Ground Truth: Field Visits As A Learning Tool | Annual Report (FY 2023-24)

We often seek avenues to be co-travellers with our grantee partners – to meet them on their own turf, get a glimpse of their day-to-day life and learn from their field experiences. Field visits provide one such opportunity for us to be a part of their world. Be it that long 4-hour car ride that lets us catch up on life or the lunch with their team that allows us to be privy to some of their little secrets - spending a few days in the field is something we eagerly anticipate.

Since a field visit is not a pre-condition for our grant-making process, we have the flexibility to schedule it during the grant period. This allows us to build a relationship with our partners, understand their work and visit them from a learning lens rather than a monitoring point of view. In many ways, it’s a relationship-strengthening exercise.

Our field notes are a powerful sense-making tool that informs our strategy and grant-making practices. They nudge us to reassess our grant-making approach from both a critical and creative lens – it has primed the questions we ask during our proposal conversations & annual learning reports and has led to the emergence of newer offerings such as capacity-building grants. Field notes provide first-hand accounts of the challenges our partners face, like the lack of funds for organisational development or their efforts to form youth groups in minority localities, and the incredible work they do, such as liaising with Forest Officers or ensuring program influence on state policy.

Looking back at the visits made through the last financial year, here are some highlights that stand out as we connect the dots:

• People power: Activating the agency of people is fundamental to most norm change journeys. Whether it’s CORO INDIA working to change gender norms in low-income settlements in Mumbai or Keystone Foundation working with tribals in Kotagiri, solutions and knowledge reside within communities. These solutions need to be harnessed by ceding space to the affected people and creating an enabling environment for their voices and leadership to emerge.
• Wicked problems defy straightforward answers: Rather than approaching a problem with a specific solution, we advocate for listening, learning, and adapting. This ethos of curiosity over certainty, a value central to RNP, guided us during our visit to Acumen’s Northeast India Collective. The fellows there grapple with balancing cultural preservation among tribals with advancing development (as commonly understood) in the region. A similar conundrum confronts ACCORD- Action for Community Organisation Rehabilitation and Development , where Adivasi youth, now educated and accessing healthcare, migrate to cities for livelihoods, risking the loss of their cultural heritage cherished by previous generations.
• Social change work is hard: Despite challenges, it is deeply gratifying to witness the profound sense of ownership and fulfilment among our partners’ ground teams. A standout experience was our visit to the Zenith Society for Socio-Legal Empowerment in Shivpuri. Its team of all women in Malanpur, despite facing resistance at home to keep their jobs, take immense pride in their work and the opportunities it has afforded them. These intangible transformations, unmeasurable by numbers alone, underscore the value of our field visits.

At our partner, Haiyya ’s Community Organising Festival, Prof. Marshall Ganz of the Kennedy School of Government remarked, “Power cannot be balanced if one party continues to have more of what the other party needs”. Here, he was referring to funds being the cause of the power imbalance that exists between funders and NGOs. Field visits, in our experience, help level this imbalance by revealing that NGO partners possess much more of what funders need!

- Authored by Abhishek Das (Portfolio Lead, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies )