GROW+ | Climate. Communities. Capacity

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Hello, this is our very first update on Grove and we look forward to engaging with the Grove community!

About Us:
We are GROW+, a climate-intelligent, community-first, capacity-strengthening initiative rooted in the realities of the Global South.

GROW+ channels flexible, unrestricted funding to local actors, bridging grassroots realities with funder ecosystems and helps embed bioregional thinking into mainstream philanthropy.

Here’s a short film on how GROW+ came to life—and where it’s headed.

GROW+: The next layer in the architecture of resilience

The Beginning

In 2021, as grassroots organizations fought hard to stay afloat amid the Covid-19 pandemic, EdelGive Foundation, along with a coalition of other funders and sector leaders, recognised a hard truth: philanthropy needs to evolve from funding only programmes to investing in organisational resilience.

That year, GROW (Grassroots Resilience Ownership and Wellness) was launched to support 100 nonprofits across India, helping them rebuild institutional capacity. GROW provided flexible funding to strengthen core systems like financial resilience, human resource strengthening, and technology adoption as critical areas for capacity building.

The program demonstrated that when nonprofits are empowered to invest in core organizational needs, they build the skills and resources necessary to address complex challenges.

GROW to GROW+

GROW proved that trust, flexibility, and institutional investment build resilient organisations. Launched in 2025, GROW+ retains this foundation while expanding it with climate intelligence and networked, place-based approaches. The result is a progression from organisational strength to collective, climate-responsive effectiveness.

GROW+ does this through a landscape approach.

Landscape Approach

India’s vast ecological diversity means climate challenges manifest differently across regions and demand differentiated responses. Organisations must adopt context-specific approaches while learning from peers across landscapes.

To address this, GROW+ works through six distinct landscapes:

The Himalayan Mountains. 2. The Northern Plains. 3. Indian Desert. 4. Peninsular Plateau. 5. Coastal Plains. 6. Islands.

Each landscape has smart pyramids.

Each identified landscape has cohorts of grassroots 10+ NGOs supported by experienced Anchor organizations who facilitate capacity building through knowledge-sharing, collaborative learning, and climate-focused strategic discourse. The design allows replication across geographies and channels resources directly to grassroots organizations.

EdelGive Foundation, together with Rainmatter Foundation and other funders, is building GROW+ to strengthen a robust ecosystem of grassroots organisations responding to the climate crisis. Rainmatter’s engagement—dating back to GROW—enables organisations to build resilient, adaptive institutions and translate local climate realities into community-led action.

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The place-first approach of GROW+ is realised through smart pyramids, where anchor NGOs work with cohorts of partner non-profits within the same landscape. Anchors bring wider reach and varied experience, while partners contribute deep local connections and understanding of in-place challenges — together building knowledge networks that strengthen climate prediction, preparedness, and response.

In the peninsular plateau region, Partnering Hope into Action (PHIA) Foundation is anchoring a network comprising 18 grassroots partners across 5 states (Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana). For nearly two decades, PHIA has championed the rights of marginalized communities, fuelling their quest for resilience, and sustainable futures.

Johnson Topno, Executive Director, speaking on trust and humanity as the foundation of PHIA.

PHIA’s work spans access to essential services, reducing inequality and bridging gender gaps, strengthening sustainable livelihoods, and advancing humanitarian response and climate resilience through community-led development across rural and underserved regions.

The organization’s work in strengthening local self-governance systems like gram sabhas (village council) so that communities become the drivers of their own development, has helped them build connections across government systems, funder and community ecosystems. PHIA has helped strengthen implementation of Forest Rights Act, working closely with the Tribal Welfare Commissioner’s Office, CSOs and communities, securing individual as well as community forest rights. Till now, 22.10 million acres of Individual Forest Claims and 222.7 million acres of Community Forest Claims have been secured across Jharkhand.

Shanti, a member of the local women’s self-help group and the gram sabha in Jharkhand, India, speaks at a community gathering.

For example, in Upper Dumri, a deeply forested village in Jharkhand, PHIA supported the local Adivasi community in their seven-year journey to secure Community Forest Resource (CFR). Illegal timber trade had ravaged the local forests. After the community was recognised as the official custodians of the forest they have lived in for generations in 2024, the village gram sabha planned protection and utilization of resources mindfully.

Stewarded by the Gram Sabha, the community now sustainably manages resources, protects native biodiversity, and bolsters livelihoods grounded in traditional ecological knowledge. Women have risen as key leaders, defending forests and resisting exploitation of vital tree species like char, amla, and kendu.

PHIA has fuelled this triumph by building local leadership, streamlining CFR documentation, liaising with authorities, and equipping communities to assert their rights confidently.

Their journey — from empowering communities to pioneering forest rights — fuels our shared mission of resilient ecosystems, empowered communities, and grassroots climate action, making them a natural anchor for GROW+.

In our next post, we move from the Peninsular Plateau to the Indian Desert, where GROW+ Anchor Gramin Vikas Vigyan Samiti (GRAVIS) demonstrates how smart pyramids foster resilience, self-reliance, and community-led climate action across the fragile ecosystems of the Thar.

Leena Chauhan from GRAVIS and Archana Toppo from PHIA lead the capacity building initiatives for their Pyramids.

