CONTEXT FOR THE PHICUS ENGAGEMENT
The pandemic brought with it unprecedented levels of stress and trauma to individuals and institutions across the board. This further exacerbated the existing challenges faced by vulnerable populations and their institutions, severely impacting their lives and livelihoods.
In this context, Community Action Collaborative (CAC) and MacArthur Foundation, came together to build resilient institutions and leaders from vulnerable populations, specifically including tribals, those indigenised by the virtue of their profession, location and context and those from the above-mentioned groups, who have migrated and forced to take up occupations that are not traditional and in locations and contexts unfamiliar to them.
SHILP-Samruddha Sanstha, a leader and institutional resilience building initiative was crafted and 60 vulnerable population organizations from the CAC network were invited to join this 18-month, capacity building initiative. Phicus was brought on board this partnership as a lead design and implementation partner to see this journey through.
THE COLLABORATION
Phicus, along with CAC, selected 60 community organizations from its pan India network of partners, through a rigorous due diligence process. An institutional baseline was completed for each and a business/work plan facilitated, basis the gaps that emerged in the baseline. A series of capacity building modules were facilitated on a monthly basis to equip the institutions and their leaders, on critical skill areas and institutional processes. Seven regional, language-aligned workshops (2-days each) and a market mela for all the 60 organizations and their parent NGOs were designed and facilitated to enable learning, sharing, networking, showcasing and business transactions.
GOING FORWARD
Through this initiative, we hope to build foundational capacities in these institutions, layering this with resilience building capacities of sense making, building a knowledge base about their specific contexts, building strong social support structures, and providing access to resources that would help them absorb, adapt and transform during and post future crises.
This is a small step that we have taken towards achieving an ambitious goal to make vulnerable populations and their institutions resilient. The journey with these grassroot organizations and communities has helped us deepen our understanding of their realities, their challenges and what it takes to build resilience. And we continue to grow as we help them grow and thrive.
We hope to have many more partners join us on this journey towards building resilience and help us expand our work to many more communities and their institutions!
