Field notes · 6 min read
Why quiet work lasts longer than loud campaigns
A year of listening in one district taught us more than a decade of dashboards.
By Ritu Mehta · March 2026
We spent the whole of 2024 not launching anything. It felt terrible.
In the funding logic we grew up inside, a year without a launch is a year without impact. But a year of only listening — of drinking chai on 200 verandas across four blocks — turned out to be the most useful year of programme design we have ever done.
The women we listened to were unanimous about one thing: they were tired of being 'beneficiaries' of programmes designed elsewhere. What they wanted was slower, smaller, and much more boring than what most NGOs bring to a village.
So we built the 2025 livelihood cohort around three unromantic ideas: it would only accept applications from groups of three or more; the curriculum would be co-written with graduates from the 2019 cohort; and no one would be photographed for a fundraising brochure without their written consent, every time.
The cohort is now 18 months in. Retention is 92%. Median income is up 2.4x. And not a single graduate has been used as a stock image.
Quiet work lasts because it doesn't need to be photographed to be real.