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As a part of GROW+, Gramin Vikas Vigyan Samiti (GRAVIS) is anchoring a network of 16 grassroots partners in the Indian Desert Landscape. Presently, GRAVIS and its 16 GROW+ network partners are working towards climate actions across four states — Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand. For over four decades, GRAVIS has worked alongside rural communities in the Thar Desert, equipping them to respond to water scarcity, food insecurity, and climate vulnerability, and to build sustainable futures.

GRAVIS, PHIA, grassroots partners and EdelGive Foundation teams at a partners’ convening.

Founded in 1983 by a group of Gandhian development activists, GRAVIS is guided by the philosophy of Sarvodaya — “all rising, but the last person first.” The organization focuses on strengthening self-reliance through community participation, sustainable resource management, and inclusive development across more than 2,000 villages, supporting nearly 2.7 million people.

Rajendra Kumar, Program Coordinator, GRAVIS at a partners’ convening earlier this year.

One of the clearest expressions of this work is the revival of traditional water harvesting systems across the desert landscape. For generations, communities in the Thar have relied on indigenous structures — taankas, naadis, khadins, and beris — to capture and store water from scarce rainfall. Recognising the value of these time-tested practices, GRAVIS has worked with communities to restore and strengthen them, blending traditional knowledge with modern approaches to water conservation.

Through these efforts, GRAVIS has facilitated the construction of more than 12000 taankas, nearly 8,000 khadins, more than 800 village ponds, and 700 percolation wells, benefiting over 2,50,000 households with water, agriculture, horticulture and livestock rearing activities These interventions have not only improved access to water but have also strengthened food security, supported livelihoods, and increased communities’ ability to withstand droughts and climate shocks.

A ‘beri’, a shallow percolation well used for rain-water harvesting, built with support from GRAVIS in Rajasthan

Beyond environmental resilience, GRAVIS has invested deeply in community well-being — through medical camps, healthcare programmes, leadership development, and the establishment of more than - 4000 Community Based Organizations. Among these, currently GRAVIS is working with 1100 Village Development Committees and over 2,000 women’s Self-Help Groups, 460 Village Older People Associations, and over 200 Intergenerational Learning Groups. These platforms have created lasting structures for collective action and local decision-making, rooted in community ownership and inclusive participation across age, gender, and social background.

Their journey — from reviving traditional water systems and strengthening local institutions to empowering communities across one of India’s most climate-vulnerable landscapes — makes them a natural anchor for GROW+.

In our next post, we return to the beginning of the story — to Jodhpur in August 2025, where a shared commitment to resilience, collaboration, and community-led climate action took its first steps.

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GROW+ | The Pledge Begins

In August 2025, GROW+ stepped out of design and into a room full of the people who would carry it forward.
The Inaugural Convening in Jodhpur brought together leaders from philanthropy, development, government, and grassroots organisations — not to mark an ending, but to chart what comes next after the GROW Fund.

https://youtu.be/WUe8NojaXxY?si=ASTiyMFiONupeXkv
Trailer: GROW+, the next layer in the architecture of resilience.

Four Years, 100 Organisations

The day opened by looking back. GROW had spent four years testing a simple but radical idea: give grassroots organisations flexible, trust-based funding and let them decide what their own institutions need most.

An evidence-based presentation by EdelGive Foundation and Social Lens turned that idea into data. Across 100 grassroots organisations, GROW’s non-programmatic funding model had strengthened human resources, financial resilience, systems, and technology — the core machinery that lets an organisation outlast any single programme. The numbers showed measurable shifts in leadership depth, donor engagement, and programme delivery. The conclusion was straightforward: when organisations are trusted to set their own priorities, they build the adaptive capacity that sustained community impact requires.

What Trust Looks Like Up Close

Numbers carried the day, but stories carried the room. Leaders from the GROW Fund cohort spoke about what unrestricted funding actually changed inside their organisations — sharper self-assessment, deliberate leadership succession, strategic plans built years rather than months out.

Grounded in the realities of climate risk, the conversation kept circling back to one point: no single organisation, however strong, can meet a systemic crisis alone. Collective action wasn’t framed as an aspiration. It was framed as a requirement.

Representatives from government, philanthropy, anchor organisations, and ecosystem partners sign the GROW+ pledge.

The Pledge

The defining moment of the day was procedural, in the best sense — people signing their names to something. The GROW+ pledge asked signatories to move from supporting the idea of grassroots resilience to actively owning it: deep collaboration, strategic approaches to building resilience, collective ownership of outcomes, and a culture of wellness for the organisations doing the work on the ground.

Signing it meant committing time, resources, and intent to test — and where needed, reshape — the GROW+ model alongside the organisations it’s designed to serve.

Leaders from philanthropy, government, and grassroots organisations at the GROW+ Inaugural Convening, Jodhpur, August 2025.

Not an Addition. A Leap.

GROW+ isn’t GROW with a longer feature list. It’s what GROW made possible: a model built on the same foundation of trust and flexibility, now broader in scope and deeper in impact, working through place-based networks to meet the climate crisis where it’s actually happening.

The convening closed on collective design, not a finished blueprint — local wisdom and lived experience treated as load-bearing parts of the model, not footnotes to it.

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GROW+ | The First All Partners Convening, Jharkhand

For the first time, 34 partner organisations from two climate-vulnerable landscapes — the Indian Desert and the Peninsular Plateau — sat down together. Not just to compare notes, but to build a shared understanding of how climate change is reshaping livelihoods, governance, migration, and the institutions meant to hold communities steady.

