Announcing the eArth Ecosystem

Since 2014 when Project Potential was founded, we have imagined rural communities thriving socially, economically, and environmentally. While we have sought to address this problem in a number of ways, two consistent factors from the beginning have been:

1. The overwhelming majority of our team is local (70–80% of the team)
2. We seek to equip local people with the knowledge, skills, mindsets, relationships, and resources required for them to work for social justice and change

On the latter, we have run a number of programs which have dual objectives: creating impact in the village today through a targeted intervention, while also building the capacity of local people working on the project. We have done so through fellowships focused on education, street theater, humanitarian aid, and other fields.

The other major learning we have had over the years is that in a place like Kishanganj District, Bihar, there are several overlapping challenges which community members face (including but not limited to) such as economic poverty, inability to access government schemes/entitlements, lack of access to quality education or health care, gender and caste-based discrimination, and beyond.

That a community member or a community may face multiple intersecting challenges is not a new insight; if you simply speak to a few people at a chai stall in rural Bihar, it quickly becomes clear: a family member gets ill, but has no access to quality public health care, so they have to take on onerous debt to pay for it, which may plunge the family into poverty, which may prevent children from studying, and so on.

Photo by the wonderful photographer Sara Hylton

The way that civil society organizations respond to this reality, though, differs:

1. Some focus on larger systemic fixes like improving the government’s capacity and accountability such that people can access what they are entitled to
2. Some rural development organizations respond by starting programs across multiple sectors to make more direct improvement’s in people’s lives
3. Other organizations realize that it is operationally very difficult to work on multiple problems simultaneously, and so they instead focus on one target issue and then try to solve that problem in multiple geographies

There is no right or wrong answer necessarily; it depends on a multitude of factors, including an organization’s values, contextual factors the area in which an organization chooses to work, availability of resources to a particular organization, and so on.

In deciding how to respond to this reality ourselves, Project Potential has decided to focus on our specific strengths. We can call these the 5P’s:

1. Purpose: A clear guiding vision of who we are and what we want to achieve
2. People: Our strong local connection — both in our team — and across several hundred villages in Kishanganj District (and other nearby districts), where we have run several programs over the last several years which have engaged over 5 lakh (0.5 million) people
3. Place: Our 15 acre campus, eArthshala, which can be used for demonstration purposes, hosting activities related to education, health, or livelihoods, and/or modeling a new kind of society
4. Partnerships: Partnerships with over 200 leading organizations across India
5. Paisa (money/resources): Ability to fundraise for projects and innovative ideas

It is also important to recognize what we do not consider a core strength at this point, which is deep technical expertise in many of the sectors which we want to work in, including livelihoods, education, and health. Given the importance of this technical expertise, this is something we want to source from elsewhere in India — namely through partnerships.

Given our strengths in the other 4P’s, it is easy for partners with technical expertise in an important problem area to plug into our ecosystem in order to connect with our team and local community members.

Our experience has shown that there are a lot of organizations who have created very successful models to specific problems: how to improve agricultural productivity or bring down maternal mortality or improve female participation in the workforce. What is significantly less common, however, are platforms which allow multiple such organizations to come together with rural communities in order to solve multiple, intersecting problems.

Our belief is that given the issues facing the community where we work, as well as the strengths which we bring to bear, the most impactful thing we can do is to solve for the bottlenecks which are preventing multiple organizations from working together in Kishanganj. We can help organizations adapt their models to a new context, connect with our volunteer network, utilize our campus, and fundraise. We believe that in doing so for multiple organizations working in allied sectors simultaneously, it is possible to imagine a future in which community members can reach their full potential.