Community Action Collab: Building Resilience in India

The Community Action Collab (CAC), formerly the COVID Action Collab, is a nationwide platform strengthening the resilience of India’s most vulnerable populations—including informal workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, and smallholder farmers—against climate, health, and economic shocks. With 368 partners, CAC reaches millions through data-driven, community-led programs that integrate social, economic, and environmental resilience. CAC exemplifies Systemic Risk Response (SRR) criteria through Complexity, Justice, and Compassion, Individual and Collective Agency, and Transformation. Its tailored Resilience Packages address local priorities, challenge structural inequities, and support long-term adaptation—especially in areas such as economic resilience, climate adaptation, and disaster response. CAC’s CDAR model (Conservation, Diversification, Aggregation, Risk-pooling) empowers communities to define and direct their own recovery.

By centering grassroots agency and systemic reform, CAC highlights how inclusive networks and flexible strategies can meet multifaceted risks. It offers a scalable model of integrated, locally driven resilience that bridges gaps between civil society, government, and the private sector. This case study is part of ASRA’s SRR Case Studies series—find out more in From Benches to Boardrooms: Responding to Systemic Risks.

Case Study: Community Action Collab: Building Resilience in India

Overview: India’s most vulnerable communities including migrant workers, farmers, informal laborers, LGBTQ+ individuals, sex workers, persons with disabilities, and victims of gender-based violence, face interconnected risks that threaten their financial stability and wellbeing. Systemic barriers such as financial insecurity, extreme weather, public health crises, and social exclusion compound vulnerabilities, making recovery from shocks increasingly difficult. Without targeted, long-term solutions, these communities can remain trapped in cycles of crises (CAC, n.d., p. 21).

The Community Action Collab (CAC) evolved from its phase one initiative, the COVID Action Collab—an all-India collaborative incubated by Bangalore-based, Catalyst Management Services, that served as an interface between communities and service providers during the pandemic (CMS, n.d.). It brought together 368 partners and reached 15 million vulnerable people delivering relief, recovery, and resilience-building programs (see Fig. 1). 

As the pandemic’s long-term impact became clear, COVID Action Collab expanded its mandate to strengthen resilience among vulnerable communities and institutions, recognizing that future pandemics, climate disasters, and economic shocks would continue to hit the most vulnerable the hardest. In phase two, it was rebranded as the Community Action Collab with a renewed focus on the economy, climate, and health (CAC, n.d.).

CAC is a multidisciplinary platform operating across India, strengthening resilience at both individual and community levels. It empowers civil society and local groups to anticipate, adapt to, and recover from external pressures. Its systemic approach integrates rapid mobilization, data-driven risk detection, and individual and collective agency, ensuring lasting impact. Rooted in principles of Justice, Equity, and Transformation, CAC offers a blueprint for resilience that extends beyond crisis recovery.

During the pandemic several initiatives designed to empower communities and strengthen institutional capacity, include: 

1. Economic Resilience Impact Canvas: Financial stability for vulnerable groups.
2. Samruddh Sanstha: An initiative for building the resilience of Community Organizations who cater to vulnerable populations.
3. Precision Health: Climate-related health solutions and early warning systems for at-risk communities.
4. VAXNOW: Reaching unvaccinated populations.

CAC aims to empower ten million vulnerable people, support more than 100 community organizations, and develop a rapid-response resource platform for high-risk communities during emergencies (CAC, n.d.).

Highlights in systemic risk response

A systemic risk response encompasses any action that deliberately seeks to mitigate, prepare for, adapt to, and/or transform away from the harms of systemic risks. By centering grassroots agency and systemic reform, this example highlights how inclusive networks and flexible strategies can meet multifaceted risks.

Complexity

Through consultations with grassroots organizations and specialists, CAC designs Resilience Packages tailored to community needs, recognizing that vulnerabilities are multifaceted, requiring integrated, context-specific solutions (CAC, n.d., p. 22). Its Resilience Packages embody the following guiding principles (CAC, n.d., p. 21):

1. Holistic support: Addressing crises beyond immediate relief measures integrating social, economic, and environmental needs. 
2. Calibrated response: Understanding that one size doesn't fit all. Interventions are customized based on community-defined priorities. 
3. Environmental focus: Ensuring minimal resource use and promoting long-term sustainable behaviors. Focusing efforts on climate change risks for vulnerable populations.