From GROW Classic to GROW+

GROW Classic built institutional foundations — stronger HR, finance, governance, technology. The convening made the next step explicit: strong institutions alone aren’t enough anymore. GROW+ adds climate intelligence, place-based adaptation, and cross-landscape learning to that foundation, connecting organisations into networks that can adapt together rather than separately.

The Pyramid, Explained

Partners walked through the programme’s architecture — how communities, local organisations, anchor institutions, and the wider ecosystem connect within the pyramid model. The throughline: resilience isn’t a solo act. It’s built in relationship.

Two Landscapes, One Set of Pressures

Through climate mapping exercises, partners found their regions — ecologically distinct — were buckling under strikingly similar weight: erratic rainfall, deepening drought, groundwater depletion, soil decline, biodiversity loss, mining-driven fragmentation, climate migration, and weakening community stewardship of shared resources.

These aren’t isolated environmental problems. They’re showing up in agriculture, public health, labour mobility, and the slow shift from subsistence to market-dependent livelihoods — a shift that’s left communities exposed on two fronts at once.
Adaptation Already in Motion

The conversation wasn’t only about risk. Partners shared real examples — shifting agricultural practices, restoring natural resources, building new institutional responses to uncertainty. The takeaway: design has to start from local knowledge, with space for partners to learn across regions facing the same structural strain.

Not an Expansion. An Evolution.

GROW+ isn’t GROW Classic with more features bolted on. It pairs institutional resilience with climate intelligence and cross-landscape collaboration, equipping grassroots organisations to navigate complexity while letting communities shape their own response.

The convening closed on a shared premise: resilience isn’t built through isolated interventions. It takes strong institutions, informed decisions, and sustained collaboration across organisations and landscapes — and this gathering laid the foundation for exactly that kind of network.

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GROW+ Field Immersion Visit, Jharkhand, 2026

Two days after the first GROW+ All Partners Convening in Ranchi, conversations moved from the conference room to the field.

The transition was deliberate as climate resilience cannot be fully understood through presentations alone. It becomes tangible when you stand alongside communities negotiating uncertain rainfall, shrinking forests, changing livelihoods and evolving systems of local governance.

The field immersion was designed as an opportunity to observe how institutions, communities and ecosystems interact when climate variability becomes part of everyday lives.

It offered an opportunity to see GROW+ architecture in practice. PHIA anchors the Peninsular Plateau landscape, while Torpa Rural Development Society for Women (TRDSW) hosted the field visit across villages where community institutions have evolved through years of sustained engagement.

Agriculture as Adaptation

The visit began in a demonstration farm where mixed cropping, indigenous seed varieties and natural farming practices are gradually replacing more input-intensive agriculture.

Erratic weather patterns have made farming increasingly uncertain. The communities are undertaking the above adaptations to reduce climate risk. Harvests too remain vulnerable to the changing weather patterns, but the response is rooted in shared and continuous learning and adaptation rather than fixed prescriptions.

Food Systems Carry Memory

In Saramoda village, the community welcomed participants with music, dance and displays of indigenous foods. Traditional vegetables, lentils, edible flowers, pickles and seeds reflected generations of ecological knowledge.

The conversation, however, quickly shifted from celebration to concern. Dietary diversity is shrinking. Market seeds, monocultures and changing food preferences are slowly replacing indigenous crops that once formed both nutrition and cultural identity.

Traditional crafts made from forest produce continue to survive, but migration and changing aspirations have reduced the number of young people practising them.

Climate Variability Changes Livelihoods

Lac cultivation provides seasonal income for many households across the region. Its production depends on carefully timed cultivation cycles and healthy host trees.

Last year’s intense rainfall disrupted harvests, illustrating how climate variability increasingly affects livelihoods beyond agriculture. Women’s self-help groups have invested in equipment and safety measures that improve cultivation practices, but infrastructure alone cannot eliminate climatic uncertainty. Adaptation continues through experimentation, local problem-solving and collective decision-making.

Governance as Climate Infrastructure

The visit concluded at the Gram Sabha Secretariat in Tunel village where climate resilience looked less like a field intervention and more like institutional capacity.

Community Forest Rights records, biodiversity registers, government applications and forest management documents were carefully maintained. Forest monitoring combines customary practices with digital tools, allowing communities to document violations, regulate extraction and strengthen collective stewardship.

Climate adaptation here is inseparable from governance. Access to land rights, functioning institutions and organised community processes shape resilience as much as changes in farming practices. The Gram Sabha becomes not simply an administrative body, but a platform through which communities negotiate environmental, social and economic change.

Culture Remains Part of the System

Across the villages, conversations repeatedly returned to forests. Forests provide food, seasonal income, cultural identity and ecological security. Festivals such as Sarhul and Karma continue to reinforce relationships between people and nature.

Rather than viewing culture separately from climate action, the immersion highlighted how cultural practices continue to support collective stewardship of natural resources. As environmental pressures increase, these social institutions become increasingly important alongside formal governance structures.

Different Landscapes, Shared Challenges

Although partners (GRAVIS and PHIA) work across very different geographies- from the Indian Desert to the Peninsular Plateau- the field discussions revealed remarkably similar experiences such as rainfall variability, environment degradation, migration, changing systems, growing dependence on markets and pressure on natural resources.

Though the ecological contexts differ, the underlying challenges may not. The visit was not intended to demonstrate completed projects. It revealed how climate resilience is built through many interconnected systems, reinforcing each other.

