶಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಇರುವಂತೆ ಭಾರತದಲ್ಲಿ ಮತದಾನ ಕಡ್ಡಾಯವಲ್ಲ. ಇಲ್ಲಿ ಮತದಾನವೆಂದರೆ ಹಕ್ಕನ್ನು ಸಂಭ್ರಮದಿಂದ ಚಲಾಯಿಸುವುದು. ಆದರೆ, ಚುನಾವಣೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಭಾಗಿಯಾಗದೆ ಇದ್ದಾಗ ನಮ್ಮನ್ನು ನಾವೇ ನಿರಾಸೆಗೊಳಿಸಿ.

ಕೊಂಡಂತಾಗುತ್ತದೆ. ಚುನಾವಣೆಗಳು ಅಮೂಲ್ಯವಾದ ಬೇಸಿಗೆ ರಜೆಯ ಸಂದರ್ಭದಲ್ಲಿ ಬರುತ್ತವೆ, ನಮ್ಮಲ್ಲಿ ಕೆಲವರ ಹೆಸರು ಮತದಾರರ ಪಟ್ಟಿಯಿಂದ ಬಿಟ್ಟುಹೋಗಿರುತ್ತದೆ ಎಂಬುದು ನಿಜ. ಆದರೆ, ಮತದಾನ ಮಾಡುವುದು ಸಮಯ ವ್ಯರ್ಥ ಮಾಡುವ ಕೆಲಸ ಎಂದು ದೇಶದ ಬಹುಜನರು ಆಲೋಚಿಸಿದರೆ ಏನಾಗಬಹುದು ಎಂಬುದನ್ನು ಯೋಚಿಸಿ. ಮೂರನೆಯ ಸಂಗತಿಯೆಂದರೆ, ತಮ್ಮ ಅಭ್ಯರ್ಥಿಗಳಿಂದ ಜನ ಏನನ್ನು ನಿರೀಕ್ಷಿಸಬೇಕು ಎಂಬುದು. ನಾವು ಆಯ್ಕೆ ಮಾಡುವವರ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಕೆಲಸವು ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಶಾಸನ ರಚಿಸುವವರಾಗಿ ಸಂಸತ್ತಿಗೆ ನೆರವಾಗಬೇಕಿರುವುದು ಎಂಬುದು ಬಹುತೇಕ ಮತದಾರರಿಗೆ ಅರ್ಥವಾಗದೇ ಇರಬಹುದು. ಇದನ್ನು ಮಾಧ್ಯಮಗಳು ಮುಖ್ಯವಾಗಿ ತೋರಿಸುವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ರಾಜಕಾರಣಿಗಳು ಈ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಮಾತನಾಡುವುದು ಬಹಳ ಕಡಿಮೆ.

ಸಂಸದರು ತಮ್ಮ ಕ್ಷೇತ್ರದ ಜನರನ್ನು ಪ್ರತಿನಿಧಿಸುವ, ಸರ್ಕಾರದ ವೆಚ್ಚಗಳಿಗೆ ಅಂಗೀಕಾರ ನೀಡುವ, ಕಾರ್ಯಾಂಗದ ಕೆಲಸಗಳ ಮೇಲೆ ಒಂದಿಷ್ಟು ನಿಗಾ ಇರಿಸುವ ಹೊಣೆ ಹೊಂದಿದ್ದಾರೆ. ಆದರೆ ಅವರ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಕೆಲಸ ಶಾಸನಗಳನ್ನು ಅರ್ಥಮಾಡಿಕೊಂಡು, ಅವುಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಚರ್ಚಿಸಿ, ಅವುಗಳ ಅಂಗೀಕಾರಕ್ಕೆ ನೆರವಾಗುವುದು. ಈ ಶಾಸನಗಳು ದೇಶದಲ್ಲಿ ಕೆಲಸಗಳು ಸುಗಮವಾಗಿ, ನ್ಯಾಯಸಮ್ಮತವಾಗಿ ನಡೆಯಲು ನೆರವಾಗುತ್ತವೆ. ಆದರೆ 2014ರ ನಮ್ಮ ಅನುಭವದ ಆಧಾರದಲ್ಲಿ ಹೇಳುವುದಾದರೆ, ಮತದಾರರು ಬಯಸುವುದು ಅಥವಾ ಅವರು ಅರ್ಥಮಾಡಿಕೊಂಡಿರುವುದು ಇದನ್ನಲ್ಲ.

