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