The GROW+ pyramid model strengthens relationships between communities, institutions and landscapes. GROW+ seeks to create value by enabling learning across landscapes facing similar structural pressures.

Looking Ahead

Climate change is placing sustained pressure on local institutions. Strengthening those institutions is climate action. The immersion reaffirmed a central premise of GROW+ that communities already hold deep knowledge about adapting to environmental change. The role of institutions is to create the conditions for that knowledge to endure, evolve and travel across landscapes collectively.

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GROW+ | Building the Institutions Behind Climate Action: PHIA’s Capacity-Building Journey

When we talk about climate resilience, we picture farms, forests, water bodies, communities adapting to a changing environment. What we talk about less are the organisations standing alongside those communities — helping people access rights, navigate government systems, respond to climate shocks, and sustain change long after a project ends. That’s where GROW began.

GROW launched in 2021 when EdelGive Foundation and a coalition of funders began investing in institutional capacity — not just programmes — for 100 Indian nonprofits, through flexible funding for finance, HR, and technology. In 2025, GROW+ built on this by adding climate intelligence and a landscape-based approach, working across six ecologically diverse regions. In each, “smart pyramids” of 10+ grassroots NGOs learn and grow under experienced anchor organisations, building climate-responsive capacity together.

One organisation bringing that vision to life is Partnering Hope Into Action (PHIA) Foundation, the anchor organisation for the Peninsular Plateau landscape.

Why PHIA?

PHIA has worked with vulnerable and socially excluded communities since 2005, expanding significantly over the last decade. Today it works across nine states with Adivasi, Dalit, and minority communities, women, and persons with disabilities — groups often excluded from mainstream development. Its work spans local governance, rights, gender justice, climate action, and community leadership.

As GROW+'s Peninsular Plateau anchor, PHIA supports a network of grassroots organisations while strengthening its own institutional systems — a role that takes community trust, technical expertise, organisational discipline, and the ability to connect local realities to larger conversations on climate and development.

Going Back to the Basics

The first phase of GROW+ focused on something deceptively simple: the fundamentals. Through The HUB, GROW+'s online learning platform, PHIA’s team took courses on HR, finance, and technology systems, alongside expert-led live sessions and capacity-building interventions shaped by its own organisational assessments.

For Mr. Johnson Topno, PHIA’s Executive Director, the value wasn’t just new information — it was revisiting principles that get pushed aside in the rush of programme delivery. “The courses on HR, finance and IT helped us revisit foundational concepts and principles. It was a great learning experience for the team and a reminder of practices that organisations need to keep strengthening every day,” he said.

Like most nonprofits, PHIA spends most of its time responding to field realities, donor commitments, and emerging challenges — institutional systems are easy to postpone until there’s a crisis. GROW+ created space to ask a different question: what would it look like to strengthen the organisation before the next challenge arrives?

Looking Beyond Project Budgets

Financial planning resonated strongly. Live sessions on budgeting and project management pushed teams to think differently about organisational costs and sustainability. “The sessions on cost budgeting and project management were particularly useful. They helped us rethink hidden and indirect costs while designing project budgets and helped us streamline operational planning,” Mr. Topno said.

It’s a familiar tension for grassroots organisations: projects get funded, and institutions are somehow expected to sustain themselves alongside them. GROW+ opened up a broader conversation about what it actually takes to run a strong organisation, and why those costs matter.

Fundraising as a Long-Term Capability

Fundraising had long been driven by immediate opportunities and proposal cycles rather than long-term strategy. Through GROW+, PHIA ran a dedicated fundraising workshop for its business development team, covering donor behaviour, organisational readiness, funding diversification, proposal development, theory of change, log frames, and resource mobilisation planning.

It went well beyond writing proposals — into helping teams think strategically about where the organisation wants to go and how fundraising supports that journey. It was also about confidence: developing fundraisers who can tell the organisation’s story clearly, read the funding landscape, and build relationships that outlast individual grants.

The Reality Many Organisations Navigate

PHIA was candid about challenges common across the sector: limited core institutional funding, growing compliance requirements, and small teams stretched across programmes, governance, donor reporting, legal compliance, communication, fundraising, data management, and monitoring — often with very limited resources.

Climate change adds another layer. Communities are already living through environmental shifts, yet many organisations are still building their own understanding of climate concepts and how they intersect with existing programmes. That’s exactly why institutional strengthening matters — not as separate from development work, but as what allows it to continue.

Taking that seriously, PHIA is now using its own organisational diagnostic to shape its next round of capacity-building, this time on fundraising, communications, and data management.

What Sustains Impact?

One reflection from Mr. Topno captures the heart of the GROW+ approach: “Projects are the means through which organisational goals are translated into action. But what truly sustains impact is the strength of the institution delivering that work.”

Projects begin and end. Communities remain — and so do the institutions working alongside them. When funders invest in organisational capacity, they let nonprofits think beyond immediate deliverables, strengthening leadership, systems, and adaptive capacity, and building organisations that are more resilient, accountable, and prepared for changing realities. For PHIA, that’s supported a gradual shift from short-term interventions towards more sustained, systems-oriented engagement with communities.

Institutional Strengthening is Climate Action

At the heart of GROW+ is the idea that climate change isn’t only an environmental challenge — it’s an institutional one. As climate variability increases, communities will keep looking to local organisations for support, information, advocacy, and leadership. Those organisations need strong systems, capable teams, financial resilience, and the ability to adapt. Strengthening those capacities isn’t separate from climate action. It is climate action.

