The Future is Collective Case Studies of Collective Social Innovation 2025

Shikshagraha Mobilizing a people's education movement dedicated to improving 1 million public schools in India Year founded Regions represented Entity typeGroups assembled Organizations involved Constituents represented3 missions engaging system leaders, social entrepreneurs, young people and women leaders in communities (state, district and community level sub-collectives)Mantra4Change was founded in 2013 and ShikshaLokam was founded in 2017. Collective action began through the Punjab Education Collective in 2019 (a state-wide collective), then Shikshagraha in 2023 (a nationwide collective). Background The ethos of Shikshagraha began in 2013, when Mantra4Change was founded and ran a pilot project to improve seven schools in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. With learnings from this initial set of partner schools over five years, the programme’s design and approach to working with public education system administration and school leaders was codified and expanded to several states. At the same time, a second organization, ShikshaLokam, was founded in 2017 to accelerate school leadership development at population scale in India. Modelled on Societal Thinking11 – a method to catalyse exponential change – ShikshaLokam was simultaneously focused on building an ecosystem for co-creation with other education non-profit organizations in the country. In 2019, the two organizations joined with two additional organizations — Sanjhi Sikhiya and Samarthya — to form a collective with the aim of creating a state-wide school improvement initiative in Punjab, a state in the north-west of India. A 2017 study of Punjab’s education system had revealed that only 36% of Grade 3 students were able to read at the grade level below, while 50% of students in Grade 5 could not comprehend basic math operations. This challenging situation called for a novel approach. The four organizations approached the Department of School Education in Punjab without ready- made plans; instead, they brought curiosity and a willingness to learn and co-create with the government. The government leaders showed a positive attitude and a willingness to embark on a learning journey. After a period of in-depth observing and listening, the collective developed a list of over 25 simple but powerful “plus one” ideas for “micro-improvements” – ideas that build on what already exists in schools and classrooms. The government gave the collective the go-ahead to pursue the entire list of ideas and urged them to empower existing school leaders and teachers to pursue the improvements rather than add layers of bureaucracy and administration. Fast forward to today: this initial collective, named the Punjab Education Collective, has implemented micro-improvements in 19,000 schools, educating 2 million students. In four years, these micro- improvements have lifted Punjab’s state results from the lower half of all 28 states to now ranking first in both the Performance Grading Index (PGI) and the National Achievement Survey (NAS) for the entire country. Encouraged by this extraordinary impact, two more state-wide collectives were set up in 2022. While these organizations learned the nuances of collective action rapidly, they soon realized their individual efforts would be unable to catalyse the full transformation of the public school system required to serve India’s children with scale and speed. Thus, in November 2023, the team launched an even larger collective: a nationwide movement called Shikshagraha, designed to reach 1 million public schools, impacting over 150 million school-age children in India. Headquartered: Bangalore, Karnataka, India Number of employees Shikshagraha has no employees. Its efforts are led by the network of partner organizations and co-builders. Budget range $20-25 million 11. Hans, A. (2022). ShikashaLokam: Building beyond. Societal Thinking. https://societalthinking.org/blog/ shikshalokam-impact/. 06 ~75 organizations are currently represented in the collectives. 40 million children and 300,000 education leaders across 100 districts by 2027India (nationwide) Shikshagraha is not a legal entity; it is a movement with many registered and non-registered organizations participating.COLLECTIVE ACTION CASE STUDY The Future is Collective: Case Studies of Collective Social Innovation 42