PODCAST · society
On the Ground
by LONG FEI
Stories and research on grassroots social organizations around the world — real people, real impact.
Episodes
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May First Movement Technology (New York / Mexico City — movement technology cooperative)
May First Movement Technology is a member-owned cooperative operating in New York and Mexico City. Members pay dues and get email, mailing lists, web hosting, document collaboration and video meetings; hosting isn't a product it sells but a benefit of membership. By its own account, more than 800...
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Digital Empowerment Foundation (India — last-mile information services)
The Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) was registered in Delhi, India, on December 16, 2002; its founder, Osama Manzar, has a background in physics. In his words, DEF was never a digital foundation, but a communication-based organization that uses digital as a tool and a medium. Its best-known...
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Practical Action (UK — community-based flood early warning in Nepal)
Practical Action was founded in Britain in 1966 by the economist E. F. Schumacher, author of *Small Is Beautiful*; originally called ITDG, it took its current name in 2005. Its Nepal office has worked on flood early warning since 2002, when it put up a watchtower and installed a siren in the...
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Village to Village Network (Boston, USA — a national network)
In 1999, eleven older neighbors on Beacon Hill in Boston met and decided "we're not going anywhere." Over the following year, they turned that sentence into a nonprofit — Beacon Hill Village, founded in 2001, welcoming its first members in 2002. Members pay an annual fee in exchange for "one…
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CoopCycle (Paris, France)
In 2017, a group of young French people opposed to the "Uberization" of food delivery met each other during a street movement and decided, instead of accommodating the platforms, to build their own delivery software — the starting point of CoopCycle, a federation of bike-delivery cooperatives.…
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SEMA (Kampala, Uganda)
In March 2018, Nathalie Dijkman, a Dutch criminologist, founded SEMA — "speak up" in Swahili — in Kampala, Uganda. She had previously worked as an East Africa program coordinator at a legal-innovation organization in The Hague, and her research kept her based in Uganda for long stretches. She…
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Accountability Lab
In 2012, Blair Glencorse founded Accountability Lab in Kathmandu, Nepal. He had previously worked at the World Bank studying fragile states, and had spent years asking young people around the world what they thought the biggest problem was — the answer he heard back, again and again, pointed to a...
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SafelyYou (San Francisco, USA)
Founder George Netscher watched his grandmother and aunt both develop Alzheimer's, and he knew his own mother would likely face it too. So he made a decision: while there was still time, build her better care technology. The idea grew directly out of his PhD research at UC Berkeley's AI Research...
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Decidim
In 2011, Spain's 15M movement swept the country — young people occupied Madrid's Puerta del Sol chanting "They don't represent us." Part of that movement later won political power in cities including Barcelona, but ran into a real problem: having campaigned on "participatory democracy," how do…
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CareYaya
In 2022, Neal Shah — a former hedge fund partner in New York — wound down his fund after his wife was diagnosed with cancer, and spent two years as her full-time caregiver. During that time, he discovered that nearby college students studying nursing and pre-med were a more reliable source of…
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Dimagi
In 2002, two MIT students, Jonathan Jackson and Vikram Kumar, flew to Zambia intending to use health informatics to analyze data — and discovered there was no data to analyze at all. That discovery quickly pushed the company from health informatics toward global health software development: they...
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Harambee (South Africa)
"Harambee" is Swahili for "let's all pull together." In 2011, Nicola Galombik incubated the initiative inside Yellowwoods, a South African investment group, with the National Treasury's Jobs Fund providing the first matched grant. The insight behind it was blunt: among South Africans aged 18 to…
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Drinkwell (Bangladesh)
Drinkwell grew out of a laboratory breakthrough. Bangladesh's groundwater naturally contains arsenic, and the World Health Organization estimates that twenty to forty-five million people nationwide drink arsenic-contaminated groundwater year-round — a crisis it has called "the largest mass...
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Ushahidi (Kenya)
Ushahidi was founded in 2008 in Nairobi. In December 2007, Kenya's presidential election erupted into a fraud dispute, and the country fell into violence — more than a thousand people died, three hundred thousand were displaced, and traditional media couldn't keep pace with events. Kenyan lawyer...
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M-KOPA (Kenya/UK)
M-KOPA was founded in 2010 in Nairobi. Its three co-founders — Nick Hughes, Jesse Moore, and Chad Larson — spotted a paradox: 70% of Kenyans had no bank account, yet 90% had mobile coverage, and the mobile money system M-Pesa was already moving money at scale. The question was what ordinary…
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BRAC: A Goat, a Bank, and an Empire
BRAC began in 1972, in the ruins of Bangladesh's war of independence. Fazle Hasan Abed quit his accounting job in the UK to return home and help with relief work — only to find that handouts didn't solve the problem: after three months of food aid, people were still hungry. In 1974, he met a…
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Chengdu Aiyouxi Community Development Center
Aiyouxi began in 2009 as a public-welfare theatre troupe — over 300 volunteers writing, directing, and filming short films on causes like blood donation. Along the way the team realized that "what happens outside the camera matters more than what's in the frame," and in 2011 it formally became a...
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Local Action：Crisis Text Line
Crisis Text Line, founded in 2013, is the first and largest text-based crisis service in the United States. We believe everyone in crisis deserves to be heard. Through a nationwide network of trained volunteer counselors, we provide free, confidential, 24/7 crisis support via text to millions...
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XinTu's Transformation Story
31 staff. 22,000 families. 6 cities. 47 communities. Over twenty years, Shanghai's Xin Tu Community Health Promotion Society went through three fundamental shifts: from direct service delivery, to training community "Health Ambassadors" to serve their own neighborhoods; from labor-intensive...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Stories and research on grassroots social organizations around the world — real people, real impact.
HOSTED BY
LONG FEI
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does On the Ground have?
On the Ground currently has 19 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is On the Ground about?
Stories and research on grassroots social organizations around the world — real people, real impact.
How often does On the Ground release new episodes?
On the Ground has 19 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to On the Ground?
You can listen to On the Ground on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts On the Ground?
On the Ground is created and hosted by LONG FEI.
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