Looking Ahead

Reflecting on the journey, Mr. Topno shared his gratitude for a model that invests not only in programmes, but in the organisations behind them: “This kind of support is unique because it invests in organisational development. It helps organisations become stronger, reach more communities, work across larger geographies, and create deeper impact around climate action and adaptation.”

PHIA’s experience echoes a broader truth behind GROW+: resilience isn’t built only in farms, forests, or villages. It’s also built in finance systems, HR policies, learning spaces, and leadership teams willing to keep evolving. Because when institutions grow stronger, communities are better equipped to face whatever comes next.

Watch the team share their journey, insights, and learnings:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/the-grow-fund_growplus-growforward-thegrowfund-activity-7482411104317538306-wP6v?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACRJioYBKSA-iFU1ZPZKL1rWRmovL2yW63M

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GROW+ | How Capacity-Building Support Strengthened GRAVIS and Its Desert Landscape Partners

In the Thar, climate change isn’t an abstract idea — it’s an unpredictable monsoon, a water tank that doesn’t fill, a livelihood that no longer holds. Responding to that takes more than technical fixes; it takes organisations strong enough to read risk, learn from evidence, raise resources, and keep adapting. That’s the institutional strengthening GROW+ set out to support — and for Gramin Vikas Vigyan Samiti (GRAVIS), anchor of the desert landscape, that support has reached both its own systems and the 16 partner NGOs working alongside it.

Starting with the Fundamentals

GRAVIS’s journey with GROW+ began with the basics: through The HUB, GROW+'s learning platform, teams engaged with courses on HR, finance, and technology, alongside expert-led sessions shaped by GRAVIS’s own organisational assessment. It gave the team space to strengthen the systems that often get pushed aside in day-to-day programme delivery.

As Ms. Leena Chauhan, Project Coordinator at GRAVIS, puts it: “These capacities require continuous upgrade to match the pace of evolving project needs and expectations. We look forward to funders investing in these capacities to enhance project delivery and sustainability.”

Building a Culture of Evidence

With that support, GRAVIS extended the learning outward, hosting a monitoring and evaluation workshop for 40 participants from 15 partner organisations — covering theories of change, results frameworks, M&E plans, and ethical data collection. The benefit went beyond compliance: partners came away better equipped to track what’s actually changing on the ground and use that evidence to sharpen their own programmes.

Mr. Rajendra Kumar, Project Coordinator at GRAVIS, connects this directly to organisational resilience: “Through this investment and capacity-building sessions, the challenges related to data management, grant management, documentation, visibility, etc. can be minimised when teams are well trained. Investing in capacities builds resilience.”

Localising Climate Adaptation

Around World Environment Day, a GROW±supported workshop on climate impact and community-led local adaptation brought 16 partner NGOs together, translating global climate trends into vulnerability mapping and adaptation plans specific to Rajasthan. The takeaway was concrete: climate risk looks different even within the same state, so adaptation planning has to start from what each organisation sees in its own communities, not a generic template.

Strengthening the Resource Base

A related session on resource mobilisation and partnerships, again reaching 16 partners, worked through donor mapping, pitching, budgeting, and storytelling. For organisations used to chasing the next proposal cycle, it opened up a longer-term way of thinking about financial resilience and the partnerships needed to sustain field work well beyond a single grant.

Telling the Story Well

A GROW±supported Communications Training for GRAVIS’s own office and field staff covered report writing, case studies, social media content, and branding — skills that showed results almost immediately. Ms. Krishna Joshi, Project Assistant at GRAVIS, shared: “After communications training, our team has effectively improved the quality of field photographs, capturing impactful visuals from diverse angles. These trainings are practical, and we are already seeing their benefits in our daily work.”

Learning Across the Landscape

A two-day training on sustainable water and land interventions rounded things out, bringing partners together to work through field challenges, stakeholder mapping, and engagement with local governance and research institutions — the relationship-building that makes any technical solution easier to sustain.

What This Support Has Meant

Taken together, these interventions show what GROW+'s support has made possible: an anchor organisation strengthening its own systems while extending that same capacity to the wider network it leads. GRAVIS didn’t just receive training — it was equipped to pass that learning on, turning individual workshops into a shared foundation across 16 organisations working in one of India’s most demanding landscapes.

That’s the value of this kind of institutional investment. Stronger monitoring means better evidence. Stronger resource mobilisation means longer-lasting programmes. Stronger communication means field knowledge doesn’t stay buried in one notebook. And a stronger GRAVIS means a stronger cluster of NGOs, better equipped to help desert communities adapt to a changing climate, together.

Watch the team share their journey, insights, and learnings:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/the-grow-fund_growplus-gravis-communityresilience-activity-7495751252555808768-8__1?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACRJioYBKSA-iFU1ZPZKL1rWRmovL2yW63M

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What Jodhpur Made Visible: Building Resilience Beyond the Project

There is a particular kind of honesty that emerges when people who work closely with communities are given the time and space to stop presenting and start talking.

That was the spirit of the second GROW+ convening in Jodhpur.