ಹಲವು ಕೊಳೆಗೇರಿಗಳಲ್ಲಿ, ಮಧ್ಯಮ ವರ್ಗದವರ ಬಡಾವಣೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಹಾಗೂ ಅಪಾರ್ಟ್‌ಮೆಂಟ್‌ ಸಮುಚ್ಚಯಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ನಾವು ಜನರ ಮಾತಿಗೆ ಇಡೀ ದಿನ ಕಿವಿಯಾಗುತ್ತಿದ್ದೆವು. ಬಹಳ ಸೆಕೆ ಇದ್ದ ಒಂದು ದಿನ ಒಂದು ಅಪಾರ್ಟ್‌ಮೆಂಟ್‌ ಸಮುಚ್ಚಯದಲ್ಲಿ, ನಂದನ್ ಅವರು ಚುನಾಯಿತರಾದರೆ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಸುಧಾರಣೆ ತರಲು ಹೇಗೆ ಕೆಲಸ ಮಾಡಲಿದ್ದಾರೆ ಎಂಬ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ನನ್ನ ಭಾವುಕ ಮಾತುಗಳನ್ನು ಆಲಿಸಿದ ನಂತರ ವ್ಯಕ್ತಿಯೊಬ್ಬರು ‘ಬಹಳ ಚೆನ್ನಾಗಿದೆ. ಆದರೆ ನನ್ನ ನೆರೆಯ ವ್ಯಕ್ತಿ ಮಧ್ಯರಾತ್ರಿ 1 ಗಂಟೆಯ ಹೊತ್ತಿನಲ್ಲಿ ನಾಯಿಗೆ ಆಹಾರ ಹಾಕುತ್ತಿರುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಅವರ ವಿಚಾರವಾಗಿ ಏನು ಮಾಡುತ್ತಾರೆ’ ಎಂದು ಪ್ರಶ್ನಿಸಿದ್ದರು! ಮಧ್ಯಮ ವರ್ಗದವರ ಬಡಾವಣೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಜನ ಬೀದಿ ದೀಪಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ, ಉದ್ಯಾನವನ್ನು ಹಸಿರಾಗಿ ಇರಿಸುವ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಏನು ಮಾಡುತ್ತೀರಿ ಎಂದು ಪ್ರಶ್ನಿಸಿದ್ದರು. ‘ನನ್ನ ಮತ ಉಚಿತವಾಗಿ ಬೇಕಾ? ನೀವು ನನಗೇನು ಕೊಡುತ್ತೀರಿ’ ಎಂದು ಮಹಿಳೆಯೊಬ್ಬರು ಪ್ರಶ್ನಿಸಿದ್ದರು. ಕಷ್ಟಪಟ್ಟು ಕೆಲಸ ಮಾಡುವ, ನೈತಿಕವಾಗಿ ಉತ್ತಮನಾಗಿರುವ ಅಭ್ಯರ್ಥಿ ಎಂದು ನಾನು ಏನೋ ಹೇಳಲು ಮುಂದಾದಾಗ, ಆಕೆಗೆ ಅದು ತಮಾಷೆಯಂತೆ ಅನ್ನಿಸಿತು.

ಕೊಳೆಗೇರಿಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಜನರು ‘ಬರೀ ನೀರು ಕೊಡಿ ಸಾಕು’ ಎಂದಿದ್ದರು. ಇತರ ಕೆಲವರು ವಿದ್ಯುತ್ ಸಂಪರ್ಕ, ಸಾರಿಗೆ ಮತ್ತು ಆಸ್ಪತ್ರೆಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಮಾತನಾಡಿದ್ದರು. ತಮ್ಮಲ್ಲಿನ ಹತಾಶೆಗಳನ್ನು ಅಭ್ಯರ್ಥಿಗಳ ಹಾಗೂ ಅವರ ಜೊತೆಗಾರರ ಎದುರು ಹೇಳಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲು ಅದು ಜನರಿಗೆ ಸಿಕ್ಕ ಒಂದು ಅವಕಾಶವಾಗಿತ್ತು. ಬೆಂಗಳೂರಿನಂತಹ ಸುಶಿಕ್ಷಿತ ನಗರಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಕೂಡ ಜನರಿಗೆ ತಮ್ಮ ಸಂಸದರಿಂದ ಬೇಕಾಗಿರುವುದು ತಾವು ಒಗ್ಗೂಡಿ ಪಡೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳಬೇಕಿರುವ ಅಥವಾ ತಮ್ಮ ಕಾರ್ಪೊರೇಟರ್‌ಗಳು, ಸ್ಥಳೀಯ ಅಧಿಕಾರಿಗಳು, ಶಾಸಕರಿಂದ ಪಡೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳಬೇಕಿರುವ ಸಂಗತಿಗಳು ಎಂಬುದು ನಮಗೆ ನಿಧಾನವಾಗಿ ಗೊತ್ತಾಯಿತು. ಸ್ಥಳೀಯ ಮಟ್ಟದಲ್ಲಿ ಎದುರಾಗುವ ಸಮಸ್ಯೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಜನರು ನೇರ ಪರಿಹಾರವನ್ನು ಬಯಸುತ್ತಾರೆ.

