By Sonal Kapoor, Founder & CEO, Protsahan
There is a particular kind of knowledge that gets built when an organisation stays close to communities for years. It does not easily and neatly get packaged as a framework. It is built through repetition, relationships, mistakes, disagreement, and institutional memory. A community worker knows when a girl dropping out of school is not an “education case” but an early warning of marriage, which is a “child rights” case and hence needs to be handled accordingly. A counsellor learns that a mother who appears unwilling to protect her daughter may herself be living with violence, debt and almost no negotiating power inside her home. A field team learns which government functionary will answer the phone after 6 pm when a child needs protection tonight, not after the next review meeting. Organisations like ours and many grassroots feminist groups have, in different ways, shown us that social change work is built as much through this accumulated practice as through formal programme design. At Protsahan too, some of our deepest understanding of trauma, adolescent agency and family systems has come from years of sitting with girls and frontline workers. The challenge begins when organisations grow organically. Knowledge that once lived between people now has to travel across teams, geographies and generations of leadership without losing its politics, context or source.
Growth creates an unusual tension for grassroots organisations. To create holistic impact as they gradually (if they) scale, they need better fool proof systems: stronger governance, budgets, safeguarding protocols, people processes, measurement, technology, second-line workforce and clearer accountability. These are not the enemy of grassroots work. Weak organisations cannot carry audacious missions for very long. But performative professionalisation can quietly become rigid and superficial, and this performance of impact can flatten the rich complexity of innovative solutioning — things that precisely what made the organisation useful in the first place. Years of locally held knowledge can easily get lost as it gets converted into a toolkit whose authorship sits somewhere else. The organisation becomes easier to fund and easier to explain, but sometimes less able to listen and manage complexity of what systems actually need. The real work of institution building, then, is not choosing between heart and systems. It is building systems strong enough to protect the organisation’s values when the founders are no longer in every room, while keeping enough humility in those systems for the field to keep correcting them.
This is also where questions of credit and power become harder. Whose knowledge becomes organisational knowledge? Who gets named as its author? Who remains a “beneficiary”, “field worker” or “participant” while somebody with greater access to English, academia, AI, philanthropy or public platforms becomes the expert explaining what they know? Grassroots organisations are not automatically protected from these hierarchies simply because their missions speak of justice. As organisations grow, power moves inside them too. Seniority, salaries, education, caste, class, language and proximity to funders can begin shaping whose interpretation carries weight. Culture cannot therefore remain a set of values written during an annual retreat. It has to show up in mundane organisational choices: who sits in decision-making rooms, how we disagree, whose knowledge gets cited, whether frontline colleagues can challenge programme design, whether young people can tell us that our intervention is not working, and whether teams can hear uncomfortable evidence contrary to their framework designs. The test of values is rarely what an organisation says when everyone agrees. It is what its systems allow when accountability is being asked of everyone at every level.
Perhaps this is the less glamorous work of scaling that the sector needs to talk about more. Scale is often narrated through numbers: more districts, larger budgets, government partnerships, technology platforms, replication and reach. But another measure matters just as much: whether an organisation can become larger without becoming further away. Can it hold professional rigour without creating a professional class that begins speaking with heavy vocabulary of management? Can it codify grassroots knowledge without appropriating it? Can it build a second-line cadre of leadership without diluting the political and ethical choices on which the work was built? Can a social purpose organisation become financially stronger while retaining the courage to say no to money, partnerships, misfit hires or growth that pull it away from its core values? These are not soft questions about culture. They are questions of organisational architecture. The strongest grassroots organisations may not be those that preserve themselves exactly as they were. They are those that know what must evolve as they grow, what must be questioned repeatedly, and what they are simply unwilling to trade away.