CAC focuses its efforts across health and climate change risks for vulnerable populations and recognizes the deep nature of risk within these domains. In its Resilience Package for Farmers, the CAC understands there are multiple sources of risk, including economic vulnerability, lack of access to resources such as irrigation, health issues related to their occupation, social vulnerability due to being part of marginalized communities, and policy and institutional challenges owing to access to credit (Farmers Resilience Package p. 21).

Justice and Cross-scale

CAC dedicates time and resources to learn about the vulnerable communities they will work with to tailor interventions based on community-defined resilience, addressing access barriers to certain resources, cultural stigma, and systemic inequities (personal communication, CAC partner organization, Swasti). 

CAC pays close attention to identifying and leveraging key points of intervention for its initiatives, such as the Economic Resilience Initiative which is guided by a CDAR framework:

1. Conservation of resources through initiatives like drought-proofing farms.
2. Diversification of income streams.
3. Aggregation of voices to ensure the effective negotiation of interests. 
4. Risk-pooling to reduce risks to income sources and assets (CAC, n.d.).

Individual & Collective Agency

CAC’s Resilience Package for Farmers tackles economic precarity, resource scarcity, occupational health risks, and policy barriers. It guides its partners across five key areas—Livelihood, Health Services, Social Protection, Climate Action, and Disaster Management—tailored to the immediate needs of small and marginal farmers, including the landless. Agency-building is central, ensuring farming communities shape the support they receive. Aligned with the CAC’s Resilience Framework, the package promotes co-creating integrated, sustained services for households and communities (CAC, n.d., p. 19).

There are numerous stories of community impact including (CAC, n.d.):

1. Empowering women farmers: In Tamil Nadu, CAC partner Rural Organization for Social Education (ROSE), is equipping women farmers with climate-resilient agricultural techniques, helping them address challenges like droughts, unfavorable markets, and natural resource degradation.
2. Disaster response in Mumbai: On March 3, 2023, the residents of Appapada informal settlements in Malad East heard multiple cylinder explosions. “A fire had broken out, gutting over a 1,000 houses in the locality and leaving numerous families homeless…” CAC partner Maha PECOnet’s activated a local relief network, “Navjivan”. Leveraging community knowledge and leadership, they ensured that aid reached those most in need, and with their help distributed utensils and ration kits to 100 vulnerable families that lived in hard-to-reach areas. 

Key Insights and Lessons Learned

The Community Action Collab stands out as a model for systemic risk response, integrating Complex thinking, Compassion, Individual and Collective Agency, and Transformation. CAC exemplifies the Justice principle by putting the needs and perspective of the most vulnerable communities and people at the heart of the response, with transformative results. Lessons from its COVID Action Collab continue to shape its broader mission today (Poverty Learning Foundation, 2022, p. 34), and provide important insights for systemic risk response efforts:

1. Understand vulnerable communities: Tailoring solutions to specific vulnerable groups ensures more effective support. By facilitating partnerships and mobilizing resources, CAC enabled implementing partners to address the unique needs of each vulnerable group. 
2. Collaborate to accelerate impact: CAC’s network streamlines last-mile delivery, bridging gaps between local organizations, government agencies, and the private sector—a challenge for public institutions working in crisis situations. 
3. Drive success through agility and multi-dimensional strategies: CAC’s multi-domain approach (health, livelihoods, social protection) and multi-state framework (relief, recovery, resilience) allowed it to operate at scale, adding value to partners and policymakers alike. 
4. Know that transformation takes time, but urgency drives action: CAC partners emphasize the importance of evidence-based transformation, though measuring long-term impacts remains challenging (personal communication, CAC partner organization, Swasti). The pandemic created a unique sense of urgency, accelerating collaboration and funding. However, the work on Economic Resilience—while critical—lacks the same immediate momentum, requiring sustained advocacy to attract long-term investment.