ಇವುಗಳಿಗೆ ಕಾರಣವಿಲ್ಲ ಎನ್ನಲಾಗದು. ಮೂಲಭೂತ ಸೇವೆಗಳು ಸೇರಿದಂತೆ ಹಲವು ಸೇವೆಗಳನ್ನು ಒದಗಿಸಬೇಕಿರುವುದು ತೀರಾ ಮಹತ್ವದ್ದು. ಆದರೆ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ ಇರುವುದು ಅವುಗಳನ್ನು ಒದಗಿಸಬೇಕಿರುವವರು ಯಾರು ಎಂಬುದು. ಇದನ್ನು ಬಹಳ ಸಣ್ಣ ಮೊತ್ತದ ಎಂಪಿಲ್ಯಾಡ್‌ ಅನುದಾನ ಹೊರತುಪಡಿಸಿ ಬೇರೆ ಯಾವುದೇ ಶಾಸನಾತ್ಮಕ ಸಂಪನ್ಮೂಲ ಅಥವಾ ಅಧಿಕಾರ ಇಲ್ಲದ ಸಂಸದರಿಂದ ಒದಗಿಸುವುದು ಆಗದ ಕೆಲಸ.

ಇನ್ನಷ್ಟು ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಸಂಕೀರ್ಣವಾದ ಸಮಸ್ಯೆಗಳನ್ನು ಪರಿಹರಿಸಲು ಸಮರ್ಥ ಅಧಿಕಾರಿಗಳ ಜೊತೆ ಕೆಲಸ ಮಾಡುವ ಅರಿವಿರುವ ರಾಜಕಾರಣಿಗಳು ಆಧುನಿಕ ಪ್ರಜಾತಂತ್ರ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಗೆ ಬೇಕು. ಬಹಳ ಸಂದರ್ಭಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ನಮ್ಮ ನೀತಿಗಳು, ಕಾನೂನುಗಳು ಚರ್ಚೆಗಳಿಲ್ಲದೆ ಜಾರಿಗೆ ಬಂದಿರುತ್ತವೆ. ಬಹುತೇಕ ಸಂದರ್ಭಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಅವು ನಮ್ಮ ದಿನನಿತ್ಯದ ಬದುಕಿನ ಮೇಲೆ ಹೇಗೆ ಪರಿಣಾಮ ಬೀರುತ್ತವೆ ಎಂಬುದನ್ನು ತಿಳಿಯಲು ಆಗುವುದಿಲ್ಲ.