Over two days, 34 civil-society organisations from the Desert Landscape and Peninsular Plateau came together, with Gramin Vikas Vigyan Samiti (GRAVIS) and Partnering Hope Into Acton (PHIA) Foundation as landscape Anchors. The two newest Anchors—Seven Sisters Development Assistance (SeSTA) for the Himalayan Mountains and Jan Sahas for the Northern Plains—also joined the convening to experience the approach before hosting their own. With EdelGive Foundation and Social Lens joining on Day Two, more than 80 people became part of the conversation.

But the numbers tell only part of the story. The more important shift was from asking what projects are being implemented to asking whether those projects still make sense in the realities communities are living through.

Starting where Ranchi left off

Jodhpur continued a conversation that began at the first GROW+ convening in Ranchi, Jharkhand in Feb 2026.

Partners had previously identified a familiar set of pressures: uncertain rainfall, declining groundwater, migration, debt and weakening community institutions. They also recognised a parallel set of pressures inside organisations—short funding cycles, staff turnover, documentation challenges, digital gaps and the constant demands of compliance.

In Jodhpur, these two sides were brought together. The opening expectation-mapping exercise showed that partners were looking for practical climate knowledge, opportunities to learn from one another, stronger organisational systems, clarity on the GROW+ journey and better ways of capturing evidence. The day that followed was designed around those needs.

A Baithak that began with what people actually live through

Instead of starting with presentations, Day One moved through three rounds of Baithak conversations. The first looked at communities and place. Across different regions, climate stress appeared in very different forms. In some places it meant shrinking water sources and uncertain farming. Elsewhere it meant mining, unsafe labour, forest degradation or disappearing livelihood options. In Santhal Pargana, summer water shortages can translate into long walks for women and girls. In rural Jodhpur, erratic rainfall affects crops while migration increases the work left behind for women.

What became clear was that adaptation is rarely a clean or easy choice. Families may migrate because farming no longer provides enough income. Children may leave school to contribute to household earnings. Livestock may be sold when water becomes scarce. People may accept unsafe work because immediate income matters more than long-term health. These choices can look very different from the outside.

One story from Madhaiya in Palamu brought another possibility into focus. MSUS shared how 132 of 140 households that had previously migrated each year chose to stay and cultivate maize, restore a community water structure and harvest rainwater. The effort expanded into a seed-ball campaign involving 55 other villages, with women playing an active role.

The message was not that migration or vulnerability can be solved through one intervention. It was that communities already possess knowledge, institutions and ideas that can become the starting point for change.

Then the questions came closer to home

The second Baithak asked organisations to examine their own programmes.

Were project timelines aligned with agricultural seasons? Did meetings account for women’s care responsibilities? Did programmes assume that everyone had identity documents, bank accounts, smartphones or easy access to government offices? Were budgets realistic about what field implementation actually costs?

The answers exposed a familiar gap between a programme on paper and life on the ground.

Partners identified changes they wanted to make: bringing climate risk into programme design from the beginning; involving communities in setting timelines; allowing greater flexibility in budgets and implementation; connecting climate work with livelihoods, education and gender; strengthening staff skills in climate, data and MEL; and investing in systems, technology and fundraising capacity.

The third Baithak asked perhaps the most constructive question: what can we share with each other? Partners mapped their own areas of experience—from water conservation, natural farming and farmer learning to forest rights, biodiversity, gender justice, youth engagement, disability inclusion, government convergence and organisational development.

The idea was simple: knowledge should travel across the network rather than remain inside individual organisations.

From conversations to capabilities

Day Two moved from reflection to practical organisational strengthening.

A financial reporting and analysis session led by Aria Advisory used a fictional organisation to demonstrate how budgets, actual expenditure and grant utilisation need to be read together. Participants worked through variances and projections, while discussing a concept often overlooked in project budgets: the true cost of delivering good work, including finance, administration, MEL, communications and governance.

The launch of the GROW+ HUB added a longer-term dimension. The digital learning platform gives partners access to self-paced learning through a progression from assessing needs to applying knowledge and strengthening organisational practice. It is intended to make capacity building part of everyday organisational life, rather than something that happens only during workshops.

The Pyramid Updates showed this approach taking shape. GRAVIS spoke about deeper thematic capacity, stronger desert networks, water harvesting, natural farming and leadership by women and youth. PHIA highlighted technical collaboration between partners, collective fundraising and its SAARTHI Just Transition Network. SeSTA and Jan Sahas brought the perspective of new Anchors preparing to carry the model into two more landscapes.

Keeping leadership in the conversation

An open dialogue with EdelGive Foundation CEO Ms. Naghma Mulla became a particularly candid part of the day.

Participants explored why GROW+ has been intentionally adaptive, and how solutions can emerge from the realities and priorities identified by partners themselves. The conversation touched on climate justice, indigenous knowledge, organisational sustainability, governance, funding diversification and the conditions needed for women and young people to participate and lead meaningfully.

The underlying question was not simply how organisations can become stronger, but what kind of organisations are needed for communities to become more resilient?

One network, many landscapes

The final plenary brought the four Anchors and Social Lens together to explore that question.

The discussion ranged from the underfunding of climate action in desert regions and the need for decentralised finance, to community ownership of data, organisational learning and leadership development. SeSTA also offered an important caution for the Anchor model: the relationship should create bridges between organisations, not another hierarchy.
That idea captured much of what Jodhpur had surfaced. GROW+ is beginning to function less like a collection of separate projects and more like a space where organisations can learn from one another, question established ways of working and build capabilities together.

