Reap Benefit’s Post

It's always amazing to work with children, their energy and enthusiasm always leave you feeling a little more accomplished in life! One of the programs being run by Reap Benefit is facilitating the Solve Ninja - Changemaker League supported by Target - where we are aiming to activate 21st-century skills in 2500 students across government schools in Bangalore by nudging them to take local civic and climate problem-solving actions through mentoring and online engagement. A small snapshot of students coming up with inspired actions - from filling up potholes to prevent accidents to fundraising to buy and fix community taps to save water! No action is too small - every small step makes a great big change in the mindsets of everyone around these students. Our program so far tabulates that 62% of the 1400-odd students enrolled have taken at least one hyper-local action on policy, campaign, and civic and climate issues. Be inspired guys!! Kudos to our mentors Subhani m n | Nirmala Naik and the RB team tagging some of them here Pooja Pawar | D. Chandrika | Kuldeep Dantewadia

The world needs more women leaders. For true compassion in social & civic solutions; and to abolish patriarchy, which normalizes denial of the agency for girls to take independent decisions. Our nonprofit KickOff Solutions attempts to partner with grassroots nonprofits to enable lesser-privileged girls & women as they overcome adversity, while refusing to give up on their love for sports and on education & career dreams. They inspire as role models, but do need allies along rough life journeys without resources or guidance. Besides a scholarship and skilling & mentoring support, we arm these girls with computers to bridge a common technology access gap, and offer a Design Thinking program with Reap Benefit - a workshop for leading civic change experiments, exposure to mentors & changemaker communities, and a seed capital for changemaker projects. Our first seed capital winners are Durga (from One All) who's been driving signature campaigns for municipality clean-ups to fight plastic waste on a beach where she plays Ultimate Frisbee, and is now creating community awareness for behaviour change; and Kajal (from Yuwa India) who started a mixed gender football team in a remote village near where she herself benefited from the game, promoting respect among genders and collaboration on projects to eliminate climate-change practices like garbage burning. On International Girl Child Day and Durga Ashtami, we salute the spirit of girl leaders redefining norms. And thank our sponsor for girls' computers this year and the changemaker seed capital fund, Shashank Sahni, a Google leader and passionate mountaineer who literally scales new peaks each year. He started the “Dr Sahni Memorial Fund” in honour of his late father who used to stand up for the cause of girls' education. Quoting Shashank: “I believe it takes one spark to light change & catalyze progress, and a pat on the back & a few words of encouragement to create belief in those fighting societal pressures, archaic systems, & deep regressive beliefs to fight for change. There are many examples of women leaders leading change against all odds, and that's inspiring and humbling as I question our role in making our world a progressive, safe & inclusive space for all.  I’m inspired by movements by women such as the Chipko movement that saves trees or the work by Medha Patkar for tribal & dalit rights. KickOff Solutions’ work to identify change agents among young girl role models is exemplary and has the potential to  create a multiplier effect of change that we need. This fund is an attempt to support that vision. Please think about this and connect with KickOff Solutions or me if you’d like to help.” We need more Kajals and Durgas, and also more Shashanks who step up to enable the change we want to see by standing alongside brave girl leaders. Contact us at https://lnkd.in/gXxYtwJy to give for a cause like Shashank did. Or just join a social impact movement you’d feel proud to be a part of.

✨Join Us for a Webinar on Community Engagement in our Cities! ✨ 🗓️ Date: October 18, 2024 ⏰ Time: 5:00 - 6:00 PM IST We are thrilled to announce an insightful webinar on Community Engagement in our Cities. Join us as our experts explore the diverse groups that fall under the term ‘community,’ and discuss why involving people in decision-making is essential, how community engagement connects with effective governance, and the systemic challenges that can arise in the process. Speakers: 🎤 Sarah Misra - Chief Operations Officer, Reap Benefit 🎤 Santosh Nargund- Head, Participatory Governance, Janaagraha Moderator: 🎙️Siddharth Pandit ,CEO, Urban Collective Action Network (U-CAN) Don't miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights and connect with professionals in the field of community engagement in urban spaces. Register now: https://lnkd.in/gJudatbk We look forward to seeing you there! #UrbanDevelopment #Governance #Webinar #Communityengagement #UCAN

Climate Change is Here: Citizens and Governance Must Act Together 🌍 The recent Chennai Air Show was a stunning display, but it also exposed a painful truth. Five lives were tragically lost due to extreme heat and overcrowding. Climate change is no longer a distant issue—it’s impacting us now, and lives are at stake. At Reap Benefit, we know that responsible governance must be built on the foundation of responsible citizens. It’s through activating the agency of youth that we see real progress. Solve Ninjas in Karnataka used technology to map water contamination and worked with local authorities to secure clean drinking water for their community . This kind of collaboration is how we tackle the growing climate crisis. We must act now. As the saying goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” Let’s build climate resilience together, through citizen action and governance that listens. #ClimateAction #YouthAgency #ResponsibleGovernance #CivicTech

Attending events like UNGA brings mixed feelings—curiosity, criticality, and contradictions. Here’s my journey: The Obsession with Language: Jiddu Krishnamurti wisely said, "Words are important... but if words drive us... then language controls us." And these conferences? They're all about language. It’s a juggling act of terms like decarbonization, mitigation, adaptation, and resilience—buzzwords galore. Now, try translating that into Kannada, Tamil, or Bengali. It’s all nouns and adjectives with little focus on verbs—on action. There’s an unspoken assumption that once the strategy is set, someone else will implement it. Conferences like these don’t like the messy realities of execution. They prefer structures, frameworks, and language to create an illusion of control—ironically, the opposite of how the natural world operates: organic, complex, and beyond our control. COVID showed us that when reality shifts drastically, old frameworks fail, and new paradigms must emerge from the ground up. Yet, these conferences lack authentic spaces for that. Instead, they often leave doers feeling like impostors, widening the gap between the grassroots and top-level strategists. For years, I fell into this trap, driven by fear. But people like Harish Hande, Anshu Gupta, Cherukuri, Tarun still dare to question and challenge, even in a world that warns young entrepreneurs, "don’t burn bridges." The Joy of Community: One undeniable perk of these events is meeting fellow practitioners. Real conversations, banter, and connection without the intellectual façade. Like my chat with Mannat Anand on building a volunteer-based social organization, or the fun of planning a gathering menu with friends like Cherukuri, Tarun, Aniket Doegar, Anshul Tewari and Rohit Kumar or Sanjay Purohit talking about agency+ actions. And of course, meeting the inspiring MJIF fellows thanks to Asha Jadeja. Shout out to Dasra for creating that space. It’s great to see Indian CSOs increasingly collaborating, despite all the criticism they get. The Dilemma: These spaces leave me torn. How do you stay curious and critical at the same time? I haven’t mastered that balance. I constantly remind myself of the privilege I have to be in these rooms—it’s not merit, just privilege. And I need to resist the urge to speak just for the sake of it. Talking is easy; the real challenge is in doing it—one person, one community at a time. Action isn’t trivial; it creates courage and is the real existential answer until then I will explore this journey Ramesh Srinivasan says leadership is inside out Until the next conference, where we’ll privately question its value but publicly sound like "thought leaders." :) P.S - Huge thank you to Natasha Joshi and Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies for the support to organise a collaborative gathering and supporting collaboration in action!