Home / About us

Our philosophy

We believe every individual should be free to shape their own life, and that society is best placed to solve many of its own problems. The people closest to a problem often understand it best. 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, governments and young people. We help them build the skills, knowledge and resources to solve the problems they know best, while generating evidence, strengthening institutions and advocating for better public policy where it is needed.

Ultimately, we want to expand individual freedom and agency, enabling people and communities to shape their own futures and contribute to a freer and more prosperous future.

Action, Academy, Advocacy

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.

Field lessonsbecome courses;trained people joinus and our partnersGround realitiesshape what we teachResearch feedspublic debateActionResearch andconsultancyWith social sector organisationsand governmentsAcademyLearning andtrainingWith youth andsocial sector organisationsAdvocacyPublic engagementWith communities
Click a part of the circle to see what it includes.

Action

With social sector organisations and governments

Organisations and governments equipped to build agency and prosperity in their communities.

What it includes

How it feeds the cycle

Lessons from the field become frameworks we teach, and questions for public debate.

Academy

With youth and social sector organisations

An active community of public policy thinkers and changemakers.

What it includes

How it feeds the cycle

The people we train go on to work with us and our partner organisations.

Advocacy

With communities

More awareness of the value of freedom, and a growing network of policy thinkers.

What it includes

How it feeds the cycle

Ground-level realities shape what we teach, and set the questions our research asks.

Where the idea comes from

In our village,it’s different.

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.

Mahatma GandhiSree Narayana GuruF. A. Hayek

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.

We’ll fix what we can,and ask for the rest!

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 demand better public policies.

See what we do Our vision