The next challenge is to carry that spirit beyond the convening—to turn the peer directory into active exchange, financial learning into regular practice, and candid conversations into changes in organisational systems.

Jodhpur did not offer a single answer to climate resilience. It did something more useful: it created a room where communities, programmes and organisations could be looked at together—and where the network could begin asking not only how to respond to a changing climate, but how to become better equipped to respond to whatever comes next.

Watch the Jodhpur convening and field immersion

Read the full convening and field visit reports

[Bipin]

GROW+ Field Visit to Ramdevpura and Bhakhri Village, Jodhpur

On 30 July 2026, a delegation of philanthropists, corporate CSR teams, Anchor organisations and GROW+ stakeholders spent a day with communities in Ramdevpura and Bhakhri in the Jodhpur region. The visit offered an opportunity to see how communities in this arid landscape are responding to water stress, erratic rainfall and changing agricultural conditions, and how local institutions are helping these efforts grow.

The visit was facilitated by Gramin Vikas Vigyan Samiti (GRAVIS), GROW+’s Anchor organisation for the desert landscape, along with its network partner Vasundhara Seva Samiti (VSS).

Ramdevpura: Water, farming and one household’s experiment

The morning began in Ramdevpura, a village of around 201 families and approximately 1,206 people. The village experiences high temperatures, low and erratic rainfall, recurring drought and saline groundwater.

The first stop was the home of Anoparam ji and Pushpa Devi, where the group saw an Arid Horticulture Unit (AHU) developed with support from VSS. The land was initially considered unsuitable for horticulture because of poor soil moisture and low organic matter. Today, the plot has around 105 drought-resistant fruit and fodder trees, including ber, amla, gundi, lasora, lemon, moringa and khejri. The family is also experimenting with mango.

The orchard now provides food for the household as well as an additional source of income. According to the family, earnings can reach close to ₹1 lakh in a good year and are around ₹50,000 in an average year. Produce is sold in Kalyanpur, Jodhpur and Barmer, while some is used at home. The orchard also showed how closely farming here is tied to water availability.

A taanka that supports the household

The family’s 30,000-litre taanka, a traditional underground rainwater harvesting structure, collects rainwater through a catchment system and is used for drinking water, livestock and the horticulture plot.

The taanka has supported the household for three generations. But the demand on the stored water has changed. Pushpa Devi shared that water which earlier lasted almost the entire year now lasts around two months, following the addition of a bathroom and toilet. There is no piped water connection to the house, so any shortfall has to be brought in separately.

The group also saw a traditional Kanara/Kothi, used to store grain and seeds through the year. Made from locally available straw, cow dung and clay, it protects stored grain from insects, rodents and moisture.

These practices remain part of everyday life in the village and show how communities have developed ways of managing limited resources using materials and knowledge available locally.

From households to the Village Development Committee

The visit then moved from the household to the Village Development Committee (VDC), which acts as a platform for community decision-making and collective action.

Community members spoke about the VDC’s role in supporting taankas, horticulture units, khadin work and the use of locally prepared compost. The committee has also helped build a Gram Kosh, which has grown to nearly ₹13 lakh.

The fund is used for community needs such as renovating the common hall, restoring the village pond and supporting community events. The village has also been discussing the financial burden associated with some traditional social customs. Money that would earlier have been spent on elaborate post-death feasts is now being channelled into the community fund.

At a larger level, VSS’s work across the villages has contributed to the construction of around 3,200 taankas, 180 community ponds, restoration of 50 wells and ground-level reservoirs, and plantation of 12,000 trees.

Women’s perspectives on a changing landscape

A separate conversation with women from the village brought out another side of the challenges faced here.

Pauchi Devi, 70, spoke about continuing to walk around two kilometres for water and about how rainfall has become increasingly difficult to predict. Lacchi Devi spoke about taking up daily wage and NREGA work when crops fail. Kiran Devi, 25, spoke about her studies, her work as a yoga instructor and the difficulties of following traditional veiling practices in the heat.

The women also spoke about their role in farming. Sowing, weeding, harvesting, processing and grading are all part of their work, even though much of this labour remains less visible once produce reaches the market.

Bhakhri: Building collective systems around farming

By afternoon, the group had reached Bhakhri, where the conversation moved towards farmer collectives, seed management and women-led enterprises.

Farmers spoke about the changes they have seen in water availability. Traditional systems of diverting surface water have increasingly given way to tubewells, drip irrigation and sprinklers as groundwater levels have fallen.

This year’s delayed monsoon had added to the pressure. Rain arrived only in the last week of July and remained below the seasonal average. Farmers reported that borewells that earlier reached water at around 20–30 pipe-lengths now sometimes need to go down to around 40.

The group then visited the community seed bank, where cumin seed is stored with ash and neem in sealed mud pots. One pot held around 70 kg of seed. Farmers access the seed at the cost of grading and storage and return twice the quantity after harvest, allowing the seed bank to continue operating each season.

From FIGs to an FPO

The seed bank is part of a wider network of Farmer Interest Groups (FIGs). Around 20–25 FIGs operate in the Osian cluster around Bhakhri, with another 25–30 in Phalodi.

The groups provide a simple form of collective support. Farmers can turn to other members when they need seed, labour or information, rather than having to look outside the community for every requirement.

These groups have also contributed to the growth of the Harimala Farmer Producer Organisation (FPO), which now has around 500 members, up from 250. The FPO mainly trades in groundnut, cumin and wheat and allows farmers to sell collectively.

