What began as regional social media creators documenting forgotten tribal and indigenous meals recipes ended up being a spine to catalyse a ₹250 crore initiative by the Odisha authorities – a five-year mission throughout 15 districts to revive uncared for crops, multiply indigenous varieties, and nutritionally profile conventional meals.
For most individuals, reels are a type of leisure. However what if these similar channels might shift how folks take into consideration local weather and social points? Can they nudge somebody from passive consciousness to lively participation? For Momentum Shifts, this sits on the coronary heart of the issue they’re fixing.
The Significance of Mindset Shifts
India doesn’t have a local weather consciousness downside – folks comprehend it’s getting hotter by the day, that rains have gotten extra erratic, and the way it’s affecting their day-to-day life. However what’s missing is the flexibility to attach lived experiences to local weather change and the message itself struggling to achieve mass audiences and maintain them engaged.
Research shows that simply giving people more information is unlikely to alter their beliefs or behaviour. What’s lacking is a bigger story or a story that ties every thing collectively and feels regionally related, private, and simply consumable, in a language and format that individuals can relate to. In brief: in the event you share a message in a method folks perceive, they’re extra prone to care!
What Momentum Shifts Does
Based in 2025, MS is a story companion that works with civil social organisations to mainstream essential social, ecological and local weather points into on a regular basis conversations in India. By group listening, creator collaboration and strategic distribution, MS builds conversations rooted in lived realities.
And the place are folks at? On the web, after all. Over 588 million (61%) of internet users devour short-form video and spend an average of five hours a day on smartphones. The creator economic system, too, has tripled to 4 million lively voices since 2020. It’s additionally about HOW folks interact – 98% of Indian internet users devour content material in Indic languages and communities interact much better once they hear issues within the colloquial phrases and cultural references they’re part of.
Momentum Shifts, too, follows the identical method. Which means listening to communities, working with regional creators throughout Instagram, YouTube, and Fb and ensuring the correct conversations attain the correct folks on the channels they’re already spending time on.
The core query the organisation is attempting to reply: How can we do higher, extra significant public-facing messaging to spark motion?
“Social function organisations in India are doing large work on the bottom throughout an entire vary of points. Nevertheless, citizen engagement and group possession, whereas usually felt or recognised as a key want, is commonly a weak muscle. Momentum Shifts brings this functionality to the sector,” says Nishkarsh Swankar, Chief Working Officer at Momentum Shifts.
The Strategy
We companion with CSOs to construct bigger narratives, past the fast work they’re doing on the bottom and determine the way to get these narratives to achieve extra folks.
- We map the cultural and contextual forces shaping how a problem is perceived, then construct a method to shift that notion over time. This additionally consists of listening in and doing common scans to first perceive current conversations at play.
- We design and distribute content material by means of regional creators, networks and group channels, bridging what organisations wish to say with what communities really reply to. In observe, this implies working with regional creators throughout languages like Hindi, Bundeli, Vaagdi, Odia, and Kannada, constructing WhatsApp-based distribution channels that attain rural communities, and creating content material that ties local weather and social points to the issues folks already care about, whether or not that’s meals, farming, native heritage, or livelihood.
- We companion with organisations and networks to construct their inside muscle for narrative pondering and storytelling by means of digital media. We additionally run coaching classes, narrative workshops, and construct communication playbooks so extra folks can inform their tales.
Influence Thus Far
Until date, Momentum Shifts has partnered with 100+ creators throughout India, together with states like Odisha, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Karnataka, producing 500+ distinctive content material items and collectively reaching over 120 million views throughout Instagram, Fb, and YouTube.
However the numbers, whereas vital, solely inform a part of the story. We’ve labored throughout themes like meals, farming, transport, wildlife and local weather in shut partnership with Zerodha’s Rainmatter Basis and organisations like WRI India, A Rocha India and the Nationwide Coalition for Pure Farming, amongst others.
- Forgotten Meals in Odisha
Conventional tribal and indigenous meals recipes, particularly in Odisha, had been slowly dying with communities feeling disgrace moderately than delight about their very own meals tradition. In 2025, Momentum Shifts partnered with WASSAN to convey it again into the highlight to make it one thing to be genuinely pleased with.
By rooting the narrative in cultural id, we labored with regional creators who made reels in Odia, Hindi, and English, holding up forgotten grains and wild greens, cooking recipes that almost all younger folks within the area had by no means seen and spoke about meals in a method that felt private. The dialog grew loud sufficient to catch political consideration and eventually led to a ₹250 crore government scheme, the primary of its type within the nation, devoted totally to indigenous meals methods. Odisha’s CM too publicly acknowledged the creators at a symposium for taking forgotten recipes again into each family.
- Reaching Rural Communities By WhatsApp & Reels
In a current collaboration with a grassroots improvement organisation working with tribal farming communities in Western India (particularly the Vaagad area on the tri-junction of MP, Rajasthan and Gujarat), Momentum Shifts constructed a sustained WhatsApp content material programme alongside a collection of quick reels, designed to be shared amongst cadre members, group facilitators, and rural households on pure farming practices for higher adoption.
A survey of group members discovered that 94% had shared organically amplified content material with household and mates and 61% p.c reported adopting new farming practices after watching the messages through reels and WhatsApp teams.
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“Many individuals hesitate to answer within the group, however once they meet us in particular person, they speak in regards to the messages. Total, a constructive setting has been created due to these WhatsApp messages,”
Block Facilitator from the Programme.
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- Sparking Conversations
Influence, for Momentum Shifts, isn’t nearly attain but in addition about whether or not content material is definitely getting folks to assume, query and have interaction with one another.
A recent reel on stubble burning is an effective instance of this – We labored with a Madhya Pradesh-based creator reframing parali not as an issue however as a possibility exhibiting how crop stubble will be changed into biodegradable merchandise which might be really profitable for farmers.
The reel crossed 8 lakh views, the feedback drew in rural farmers, children, businessmen, and native communities in a dialog that was genuinely alive, and the Collector’s workplace of Sagar in Madhya Pradesh reposted it, taking the dialogue past social media and into institutional areas altogether.
Momentum Shifts can also be co-anchor of the Climate Narrative Hub, which seeks to redefine local weather storytelling in India by bridging hyperlocal, group voices and bigger thematic nationwide stage priorities. Together with the Rainmatter Basis and Dasra, the Hub goals to remodel how the altering local weather is felt, understood and mirrored within the mainstream.
“The local weather disaster can’t be addressed with out a compelling public story. We’re constructing that story by assembly communities the place they’re – on their telephones, of their native language. It turns passive consciousness into tangible, community-led motion,” says Prachur Goel, Chief Govt Officer at MS.
Odisha – Forgotten Meals marketing campaign: https://www.instagram.com/reels/C-mGHj4q1R6/ | https://www.instagram.com/reels/C-KyIK8vIqn/
Meals Programs: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWJXLj2DkFf/
Warmth: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DJmIFuXy9oZ/
Mobility: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DaSqLRyqpDK/
Inexperienced Economic system: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWfX3YIBxRv/
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/HDC-GettyImages-668641904-9179dc9fe60446d8b4d8a08fbffcf46d.jpg?w=600&resize=600,400&ssl=1 "What Happens When You Combine Turmeric and Black Pepper")
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