Our partnership with the InterGlobe Foundation (IGF) is co-creating a 10-year strategic roadmap to guide its CSR investments toward sustained, high-impact outcomes. Anchored in procedural humility, the process centres on deep listening to communities and local stakeholders to surface priorities that reflect lived realities. This co-creation ensures interventions are contextually grounded and community-led. The roadmap identifies areas where patient, long-term capital can unlock transformative social impact across themes like heritage conservation, environmental stewardship, and livelihood resilience.

In collaboration with the HT Parekh Foundation, we conducted in-depth city-level studies to formulate impact investment strategies for urban India. Focusing on heat resilience, waste management, and water systems, our approach combined infrastructure readiness assessments, governance analysis, and community vulnerability mapping. This multi-faceted evaluation identified where philanthropic capital could be most catalytic, particularly in underserved and high-risk urban zones, guiding investments toward high social return and equitable development.

Innovation scaling requires a radical departure from traditional models. Through the Community-Led Innovation Partnership (CLIP), we championed an approach rooted in the agency and aspirations of communities themselves. Moving beyond mere geographic expansion, we co-designed a framework defining scale from a community perspective: as impact depth, ownership transfer, and systemic embedding. This was supported by nine practical scaling attributes, hands-on tools, and training modules to help local actors sustain change. The strategies were successfully applied and tested with partners like CDP in the Philippines, YEU in Indonesia, CAFOD in South Sudan, and ASECSA in Guatemala.

The aim of this project was to provide government officials training on climate change issues, adaptation needs and possibilities. The broad themes for this capacity building included impacts on water resources, agriculture and human health, as well as disaster risk reduction (DRR) and mitigation strategies.

This project aimed to assess the vulnerability of cities and communities to complex disasters in the face of climate change. The project adopted a bottom-up approach focusing on multiple stakeholders at all levels including government officials, PRI representatives, schoolteachers, and community members.

This action research explored the improvement of system efficiency through community actions and frontline health worker effectiveness during COVID in NE India. Nudges that improve catalytic actions in small ways can improve outcomes significantly. The findings of the project showed ways to create high levels of social impact in community resilience through strategic actions.

The Virtual Cadre is a unique and effective governance mechanism in Kerala wherein identified office-bearers across state departments constitute a multi-sectoral team of disaster managers. This ensures better inter-departmental coordination, which has been an elusive goal of disaster management approaches. The focus was on training and capacity building of the Virtual Cadre.

Extreme heat disproportionately affects urban low-income families. Cities are hotter than the countryside, and slums are hotter than other parts of cities. The project demonstrated how women can mobilize, understand weather risks and lead frugal interventions such as cool roofs and street shading that are easily adopted, making their spaces safer from heat-related risks.

Weather warnings and climate forecasts are usually too complex for end users such as farmers and citizens to fully understand and act upon. Additionally, information is often received from weather stations far away. This project targeted the collection and analysis of local weather data, improving both the understanding of risks and the actions that should be taken as a result.