Each member contributed around ₹1,000 when the FPO was formed. Over time, member contributions and trading margins have helped build a reserve of approximately ₹5 lakh, including to meet statutory audit costs.

Women building their own enterprises

The final interaction was with women from Self-Help Groups (SHGs), who spoke about running tailoring units, flour mills, dairy activities and small businesses.

One SHG has grown from members contributing ₹30 a month to a loan pool of ₹5 lakh. Members borrow from the group at around 1% a month and use the money to run or expand their enterprises. Members reported monthly incomes of around ₹5,000–8,000 from their respective activities.

The interaction also brought out the growing confidence among women to speak about their businesses, incomes and role in community life.

What the visit brought together

By the end of the day, participants had seen several layers of community action — from a household taanka and orchard to a Village Development Committee, seed bank, FIGs, FPO and SHGs.

The closing discussion brought together more than 30 participants from different organisations. A common reflection was that communities already have considerable knowledge of their local challenges and have developed their own ways of responding to them. What is often needed is sustained institutional support to strengthen and expand these efforts.

For GROW+, the visit was an opportunity to see this progression on the ground. A household-level response to water scarcity can influence others in the village. Community groups can build systems that continue beyond an individual project. Farmer groups can come together to create larger institutions. Women can use collective savings to build their own enterprises.

The experiences of Ramdevpura and Bhakhri offered a close look at this process and at the work of VSS and GRAVIS in supporting communities and institutions over the long term.

Read the full convening and field visit reports here

[Bipin]

GROW+ | Jan Sahas: Connecting Climate Resilience with Dignity, Livelihoods and Stronger Institutions

As part of GROW+, Jan Sahas Foundation will anchor a network of grassroots organisations in the Northern Plains, bringing its experience in worker rights, social protection and institutional strengthening to the programme. Founded in 2014, Jan Sahas grew out of a grassroots movement in Madhya Pradesh and now works across 13 states and 68 districts. Its work centres on ensuring that people facing barriers to safety, dignity and opportunity have the support and resources to shape their own futures.

Jan Sahas has worked with communities affected by caste-based discrimination, unsafe working conditions, violence and insecure livelihoods. Its efforts to address manual scavenging and support people engaged in the practice have helped more than 45,000 people move towards safer and more dignified lives. This experience has shaped an approach that looks beyond immediate needs to the wider social and economic conditions that leave people vulnerable.

Climate change adds another layer to these challenges, particularly for informal and migrant workers who depend on daily wages, outdoor work and seasonal employment. Extreme heat can make working conditions unsafe, while erratic rainfall, droughts and floods can affect agricultural incomes and push households to migrate in search of work. These disruptions can mean lost wages, health risks and limited access to housing and social protection.

Jan Sahas has been examining these links through its work with the Migrants Resilience Collaborative (MRC), which it co-founded in 2020 in response to the hardships faced by migrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. MRC brings together civil society organisations, funders, industry and government to improve access to social protection and make support systems more responsive to migrant workers’ needs.

Jan Sahas’s climate-resilience interventions across more than 15 cities include work on climate-risk insurance, cooling facilities and improved housing conditions. The organisation reports reaching more than 40,000 workers through climate-resilience interventions and more than 17,000 through climate insurance schemes. Through MRC, it also works to connect workers with government entitlements and social protection.

But effective responses to these challenges also depend on the strength of the organisations working closest to communities. Many grassroots civil society organisations have deep local knowledge and trusted relationships, yet need support with governance, financial management, compliance, leadership development and fundraising to sustain their work.

Jan Sahas established the Grassroots Resilience Institute (GRI) in 2022 to address this need. Through tailored institutional development partnerships extending over 36 months, GRI has supported more than 300 grassroots civil society organisations. The work includes strengthening governance and financial systems, developing leadership, improving fundraising capabilities and creating opportunities for organisations to learn from one another. GRI-supported organisations have collectively reached nearly 3.5 million people.

This understanding of organisational development was also reflected in Jan Sahas’s participation in the second GROW+ convening in Jodhpur in July 2026. The convening brought together 34 civil society partners from the Desert Landscape and the Peninsular Plateau, alongside the network’s newest Anchors, SeSTA and Jan Sahas, who joined to experience the format before hosting their own convenings. Reflecting on her first experience, Dr. Swati Jha described the feeling as “confidence”. She emphasised that organisational development is a continuous process, involving not just systems and processes but also leadership, culture and the ability to learn and adapt through uncertainty.

That perspective is central to the work ahead. Community participation is also an important part of Jan Sahas’s approach: more than 80% of its staff come from the communities it serves, supported by a network of around 4,000 community volunteers. These relationships help the organisation understand local priorities and connect people with information, services and support.

As a GROW+ Anchor, Jan Sahas proposes to work with grassroots partner organisations in the Northern Plains. The focus will be on strengthening their institutional foundations, encouraging peer learning and building connections between organisations working with communities facing climate-related and livelihood challenges. GROW+ offers a space for partners to learn from one another while retaining the local relationships and knowledge that make their work relevant.

Jan Sahas brings to GROW+ an understanding that climate resilience is closely linked to dignity, secure livelihoods, access to social protection and the strength of grassroots institutions. Its experience, alongside the learning shared through the network, will contribute to building organisations and communities better equipped to navigate change and shape their own futures.