ಉದಾಹರಣೆಗೆ ಹೇಳುವುದಾದರೆ, ‘ದೂರಸಂಪರ್ಕ ಕಾಯ್ದೆ– 2023’ ಇಂಟರ್ನೆಟ್ ಸೇವೆಗಳನ್ನು ಅಮಾನತಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಇರಿಸಲು ಸರ್ಕಾರಕ್ಕೆ ಮತ್ತಷ್ಟು ಬಲ ನೀಡುತ್ತದೆ. ಕೆಲವು ಗಂಟೆಗಳಿಗಿಂತ ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಹೊತ್ತಿನವರೆಗೆ ಇಂಟರ್ನೆಟ್ ಇಲ್ಲದೆ ಬದುಕುವುದು ಹೇಗೆಂಬುದು ನಗರವಾಸಿ ಮತದಾರರಿಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ. ನಮ್ಮ ಸಂಸದರು ಇಲ್ಲಿ ಮಧ್ಯಪ್ರವೇಶಿಸಿ, ಅತ್ಯಂತ ಅಪರೂಪದ ಸಂದರ್ಭಗಳನ್ನು ಹೊರತುಪಡಿಸಿ ಬೇರೆ ಸಂದರ್ಭಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಇಂಟರ್ನೆಟ್ ಸೇವೆ ಸ್ಥಗಿತಗೊಳಿಸದಂತೆ ನೋಡಿಕೊಳ್ಳಬೇಕು ಅಲ್ಲವೇ? ಕೆಲಸದ ಭವಿಷ್ಯದ ಸ್ವರೂಪಕ್ಕೆ ಸಂಬಂಧಿಸಿದ ನೀತಿಗಳು ಹೊಸ, ಯುವ ಮತದಾರರ ಪಾಲಿಗೆ ಅತ್ಯಂತ ಮಹತ್ವದವು. ಹಾಗೆಯೇ, ಮಹಿಳೆಯರ ಪಾಲಿಗೆ ಸುರಕ್ಷತೆ, ಆರೋಗ್ಯ, ಸಮಾನತೆಗೆ ಸಂಬಂಧಿಸಿದ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳು ತಕ್ಷಣದ ಯಾವುದೇ ಸೌಲಭ್ಯಗಳಿಗಿಂತ ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಮಹತ್ವ

ದ್ದಾಗುತ್ತವೆ. 17ನೇ ಲೋಕಸಭಾ ಚುನಾವಣೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಮತದಾರರಾಗಿ ನಮಗೆ ಹಳೆಯ ಮಾದರಿಗಳನ್ನು ಪಕ್ಕಕ್ಕೆ ಇರಿಸಲು ಒಂದು ಅವಕಾಶ ಇದೆ. ಹೊಸ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳನ್ನು ರೂಪಿಸುವಾಗ ಅಥವಾ ಹಳೆಯ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳಿಗೆ ತಿದ್ದುಪಡಿ ತರುವಾಗ ನಮ್ಮ ಸ್ವಾತಂತ್ರ್ಯದ ಪರವಾಗಿ ಮಾತನಾಡುವವರನ್ನು ನಾವು ಚುನಾಯಿಸಬಹುದು.

ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಸಂಸದೀಯ ಪಟುಗಳು ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಶಾಸನಗಳನ್ನು ರೂಪಿಸುತ್ತಾರೆ. ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಶಾಸನಗಳು ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಸಮಾಜವನ್ನು ಕಟ್ಟುತ್ತವೆ. ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಶಾಸನಗಳನ್ನು ಚೆನ್ನಾಗಿ ಅನುಷ್ಠಾನಕ್ಕೆ ತಂದಾಗ ಪ್ರಜಾತಂತ್ರ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯು ಸಮಾನತೆ, ನ್ಯಾಯ, ಹಕ್ಕುಗಳಿಂದ ಕೂಡಿ ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಶ್ರೀಮಂತವಾಗುತ್ತದೆ. ಇಂದು ರೂಪುಗೊಳ್ಳುವ ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಕಾನೂನುಗಳು ಮುಂದೆ ಅಸಂಖ್ಯ ತಲೆಮಾರುಗಳಿಗೆ ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಭವಿಷ್ಯವನ್ನು ಕಟ್ಟಿಕೊಡುತ್ತವೆ.

ಸ್ಥಳೀಯ ಸಮಸ್ಯೆಗಳು ನಮ್ಮ ಸಂಸದರನ್ನು ತಮ್ಮತ್ತ ಸೆಳೆಯಬೇಕಿಲ್ಲ; ಆ ವಿಷಯಗಳಿಗೆ ನಾವು ಸ್ಥಳೀಯ ಸರ್ಕಾರವನ್ನು ಹೊಣೆಗಾರ ಆಗಿಸಬೇಕು. 543 ಮಂದಿ ನಾಯಕರನ್ನು ಸದ್ಯದ ಅಗತ್ಯಗಳಿಗಿಂತ ಹೆಚ್ಚಿನ ಮಹತ್ವದ ವಿಷಯಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಗಮನಹರಿಸುವ ಕೆಲಸಕ್ಕೆ ಬಿಡಬಹುದು. ನಮ್ಮೆಲ್ಲರನ್ನು ಚೆನ್ನಾಗಿ ಪೊರೆಯಲು ಬೇಕಿರುವ ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಶಾಸನಗಳನ್ನು ರೂಪಿಸುವ ಅಭ್ಯರ್ಥಿಗಳನ್ನು ಆಯ್ಕೆ ಮಾಡುವ ಮೂಲಕ ಭಾರತದ ಸಮಾಜವು ಭಾರತದ ಪ್ರಜಾತಂತ್ರವನ್ನು ಇನ್ನಷ್ಟು ಗಟ್ಟಿಗೊಳಿಸಬಹುದು.

