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Our philosophy
We believe society is best placed to solve most of the problems around it. The people closest to a problem understand it best, and the institutions they build themselves, from community groups to local organisations, are often the ones that last.
That is why we work with communities, civil society organisations and young people: helping them build the skills, knowledge and resources to solve the problems they know best, and to ask for better public policy where it is needed.
Advocacy, Academy, Action
We put this philosophy into practice through three connected parts. Each works with a different group, and what we learn in one strengthens the other two.
Where the idea comes from
From the districts
Before NPoC, we helped develop skill policies for individual districts in Kerala. We saw top-down policies miss local needs and fail, and saw how much needs varied even within a single district.
Gandhi, Guru, and Hayek
Gandhi and Sree Narayana Guru showed us that lasting change grows from the grassroots, as people educate and organise themselves. Hayek showed why: the knowledge needed to solve problems is spread among people, and no government can gather all of it. Together, they are why we work close to communities, from the ground up.
Portraits adapted from photographs: Mahatma Gandhi, Elliott & Fry, 1931, and Sree Narayana Guru, before 1929, both public domain; F. A. Hayek, Mises Institute, CC BY-SA 3.0, the adapted portrait shared under the same licence.
Bottom-up, for the long term
Many think tanks work top-down, through government. We also work from the ground up: putting public policy ideas into plain language, and equipping people to solve problems and ask for better policies.