On the Ground

About On the Ground

Stories and research on grassroots social organizations around the world — real people, real impact.

Publisher

LONG FEI

Category

education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

5 Jun 2026

Latest episode

20 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

20 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   20 Oct 2026

   Alliance for Public Health

   The Alliance for Public Health was founded on 1 December 2000, originally as an international technical assistance project supported by the United States Agency for International Development and the European Union. It started in Ukraine and now works across the whole of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For twenty-five years it has stayed with a small set of issues: HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and harm reduction for people who use drugs — not making abstinence a precondition, but bringing infections and deaths down first. By its own account, 250,000 people at highest risk of infection in Ukraine are reached with its prevention services every year, and together with partners it has averted 50,000 new infections. Before teaching others to use AI, it built a few things of its own: TWIIN, a "virtual social worker" launched in 2024 — online 24 hours a day, free and anonymous, answering questions on HIV, tuberculosis, addiction and mental health, with every digital figure drawn from real social workers and community representatives; its 25th-anniversary materials say it has attracted over 10,000 users. It uses machine learning to support social network testing: data from 2024, published in October 2025, show a positivity rate of 5.6% in the machine-selected group against 4.3% in the staff-selected group. And its telemedicine platform Help24 had provided 127,192 services by October 2025. The seven-session online course featured in this episode, "AI for NGOs," began on 19 June 2026. It is run by Social Equation Hub, a partner team within the Eastern Europe and Central Asia regional project led by APH, with APH as the supporting organization; funding comes from Help Space's blockchain-oriented community health initiative, supported by an international foundation, and from the regional project itself, funded by the Global Fund. The course's promise: each organization builds its own projects, knowledge bases and tools, and by the end it is "entirely theirs: their account, their setup, their rules." It uses the "4D" framework from an AI fluency course for nonprofits — Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence. Every exercise is done on the organization's own real documents, one session is devoted to data security and verifying outputs, and the "skills" it teaches are transferable and belong to the organization. Registered organizations can receive a two-month paid subscription, with a limited number of places.

2. 

   13 Oct 2026

   May First Movement Technology (New York / Mexico City — movement technology cooperative)

   May First Movement Technology is a member-owned cooperative operating in New York and Mexico City. Members pay dues and get email, mailing lists, web hosting, document collaboration and video meetings; hosting isn't a product it sells but a benefit of membership. By its own account, more than 800 organizations entrust their digital infrastructure to it, and for over 20 years it has run that infrastructure without mining data or selling attention. Its roots go back to two alternative internet providers of the early 1990s, People Link in New York and LaNeta in Mexico City. In 2005, People Link merged with the May First tech group to become May First/People Link; in 2011 it took over LaNeta's hosting, and about 20% of its members have been in Mexico ever since; in 2015 an independent cooperative was set up in Mexico City to give Mexican members a local legal framework and ways to pay; and in June 2019 the members approved new bylaws — 16 to 20 board members elected by the members, five more by the staff, about five seats for Mexico in proportion to its membership, three-year terms. Its website says that from then on it became a "functional cooperative." The cost of building and running its own infrastructure is recorded on its legal history page: in 2008 it dealt with infringement complaints against two activist-art websites, and in one of them refused The New York Times' takedown demand; in 2009, after a complaint from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an upstream provider cut its entire internet connection for one and a half hours without notice; in 2012 the FBI, with a search warrant, removed another collective's server from its rack, after a subpoena to which it answered that "we had nothing to turn over"; in 2014 it refused to hand over identifying information about an Independent Media Center member and then received a gag order; in 2015 it suffered the most serious distributed denial-of-service attack in its history, lasting several weeks; in 2023 it refused to take down a database of Los Angeles police officers; and in 2025 a photo claim by Agence France-Presse was dropped after the Electronic Frontier Foundation stepped in. Its answer is the cooperative model, governance by members and free software throughout — because only open source lets people audit, modify and truly control the tools they use. Its impact, it says, is measured not in services maintained, but in whether people and organizations can keep doing their work through a crisis.

3. 

   7 Oct 2026

   Digital Empowerment Foundation (India — last-mile information services)

   The Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) was registered in Delhi, India, on December 16, 2002; its founder, Osama Manzar, has a background in physics. In his words, DEF was never a digital foundation, but a communication-based organization that uses digital as a tool and a medium. Its best-known approach is the SoochnaPreneur ("information entrepreneur") program, launched in 2016 with seed funding from a Qualcomm program to expand wireless access, and supported over the years by partners including the European Union, Nokia and Google. Rather than building computer rooms or centers in villages, DEF finds someone in the village who is willing to do the work, teaches them digital skills, gives them a printer and a tablet, and leaves the rest to them to run as a business; one SoochnaPreneur in Assam's tea gardens, for example, corrects errors on ID registrations, opens bank accounts, serves as the village's cash-withdrawal point and helps children submit scholarship applications. One shopkeeper in DEF's book did the math: making the trip to the district town to get one card — fares, photocopies and a lost day's wages — came to about 700 rupees; he offered to do it for 30. The time this business saves people is its income, so it can keep going without subsidies. By the organization's own 2026 website figures, the network has about 2,000 community information centers and 10,000 digital foot soldiers across 25 states and more than 250 districts, and has reached more than 35 million people over 23 years; the book DEF published in 2025 gives 2,200 SoochnaPreneurs in 26 states instead. The two sets of figures don't match, and both are self-reported. The approach has its limits. Among the Toda tribe in the Nilgiri hills, the mountains broke up the signal and the first center couldn't stay afloat — DEF itself wrote that the area had been left "digitally stranded." What worked in the end was two women splitting the job: one took on the work that has to be done in person, the other moved to a spot with signal to handle online applications. Smartpur, a project in the Nuh district of Haryana, shut down around 2024, but its spokes, designed from the start as self-sustaining micro-businesses, survived — negotiating bandwidth with operators and repairing broken lines on their own. At one shop there, opened in 2018, the owner, Mustakeem, added a second screen on the counter facing the customer, so people could watch how their own transaction was being handled; his WhatsApp group became the place where the village checks whether something is "a new subsidy or a new scam." A biometric scanner can find dormant accounts and screen out false claimants — and, in the wrong hands, be used to cheat people. In Chanderi, sari weavers learned the JacDraw loom software after a 2009–2012 project had ended, and by 2025 the number of handlooms had grown from fewer than 3,500 before the pandemic to 5,500. The book's yardstick: don't measure by project cycles and burn rates, but by what the community keeps choosing after the money recedes. In 2016, DEF submitted recommendations on public Wi-Fi to India's telecom regulator, TRAI, and says several of them were written into the national public Wi-Fi framework of 2020 — this is the organization's own account; government documents don't name it.

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Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.