ಲೇಖಕಿ: ‘ರೋಹಿಣಿ ನಿಲೇಕಣಿ ಫಿಲಾಂಥ್ರೊಪೀಸ್‌’ನ ಅಧ್ಯಕ್ಷೆ‌

(ಲೇಖನವು ಈ ಮೊದಲು ‘ದಿ ಇಂಡಿಯನ್ ಎಕ್ಸ್‌ಪ್ರೆಸ್‌’ನಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಕಟವಾಗಿತ್ತು)

Prajavani

Skoll | Launching the Centre For Exponential Change: A support network for system orchestrators

By Rohini Nilekani (Chairperson, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies) & Donald Gips (CEO, Skoll Foundation)

If you happen to drive along the highway connecting Guwahati and Shillong in the Northeast of India, you may want to stop at a few of the 350 rural Primary Healthcare Centres (PHCs) and interact with the healthcare professionals. These centres are a thriving testament to the systemic transformation in progress.

Nurse Joyce would explain how she can ensure proper maternal care of the most vulnerable rural women because she has access to uninterrupted power and functional medical facilities such as baby warmers. This is no accident; it’s a thoughtful system orchestration by SELCO Foundation, a 2018 Skoll Awardee and co-traveller with Centre For Exponential Change.

Bringing together state government resources with private players to ensure reliable operations, maintenance, and building capacity of primary healthcare staff is no easy task. Systemic change is underway to make PHCs and other crucial health service points no longer just functional, but resilient and self-reliant. Isn’t it remarkable that such a model of exponential change is emerging as a blueprint for 50,000 rural PHCs across India?

Human history is peppered with long periods of small changes that were disrupted by compounding big shifts. We are living through such a transition, where both our problems and our ability to respond are multiplying at an unprecedented pace. This moment compels us to pause, reflect, and reimagine our response to social problems with exponential thinking. Would linear solutions that may have worked in the past be adequate for the future?

How can we learn from exponential thinking and action in progress? Most successful social innovations scale because of the collective work of many problem solvers across communities, civil society, government, and private sector (Samaaj, Sarkar, Bazaar). One example is the global financing and professionalization of frontline Community Health Workers (CHWs), the backbone of community health services in many countries. A more professionalized workforce active hand-in-hand across communities, civil society, government, and business, is key to responding to public health outbreaks and developing strong health systems.

But much more investment is needed to unlock the full potential of CHWs and to ensure communities have access to professionalized, trained, compensated, and integrated CHWs. Within the Skoll community, we see locally-based partnerships and coordination successfully happening with multiple governments to develop national community health strategies and financing pathways. The Africa Frontline First Catalytic Fund is an example that has already secured $100 million in funding as it seeks to scale-up and sustain 200K professional CHWs across 10 countries by 2030, expanding healthcare coverage to 100M people. But this work takes a specific profile of innovator to build, coordinate, and activate this type of exponential change over time.

What type of innovator does it take to catalyze such exponential change? This requires system orchestration: connecting the dots, fostering partnerships, and driving whole ecosystems forward. Working behind the scenes, system orchestrators bring about transformational social change by knitting together key actors, providing resources and digital infrastructure, and mobilizing collective change efforts. They shape a new paradigm, leverage systems’ resources, navigate complexity and persist with authenticity to create impact at societal scale.

When system orchestrators are networked and resourced, they are able to “conduct” social change symphonies that trigger positive domino effects of change. While not always at the center, or even out front, their coordinating and activating capabilities are critical.

System orchestrators exist and have existed for years. They continue to do influential work behind the scenes that often does not get the public spotlight. By no means is this journey of system orchestrators an easy one. These endeavors are very complex, extend over long periods of time, and bridge many chasms on the way. Does it not behoove us to do our best to unlock their imagination, reinforce their capabilities, and reduce the friction they face?

