What started as regional social media creators documenting forgotten tribal and indigenous food recipes ended up being a backbone to catalyse a ₹250 crore initiative by the Odisha government – a five-year project across 15 districts to revive neglected crops, multiply indigenous varieties, and nutritionally profile traditional foods.
For most people, reels are a form of entertainment. But what if these same channels could shift how people think about climate and social issues? Can they nudge someone from passive awareness to active participation? For Momentum Shifts, this sits at the heart of the problem they are solving.
The Importance of Mindset Shifts
India does not have a climate awareness problem – people know it’s getting hotter by the day, that rains are becoming more erratic, and how it’s affecting their day-to-day life. But what’s lacking is the ability to connect lived experiences to climate change and the message itself struggling to reach mass audiences and keep them engaged.
Research shows that simply giving people more information is unlikely to change their beliefs or behaviour. What is missing is a larger story or a narrative that ties everything together and feels locally relevant, personal, and easily consumable, in a language and format that people can relate to. In short: if you share a message in a way people understand, they’re more likely to care!
What Momentum Shifts Does
Founded in 2025, MS is a narrative partner that works with civil social organisations to mainstream important social, ecological and climate issues into everyday conversations in India. Through community listening, creator collaboration and strategic distribution, MS builds conversations rooted in lived realities.
And where are people at? On the internet, of course. Over 588 million (61%) of internet users consume short-form video and spend an average of five hours a day on smartphones. The creator economy, too, has tripled to four million active voices since 2020. It’s also about HOW people engage – 98% of Indian internet users consume content in Indic languages and communities engage far better when they hear things in the colloquial terms and cultural references they’re a part of.
Momentum Shifts, too, follows the same approach. That means listening to communities, working with regional creators across Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook and making sure the right conversations reach the right people on the channels they’re already spending time on.
The core question the organisation is trying to answer: How can we do better, more meaningful public-facing messaging to spark action?
“Social purpose organisations in India are doing tremendous work on the ground across a whole range of issues. However, citizen engagement and community ownership, while often felt or recognised as a key need, is often a weak muscle. Momentum Shifts brings this capability to the sector,” says Nishkarsh Swankar, Chief Operating Officer at Momentum Shifts.
The Approach
We partner with CSOs to build larger narratives, beyond the immediate work they are doing on the ground and figure out how to get those narratives to reach more people.
- We map the cultural and contextual forces shaping how an issue is perceived, then build a strategy to shift that perception over time. This also includes listening in and doing regular scans to first understand existing conversations at play.
- We design and distribute content through regional creators, networks and community channels, bridging what organisations want to say with what communities actually respond to. In practice, this means working with regional creators across languages like Hindi, Bundeli, Vaagdi, Odia, and Kannada, building WhatsApp-based distribution channels that reach rural communities, and creating content that ties climate and social issues to the things people already care about, whether that is food, farming, local heritage, or livelihood.
- We partner with organisations and networks to build their internal muscle for narrative thinking and storytelling through digital media. We also run training sessions, narrative workshops, and build communication playbooks so more people can tell their stories.
Impact Thus Far
Till date, Momentum Shifts has partnered with 100+ creators across India, including states like Odisha, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Karnataka, producing 500+ unique content pieces and collectively reaching over 120 million views across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
But the numbers, while significant, only tell part of the story. We’ve worked across themes like food, farming, transport, wildlife and climate in close partnership with Zerodha’s Rainmatter Foundation and organisations like WRI India, A Rocha India and the National Coalition for Natural Farming, among others.
- Forgotten Foods in Odisha
Traditional tribal and indigenous food recipes, especially in Odisha, were slowly dying with communities feeling shame rather than pride about their own food culture. In 2025, Momentum Shifts partnered with WASSAN to bring it back into the spotlight to make it something to be genuinely proud of.
By rooting the narrative in cultural identity, we worked with regional creators who made reels in Odia, Hindi, and English, holding up forgotten grains and wild greens, cooking recipes that most young people in the region had never seen and spoke about food in a way that felt personal. The conversation grew loud enough to catch political attention and eventually led to a ₹250 crore government scheme, the first of its kind in the country, dedicated entirely to indigenous food systems. Odisha’s CM too publicly acknowledged the creators at a symposium for taking forgotten recipes back into every household.
- Reaching Rural Communities Through WhatsApp & Reels
In a recent collaboration with a grassroots development organisation working with tribal farming communities in Western India (especially the Vaagad region at the tri-junction of MP, Rajasthan and Gujarat), Momentum Shifts built a sustained WhatsApp content programme alongside a series of short reels, designed to be shared among cadre members, community facilitators, and rural households on natural farming practices for better adoption.
A survey of community members found that 94% had shared organically amplified content with family and friends and 61% percent reported adopting new farming practices after watching the messages via reels and WhatsApp groups.
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“Many people hesitate to reply in the group, but when they meet us in person, they talk about the messages. Overall, a positive environment has been created because of these WhatsApp messages,”
Block Facilitator from the Programme.
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- Sparking Conversations
Impact, for Momentum Shifts, isn’t just about reach but also about whether content is actually getting people to think, question and engage with each other.
A recent reel on stubble burning is a good example of this – We worked with a Madhya Pradesh-based creator reframing parali not as a problem but as an opportunity showing how crop stubble can be turned into biodegradable products that are actually profitable for farmers.
The reel crossed 8 lakh views, the comments drew in rural farmers, youngsters, businessmen, and local communities in a conversation that was genuinely alive, and the Collector’s office of Sagar in Madhya Pradesh reposted it, taking the discussion beyond social media and into institutional spaces altogether.
Momentum Shifts is also co-anchor of the Climate Narrative Hub, which seeks to redefine climate storytelling in India by bridging hyperlocal, community voices and larger thematic national level priorities. Along with the Rainmatter Foundation and Dasra, the Hub aims to transform how the changing climate is felt, understood and reflected in the mainstream.
“The climate crisis can’t be addressed without a compelling public story. We are building that story by meeting communities where they are – on their phones, in their local language. It turns passive awareness into tangible, community-led action,” says Prachur Goel, Chief Executive Officer at MS.
Odisha – Forgotten Foods campaign: https://www.instagram.com/reels/C-mGHj4q1R6/ | https://www.instagram.com/reels/C-KyIK8vIqn/
Food Systems: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWJXLj2DkFf/
Heat: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DJmIFuXy9oZ/
Mobility: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DaSqLRyqpDK/
Green Economy: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWfX3YIBxRv/
