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 challenge 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 individuals 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 drawback – individuals understand 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 power 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 vary their beliefs or behaviour. What’s lacking is a bigger story or a story that ties every little thing collectively and feels domestically related, private, and simply consumable, in a language and format that folks can relate to. Briefly: for those who share a message in a approach individuals perceive, they’re extra more likely to care!
What Momentum Shifts Does
Based in 2025, MS is a story companion that works with civil social organisations to mainstream necessary 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 individuals at? On the web, in fact. Over 588 million (61%) of internet users eat short-form video and spend an average of five hours a day on smartphones. The creator financial system, too, has tripled to 4 million lively voices since 2020. It’s additionally about HOW individuals interact – 98% of Indian internet users eat content material in Indic languages and communities interact much better after they hear issues within the colloquial phrases and cultural references they’re part of.
Momentum Shifts, too, follows the identical method. Meaning listening to communities, working with regional creators throughout Instagram, YouTube, and Fb and ensuring the appropriate conversations attain the appropriate individuals on the channels they’re already spending time on.
The core query the organisation is making an attempt to reply: How can we do higher, extra significant public-facing messaging to spark motion?
“Social goal organisations in India are doing super work on the bottom throughout a complete vary of points. Nevertheless, citizen engagement and group possession, whereas typically felt or recognised as a key want, is usually a weak muscle. Momentum Shifts brings this functionality to the sector,” says Nishkarsh Swankar, Chief Working Officer at Momentum Shifts.
The Method
We companion with CSOs to construct bigger narratives, past the instant work they’re doing on the bottom and work out learn how to get these narratives to achieve extra individuals.
- We map the cultural and contextual forces shaping how a problem is perceived, then construct a technique to shift that notion over time. This additionally contains listening in and doing common scans to first perceive present conversations at play.
- We design and distribute content material via 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 individuals already care about, whether or not that’s meals, farming, native heritage, or livelihood.
- We companion with organisations and networks to construct their inner muscle for narrative pondering and storytelling via digital media. We additionally run coaching periods, narrative workshops, and construct communication playbooks so extra individuals 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 important, 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, have been slowly dying with communities feeling disgrace relatively than satisfaction 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 identification, 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 individuals within the area had by no means seen and spoke about meals in a approach 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 sort within the nation, devoted totally to indigenous meals techniques. 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 sequence 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 by way of reels and WhatsApp teams.
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“Many individuals hesitate to answer within the group, however after they meet us in particular person, they speak in regards to the messages. Total, a optimistic atmosphere 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 individuals to suppose, query and interact with one another.
A recent reel on stubble burning is an efficient instance of this – We labored with a Madhya Pradesh-based creator reframing parali not as an issue however as a possibility displaying how crop stubble might be was biodegradable merchandise which are 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 rework how the altering local weather is felt, understood and mirrored within the mainstream.
“The local weather disaster can’t be addressed with no 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 Government Officer at MS.
Odisha – Forgotten Meals marketing campaign: https://www.instagram.com/reels/C-mGHj4q1R6/ | https://www.instagram.com/reels/C-KyIK8vIqn/
Meals Methods: 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/
