About | Roots Learning

Overview

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Stronger Grantee. Better Outcomes. Greater Impact.

Roots is a capacity-building platform for social impact organizations across South Asia. Our mission is to strengthen institutions by addressing recurring capability gaps—from strategy and systems to leadership depth and staff capacity. By building individual capability at scale, we strengthen not just organizations, but the entire ecosystem they serve.

We partner closely with CSOs, CBOs, and social enterprises to co-create learning experiences that are inclusive, grounded in practice, and deeply relevant to the realities of nonprofit work. Our offerings span structured online programs, peer learning spaces, short modules, learning journeys and field-friendly resources.

Roots is anchored by Phicus Social Solutions, with over 15 years of experience strengthening civil society institutions. The initiative is seed-funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The Gap

Unlocking NGO Potential: Strengthening the Social Sector Through Capacity Building

Most social impact organizations already have strong intent, deep community trust, and committed teams. What is often missing is structured support to turn this intent into consistent organizational performance.

Further, the operating environment for social impact organizations has changed significantly.

Leaders are managing growing teams, tighter funding cycles, higher compliance requirements, and rapid shifts in technology—often without formal preparation for these roles. At the same time, field staff and first-time managers are being asked to take on greater responsibility with limited support.

A recent study (ATECF, 2025) underlined these realities:

Capacity Gaps Stall Impact: 60% of projects miss targets due to gaps in leadership, fundraising, and compliance
Chronic Underinvestment: Less than 1% of NGO budgets are allocated to staff development, exacerbating burnout and turnover
Access Inequity: 70% of NGO staff—especially mid-level and field teams—lack structured training, while most programs cater to senior leaders. Further, L&D efforts remain skewed toward elite or urban professionals, missing smaller, rural, and frontline organizations.

Capacity building can no longer be occasional or generic. It must be continuous, role-aware, and embedded in practice. Roots responds to this need by offering learning that is timely, practical, and designed to evolve with organizational realities.

Vision

The Vision: Scaling Roots as a Sectoral Lever

Roots exists to strengthen the social sector by building the institutional capabilities that enable organizations to learn, adapt, and sustain impact over time.

Our vision is for Roots to become part of the core learning infrastructure of South Asia's social sector—a sectoral lever that supports continuous capacity building at scale.

We aim to build a modular, inclusive, and evolving learning platform that:

Equips 1,00,000+ changemakers across hundreds of CSOs at different roles and stages
Builds a strong alumni network with regional learning nodes that enable peer exchange and local relevance
Integrates with complementary initiatives and learning solutions in the sector
Deepens organizational capabilities across priority areas including digital readiness, compliance, leadership development, monitoring and evaluation, fundraising, and people management

By strengthening organizations from within and enabling shared learning across the ecosystem, Roots seeks to contribute to a more resilient, collaborative, and effective social sector.

Roots Suite

The Roots Suite of Programs

1. Roots Live

Roots Live is our sector-facing learning space.This open calendar of 6 – 10 events a month hosts short workshops, learning sessions, expert talks and peer exchanges on core organizational capabilities such as leadership, fundraising, people management, monitoring and learning, compliance, and technology use. These sessions are open, typically 120 - 150 minutes long, led by expert facilitators, and designed to be immediately useful. Here, we have standalone programs as well as learning journeys curated for specific roles.This pillar enables wide access to learning, surfaces common capacity gaps across the sector, and acts as an entry point for individuals and organizations engaging with Roots. We currently offer programs in English and Hindi with more languages coming.

2. Excelerate

Excelerate is Roots’ structured, cohort-based learning offering for high potential mid-senior leaders.

Over a six-month period, participants experience a 360-degree feedback exercise combined with an individual development planning session, 2 coaching sessions, facilitated peer learning-sharing-reflection sessions and a capstone project that is anchored in their own organizational contexts, mentored by a Phicus Expert.

Excelerate is leveraged by organizations to augment their leadership pipeline and strengthen institutional systems (through capstone projects).

3. Sahuri

Sahuri is Roots’ field staff learning solution.

Designed for frontline teams, Sahuri, a veteran grassroots worker, reaches her audience through audio letters, delivered to them via WhatsApp, every fortnight. The simple language, story telling, anecdotal format and ease of access support learning that fits into field realities. It focuses on strengthening everyday practices such as communication, role clarity, problem-solving, and engagement with communities.

Sahuri ensures that capacity building reaches staff who are often excluded from formal learning spaces.

