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What if the social sector’s obsession with "reach" and "systemic change" is actually the very thing preventing real transformation? In this episode, we dive into the radical philosophy of Shifting Orbits Foundation, a small organisation that has made three unconventional choices to challenge the status quo. We explore their decision to live in the "82% gap"—the time children spend outside the classroom where potential often quietly erodes. We discuss their "long-haul" commitment, a "no-exit" promise to students and families that rejects the "touch and go" models they view as a form of harm. Finally, we examine why Shifting Orbits is explicitly anti-scale, arguing that the moment we optimise for numbers, we begin to see people as statistics rather than humans. Join us for a conversation about why depth must come before breadth and why being a "good neighbour" might just be the most effective way to change a life. This episode poses a challenging question for the entire social sector: After decades of work and billions in funding, what has actually been produced for the specific child in the specific neighbourhood today? Key Topics Covered: The 82% Gap: Reclaiming the hours spent outside of school.The Long Walk: Why trust requires a commitment that outlasts funding cycles.The Case Against Scale: Why deep engagement is "structurally impossible" when chasing impact metrics.Neighbourhood Solidarity: Shifting the focus from "programmes" to "people".

Welcome to another episode where we take a deep dive into something we hold sacred at Shifting Orbits – our Impact Measurement Framework. This isn’t just about numbers or reports. For us, it’s a vision and a guiding compass. A way to make sure we stay honest to the change we promise to bring. Is it perfect? Far from it.We still wrestle with scattered data, gaps in information, and the everyday challenge of turning insight into action.But this is our attempt – to build clarity, accountability, and learning into our work, one layer at a time. Let’s unpack what this framework looks like, why it matters so much, and where we’re still figuring things out.

At Shifting Orbits Foundation (SOF), we believe that every child carries a story — often unheard, often unseen.In this special podcast, our staff and student interns have come together to bring alive some of these powerful stories. These stories moved them... and now, they move us too.We also know that there are many more stories around us, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be told. Listen as our wonderful artists — Bhargavi, Harshita, Likhita, Rupa, Hanumashree, Deepa, Vijay, Preethi ,Sandhya and Aparna — take you on a journey into the heart of our work, through the voices of our students. Their stories remind us why we do what we do. And why every story matters.

Our Latest experiments - We used NotebookLM and its Gemini 2.0 engine to generate a podcast between two of its AI agents and let it talk of our journey, our values, our model and more. And look what it did! Not sure if we should be amazed or scared about the way technology can do something so much better than us! So Here is a talk between two AI Agents on what they could make out of SOF and its journey!

In this episode, we talk about the blurring lines between what we think is impact vs what it is really is and how easy it is to fall into the trap of loosing your purpose especially when funding and branding becomes demanding.

This episode dwells into a "feelings" journey to help appreciate mindfulness that we need with Philanthropy. A blog version of this episode can be read at https://shiftingorbits.wordpress.com/2019/08/04/how-does-it-feel-when/

In this second episode, we take you through our core beliefs and premises on which we are building our organization.

In this introductory episode, we explain why we started and what are we after...