Can all of us focused on impact at scale come together as an enabling force for them? Can we ensure that knowledge is reused, reimagination is encouraged, prototyping is celebrated, and self-efficacy of leaders is reinforced? Can we join hands to catalyze positive change by accelerating the work of the social innovators who are tackling our planet’s most existential challenges, and provide a network of support for system orchestrators? That is the vision with which we are establishing the new Centre For Exponential Change.

In the Skoll community and across the network of Centre For Exponential Change, we continue to see system orchestrators emerge. Many started with social innovations they were scaling within their organizations and over time their credibility in the space led to a system orchestrator role. Other social innovators are system orchestrators from the start.

Given the scale of impact system orchestrators are helping drive, it’s hard for us to imagine a scenario in which the big, audacious goals that we have set for ourselves can be achieved without them. Yet the common theme we hear from them is that raising funds for what they do is challenging, even when most have lean budgets ($5M annually) and staff (~10 or less). Through surveying the field with Bridgespan, we’ve found that most system orchestrators have severe finance gaps, on average between half to 2x their budget, or about $2.5M. The Centre for Exponential Change is designed to build a community of enablers, including funders, for system orchestrators, so they can flourish and consistently leverage critical networks.

Nilekani Philanthropies works closely with system orchestrators, such as EkStep Foundation and many others engaged with Societal Thinking, and has experienced not only many successes but also setbacks. Some lessons from these experiences have become the guideposts for how philanthropy is practiced. One of them is that we need a new lens to reimagine the way we look at and solve social problems – going beyond plucking out the weeds, instead digging deep to the intertwined roots of a problem. This means opening up a space to reimagine the way we look at problems and our role in solving them, a space for experimentation, and a space for diverse actors across civil society, government and markets to come together to solve.

In the journey towards systemic change, the triad of Samaaj (society), Sarkaar (government), and Bazaar (market) plays a pivotal role. Through successful cross-sector collaborations, we’ve seen firsthand how the synergy between these sectors amplifies our collective impact. For instance, initiatives that bring together the grassroots innovation of Samaaj, the regulatory framework and resources of Sarkaar, and the scalability and efficiency of Bazaar demonstrate the power of united action. This collaborative ecosystem is at the heart of the mission for the Centre for Exponential Change, leveraging the unique strengths of each sector to foster exponential change.

It is with this vision that the Centre for Exponential Change is emerging as a co-creation space to bring together diverse enablers that support the journeys of system orchestrators in solving social problems faster, sooner, and at scale. Skoll Foundation and Nilekani Philanthropies are co-founding the Centre For Exponential Change along with New Profit and Instituto Beja with a shared vision and aspiration. Conceived as a global action network, the Centre for Exponential Change (C4EC) and its Global Members will offer:

  1. Exchange of open and practical knowledge on how to induce exponential change
  2. Actionable advisory for deep design and prototyping to explore new pathways
  3. Paradigm grants to unlock the imagination of validated system orchestrators
  4. Hands-on experienced mentors who can help navigate challenges with insights
  5. Spaces and communities to reinforce the self-efficacy of system orchestrators

When catalyzing positive exponential change, it’s possible to inadvertently perpetuate existing disparities in our society that harm marginalized populations. What may seem ambitious from a dominant paradigm may have hidden costs for the vulnerable, if not empathetically considered from their lived experience. With the right values, design principles and approach, social innovators can balance innovation with responsibility. Founded on core values of restoring agency, nurturing dignity, and empowering choices for traditionally marginalized and underrepresented groups, the Centre For Exponential Change will co-travel with system orchestrators to actively integrate and elevate voices from multiple axes of difference, lend fresh perspectives, surface blindspots and nourish equity.

Like the attention we pay to conserve and regenerate the systems in nature that preserve and rejuvenate our ecology, such as coral reefs and rainforests, we must pay similar attention to system orchestrators in our society that are essential for rapid progress towards a sustainable and equitable future. It is our responsibility to engage, listen, learn, and strive to improve our systems to reduce the friction these actors face and bridge the chasms they must cross. That commitment is at the heart of the Centre For Exponential Change.

We invite you to join this movement, reach out to become an active member of the emerging C4EC Global Network, extend your financial support or expertise with system orchestrators, share your journey and insights, strengthen the narrative, or collaborate on existing or new exponential change journeys. Visit us at the Centre for Exponential Change, and get involved!

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