Sense of The House (Focus Area) : Updates

Introduction and background :

One of the pillars of how we’re seeing the change needed in problem solving the community’s ownership of the place through tracking its assets, resources, incomes, livelihoods, local economy, waste, etc. These need to be understood in terms that the community understands, is able to baseline and track over time, and benchmark against other examples in the region. Indeed, these indicators must form the basis for understanding gaps and needs, as well as for reporting as aggregates at higher levels of governance or public problem solving by CSOs and philanthropy - always with an eye on what happens to the place and community as a result of the actions. As communities understand this better, it’s imperative that the idea of driving interventions transition to responding to realized needs instead, and the effort go into helping the process of arriving at the indicators, the gaps and needs better, and then to understand the solutions in terms of the trade-offs made.

We believe that biodiversity and the ecology will win as communities start taking charge of their places better, and make better trade-offs biased a little more towards the longer term.

We believe the best folks to drive this change with communities everywhere are changemakers embedded in and with the communities - both individual and orgs. Many of our partner orgs and fellowship networks have a lot of social capital built through long term efforts and interactions in the communities they work with, and are exploring this direction in their own ways. We soon intend to meet together and exchange notes on the process, the learnings so we can collectively see more of this happening and be able to respond to the needs at scale.

Stay tuned for updates, and pitch in if you’re aware of good examples of this.