4. Future Ready

Future Ready is Roots’ organizational assessment and reflection tool.

It helps organizations take stock of their readiness across key capability areas such as leadership, systems, digital preparedness, compliance, fundraising, etc. The tool is designed to prompt structured reflection in management teams, surface gaps, and support informed decision-making about critical growth / consolidation / augmentation areas. The online tool is complemented by 1 - 2 coaching / consulting sessions with a Phicus OD Expert.

Future Ready is often used as a diagnostic to help organizations review, reflect and plan for the future.

5. Resource Hub

The Resource Hub brings together learning assets generated across Roots’ work.

It includes session recordings, tools, templates, articles, videos, learning notes, case examples, and Sahuri materials. Resources are curated and organized to support reuse within organizations and application in real work contexts.

The Hub enables continuity, allowing learning to travel beyond live sessions and reach wider teams.

Framework

The Roots Framework: Our Blueprint Behind Every Solution

01.

ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT

Equips organizations to navigate partnerships, align with policy, and collaborate effectively within the larger development ecosystem.

02.

INSTITUTION BUILDING

Strengthens the internal systems, structures, and strategies that enable CSOs to grow sustainably and deliver long-term impact.

03.

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Builds confident, reflective leaders at every level—from field staff to CXOs—who can drive vision, manage complexity, and empower teams.

04.

PERSONAL MASTERY

Fosters self-awareness, resilience, and emotional intelligence to help individuals lead with clarity, balance, and purpose.

Impact Study

The Roots Impact Study: 2026

In 2026, Roots completed the most comprehensive evaluation of digital-first capacity building in the Indian social sector to date. The study engaged 11 organizations and 132 respondents in a rigorous mixed-methods design—with every claim of impact triangulated against manager observation.

The findings are unequivocal: Roots works.

Sahuri, our frontline program delivered via WhatsApp audio letters, achieved 100% confidence gains among field staff with 95% application rates. Organizations report direct cost substitution of ₹2.5 lakhs+ per organization—replacing in-person training that would have cost five days and significant travel expense.

Excelerate, our 6-month leadership journey for mid-level managers, delivered 89% skill improvement. Managers validated tangible efficiency gains, saving 15+ minutes of oversight per week per participant—worth an estimated ₹10,000–15,000 per month in recovered time.

Roots Live, our calendar of learning sessions for all staff, earned 93% relevance ratings. A clear dose-response relationship emerged: participants attending three or more sessions saw confidence scores rise from 3.4 to 4.4 out of 5.

Future Ready, our organizational health diagnostic for senior leaders, provided 100% strategic clarity. Leadership teams gained new organizational language and narratives—with one organization estimating ₹1 crore+ in additional fundraising potential as a result.

Platform-wide, Roots reaches learners at approximately ₹1,500 per person—a fraction of the cost of traditional programs.

The core finding: Roots reliably builds capable individuals who apply their learning. Individual impact is proven and consistent.

The next frontier: The study also identifies three systemic constraints that currently limit individual capability from becoming organizational transformation—the absorption barrier, the validation barrier, and the execution barrier. These are not failures of the model. They are the blueprint for our evolution.

*Financial estimates are self-reported, not audited. Full 65-page study releases April 2026. Advance summary available.

Click on image to download Report Summary

Team

Team @Phicus-Roots

About Phicus

Roots is created and managed by Phicus, a social impact firm with over 15 years of deep expertise in organizational development. Phicus exists to catalyze the resilience of changemakers by augmenting their capacities, having already impacted over 1.5 million individuals across 12+ social impact domains.

With a track record of working with 150+ clients across 18 Indian states and 10 countries, Phicus brings a wealth of practical, grounded experience to the Roots platform.

By combining high-touch consulting with digital-first scalability, Phicus ensures that every level of civil society—from frontline staff to executive directors—has the tools and support needed to thrive in the South Asian context.

The Team

With over 175 years of collective experience in Leadership Building, Learning Design, and Tech Partnerships, we’ve seen it all—but we never stop evolving.

We don’t just teach digital capacity; we live it every single day. Our "office" is a buzzing Google Chat workroom, and our ritual is the daily morning huddle (where the "video on" rule is sacred!) to keep our alignment high. But we know the best ideas happen away from a screen. That’s why we gather once a week to dive into blue-sky thinking and—most importantly—eat together.

We’re a messy, high-energy mix of Gen Z and Gen X who believe the best ideas happen when the coffee is hot and the visitors are plenty. So join us for a meal / coffee in our office in Kasturinagar, Bangalore!