Grassroots initiatives nurture community resilience

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

The most marginalized communities across India have demonstrated this truth articulated by American anthropologist Margaret Mead through their timely and effective grassroots responses to the coronavirus crisis and the ensuing nationwide lockdown.

From making sure rations reached the families who needed them most to providing emotional support to one another at this time of global uncertainty, community leaders in India immediately activated local systems to ensure effective emergency responses around the country.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC), a non-government organization (NGO) that focuses on empowering urban poor communities, tapped a decentralized network of poor women’s collectives, called Mahila Milan (Women together), and its members to help identify families in urgent need of rations in Mumbai, India’s most populous city.

Mahila Milan’s network, which manages credit and savings activities in their Mumbai communities, came up with the framework to determine who should be prioritized in ration distribution while SPARC provided the linkage between the donated rations and its ultimate beneficiaries. Priority was given to older couples with no earning children, households headed by single women, and families who has a member with a chronic illness.

“When it comes to taking local actions, the local knowledge of community members matters the most because it is seasoned over time. Outsiders are unlikely to make good judgments and are temporary entrants who do not need to commit to local issues,” said Vinod Kumar Rao, an urban poverty alleviation consultant at SPARC. “Trust here matters the most, because what is categorized as vulnerable locally may not be the same as the definition of vulnerability for an outsider.”

Across India, non-government organizations like SPARC work closely with community members to train and mobilize them into groups that will spearhead local efforts to respond to specific issues confronting their communities. Organized community groups are local actors best positioned to serve their communities, leveraging their strong relationships with other locals, their nuanced, firsthand understanding and informal data on the pertinent issues within their community, and their informal authority and leadership capacity.

Community-led response to the coronavirus pandemic coupled with capacity-building provided by nonprofits or other training organizations has demonstrated that investing in social protection (e.g., child safety, sustainability, financial literacy) helps build resilience across a range of issues in the community.

“We must stress letting local communities decide priorities, modes of action, etc. The role of our external assistance is to provide communities with the tools they need, liaise where necessary, and ultimately let local action take its course,” said Rao.

Non-profit Pratham knows this too well. It began with a mission to ensure quality education for children in low-income marginalized groups across the country. Over the last few decades, the learning intervention has been run by thousands of local volunteers.

When the country was put under lockdown on March 25, active networks of volunteers were perfectly positioned to take on relief work. They worked closely with ward officials to distribute close to 1.9 million meals to families in need in 15 settlements across Mumbai. Armed with a deep understanding of the community, they were able to identify and reach otherwise “invisible” groups such as persons with visual disability, transgender people, and homeless individuals.

Feedback from these community volunteers, who were familiar with the situation of out-of-school children – who often live in stressful situations and turbulent family settings – enabled Pratham to provide this vulnerable sector with educational materials such as digital learning tools and worksheets, helping parents provide home-based learning for their children.

Meanwhile, the Mamidipudi Venkatarangaiya (MV) Foundation, an organization that works to ensure that every child is enrolled in school and not engaged in child labor, also organized community members in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Bihar into units called a Child Rights Protection Forum (CRPF). The CRPFs were initially tasked to take a public stand against child labor in their localities, and lead advocacy efforts and local government engagements to identify the needs of the children in the community.

When the pandemic struck, CRPFs in 50 locations in Hyderabad city in south-central India initiated conversations with local government officials to waive the ration card requirement so families in need can access emergency relief. The community members created a tiered set of criteria to determine which families should receive rations directly from the MV Foundation. Such prioritization of needs by the community allowed the Foundation to work with a funder to secure additional resources to provide food to 2,000 families for two months.

“We like to think of ourselves as the thread in a garland of flowers,” Venkat Reddy, the Foundation’s National Convener, said on the role of the nonprofit.

“The community members are the petals — their efforts blossom to keep children safe. Our role is to provide a container, help them band together, and support them to thrive,” he added.

To support members of the CRPFs in their move to convince local officials to waive the ration card requirement, MV Foundation staff helped schedule appointments and ensure that visiting community members were treated with dignity and respect. Through this process, they built value for the community volunteer worker among government stakeholders.

“They have the information, much richer information than we do,” said Reddy. “As an NGO, we have to make sure the government is ready to hear what’s going wrong directly from those whom it impacts the most.”

At Aangan Trust, women volunteers who received training in preventing serious child harm became barefoot child safety workers in their communities in the eastern states of Bihar, West Bengal, and Jharkhand; the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan; and Maharashtra in the country’s western region. They work with families and train them to identify early warning signs of child harm; liaise with local officials to ensure that they are activated in case the harm does occur; and work directly with children to ensure that they do not fall victim to hazardous labor, trafficking, child marriage, or sexual abuse.

“Some of the most vulnerable women in these communities compiled lists and presented them to us, saying ‘These are the most vulnerable families in this area,’” Aangan Trust Executive Director Atiya Bose said. “Despite their own level of need, they were keenly aware of which families’ children faced a higher risk than they themselves did.”

Community women volunteers compile family-level, hyperlocal data on potential risks faced by children in each community. They used this database to steer rations during the lockdown. The volunteers also organized themselves into informal “women’s circles” via WhatsApp to alert one another to potential cases of domestic violence in their neighborhoods. Then they utilized the community-based conflict resolution practices that they learned to defuse potentially unsafe situations. The volunteers’ efficient response allowed Aangan Trust to raise flexible funds to support 11,000 families with immediate relief.

Across the country, community groups step up and use their deep knowledge of their neighborhoods and understanding of risk trends to help nonprofits and government agencies identify prioritize actions. Non-profit organizations, on the other hand, provide flexible funding to respond to the most urgent priorities identified by communities.

Governments would do well to invest in supporting local leaders who know their communities best and have the relationships required to respond quickly and effectively to crisis.  ● 

Ratna Gill is a student at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She was formerly the Head of Communications and Advocacy at Aangan, a nonprofit committed to preventing child harm in India. Prior to this, she worked at Living Cities, a strategic philanthropy focused on creating opportunity for people of color in the United States. Ratna completed her B.A. at Harvard College, where she studied Economics and Latin.

Suparna Gupta founded Aangan in 2002 to influence India’s child welfare policy and build child protection systems for the most marginalized. She earned a Master in Public Administration degree from Harvard Kennedy School as an Edward S. Mason Fellow. She was selected as a Fellow by Harvard’s Ash Centre for Democratic Governance and Innovation in 2012, was named an Asia Society Young 21 Leader in 2011, and has been an Ashoka Fellow since 2009.