Reap Benefit Roundup

Dear friends,

Hope you, your families and teams continue to be safe. On behalf of the team at Reap Benefit, we would like to wish you a very Happy New Year! Hope 2023 brings in new light, opportunities and adventures. :) As we have wound up another year around the Sun, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to Solve Ninjas and their pursuit of solving small and denting big, our communities who displayed everyday leadership in owning their local neighbourhoods and cheerleaders who have helped us grow the Solve Ninja Movement by leaps and bounds.?

In true Reap Benefit style, the last two months were quite action packed. From signing an MoU with SCERT,Delhi to getting featured in an article by Stanford Social Innovation Review to Hardeep Singh using local data to prevent 10,500 acres of land from stubble burning, the Solve Ninja Movement is moving towards enabling 10 million action-oriented citizens to engage in civic and climate action by 2030.?

Solve Ninja Movement is a unique hyperlocal grassroots movement addressing civic and climate change at a neighbourhood/community level. Using a combination of civic technology and grassroots mobilisation, we identify, nurture and sustain grassroots leaders to combat civic and climate change with tools of local data, local solutions and local community.?

?In the last nine years, 112,018 Solve Ninjas across 12 states in India have taken 94k+ actions, crowdsourced 5.6 lakh data points, started 3143 campaigns & built 552 solutions - saving? 54.3 million litres of water, 1.7 million units of electricity & 187 tonnes of waste. There are 47 Solve Ninja communities with 750+ Solve Ninjas across Bangalore, Nelamangala, Dharwad, Amritsar, Patiala, Bihar among others.?

Read on to know more about what the team has been up to:

Citizen driven action leading to Policy Change

Local Climate and Civic Action integrated in education curriculums: Reap Benefit has signed an MoU with SCERT (official tweet) to integrate an action-oriented methodology and its 21st century skill building M&E framework to one of Delhi government’s flagship mindset change initiatives- Deshbhakti Curriculum. It is set to be delivered to 18 lakh adolescents next year across 1000 schools under the Delhi government.

We are also a part of the alliance integrating an Entrepreneurial Mindset Curriculum (being delivered across 4.5 lakh adolescents since October 2022) in Andhra Pradesh government schools.? This follows a pilot conducted across 300 schools last year that led to an increase in self efficacy by 76% and self awareness by 88%. See the detailed impact report from the pilot ?here.

With integrations across Deshbhakti and Entrepreneurial Curriculum, we are seeing government buy-ins and focus on developing 21st century skills, entrepreneurial mindsets and youth leaders through climate and civic action.?

Citizen driven Collaborations and Engagements

Leveraging technology in ecosystem thinking: Reap Benefit was mentioned in Thinking and Acting Like a Platform will help social entrepreneurs create impact at scale, published in Stanford Social Innovation last month.? Building a movement of local changemakers, rooted in local context but interconnected through technology, has allowed Reap Benefit to remove linear structures and focus more on growing the vision of hyperlocal climate and civic participation. Whether it is enabling COVID relief for 1.6 million people or unlocking compensation under government schemes or providing disaster relief or engaging youth in everyday public problem solving, the platform has grown from strength to strength and is currently supporting 90,000 youth across 21 states with an engagement rate of ~30%.?

While our technology journey started with an app, the platform now consists of a WhatsApp based chatbot, Samaaj Data with hyper-local data across heat maps and geo-boundaries, User Profiles (A micro-site for each Solve Ninja detailing the 21st century skills developed, actions taken and Solve Ninja persona they embody.), Leaderboard (A detailed dashboard with information about Ninjas, actions, check-in trends across different cities and regions. ) and Forum (A quora for civic and climate problem solving).?

Enabling civic leaders across the country: In the last one year, through our partnership with Kick-Off Solutions, we have been engaging with tribal girls across 12 states in the country to become active and engaged change leaders.? Be it Kajal addressing water issues in her village in Hutup, Jharkhand or Premlata mobilising 22 youth to start waste segregation and creating dustbins for waste disposal in Lepsar in Jharkhand, or Varsha making a transition to menstrual cup from sanitary pads and encouraging her friends to do the same in Pratapgarh in Maharashtra, we feel both proud and privileged to be part of their leadership journeys! Watch Sayali talk about how creating a map for her village (Karjat, Maharashtra), listing the challenges and getting mentor support made her go on the road less travelled and read what Anand Devsharma, Co-Founder Kick Off Solutions has to say about the engagement here.?

As part of the new cohort of 16 RISE Seed Awardees, Reap Benefit is looking for brilliant 15-17 year olds working towards addressing some of the most pressing problems in the world. If you know someone who will benefit from this opportunity, please ask them to check this link here.

On this Constitution Day, we ran a campaign in collaboration with Samvada, leveraging the Solve Ninja chatbot to engage youth across 9 states and 2 Union Territories. A huge 68% of the youth had read the preamble at least once. Click here to see what our civic tech team mate Baiju learnt or test your knowledge of the Preamble here.?

We are also gearing up to launch the next cohort of Solve Ninja Leadership Accelerator- our flagship 6 month program for climate and civic leaders looking for mentoring and skills to get a headstart in their problem solving journeys. The program has supported 34 change leaders, 30 social initiatives across 11 states in the country until now. Click here to register or share with someone who may benefit from access to this opportunity. If you would like to mentor or support some of these ideas, please do reach out to us.?

Citizen driven?actions

Youth communities leading the way: Our attempts to ignite a youth movement actively engaged in climate and civic problem solving in local communities is taking the form of Yuva Cabinets (these are like chapters based on location, personas or causes- a more detailed note here). 750 youth across 47 Yuva Cabinets have invested ~2500 hours in problem solving this year! Leveraging the 31,000 data points for stubble burning (available on Samaaj Data) across Punjab, Yuva Cabinet President Hardeep Singh prevented 10,500 acres of land and subsequent air pollution by conducting regular awareness campaigns and sessions. Kultar Singh Sandhwan, Honorable Speaker, Punjab Legislative Assembly lauded his efforts (read more here).?

In Ganjigatti, Hubli, Bala Cabinet President Veeresh mobilised adolescents and resources in his village to conduct the first ever Makkala Grama Sabha and share a list of their problems with the Panchayat Development Officer (see more here). By enabling access to mentors, peers, knowledge and nudges, we are seeing youth transforming their roles in a bottom-up engagement in their communities.?

Flexing Fridays: Walking the talk on solving climate and civic problems; one street at a time,the Reap Benefit team, no matter where they are, engages in public problem solving on every Friday. One of our youth team mentor Poonam Chakroborty, while visiting her home city Kolkata, flexed her civic muscle by initiating the process to address a 15 year old garbage black spot!! Speaking with the mayor, reporting issues on the chatbot and mobilising people towards action, Poonam is a true embodiment of the Solve Ninja spirit. In the last one month, the team in Bangalore cleared 200 kilos of debris, mapped 1000+ trees and mobilised citizens through the Constitution Day campaign. (Watch more here)

Events: After a post COVID hiatus, the Reap Benefit team is back on the ground conducting micro-events using gamification techniques to engage more and more youth in public problem solving- whether it is issues of access to safe water and sanitation, improper waste disposal, unsafe roads, garbage blackspots or any other hyperlocal issues. In 15 such events across the last one month, 500 youth have started their problem solving journeys.? Read more from Adolescent Team mentor, Shrikant Mehtre here about his experience of conducting one too many events across Karnataka.?

That’s all from our end. If you would like to support us, in ways big or small, you can click here. We will be back with another round of updates in two months from now.

In gratitude,

Team Reap Benefit

Solve Small, Dent Big!