A SELCO Foundation Initiative
Centre for Systems Practice
Enabling practitioners to navigate complexity, build convergence, and create lasting change
What is CSP?
- A Movement Platform for Systems Practice
India's development sector is full of people who care deeply and work hard. And yet problems persist, resurface, and multiply. Not because solutions are absent, but because they're built in silos, aimed at symptoms, and disconnected from the systems that keep producing them.
CSP started as a question: what would it take for India's grassroots practitioners to not just understand this, but act on it? To move from systems thinking, which is widely known, to systems practice.
The answer was a movement platform where practitioners learn from each other, where knowledge is built in common, and where a practice takes shape.
India’s development landscape has long been shaped by grassroots practitioners, civil society movements, community and government institutions that work closely with lived realities. Across sectors and geographies, they have created deeply rooted social innovations by responding to people’s needs with adaptability, empathy, and contextual understanding. Much of this work has always been systemic in nature - navigating interconnected challenges, building local ownership, and creating change that extends beyond isolated interventions.
As climate change, inequality, and overlapping social and economic crises intensify, there is an urgent need to recognise, strengthen, and amplify this capability for systems practice. CSP exists to support that shift - by building communities of practice, nurturing practitioner-led learning, creating shared knowledge, and enabling diverse actors to collectively make sense of complexity and act on it together.
Whenever we talk of systems change, somehow the image that has been created in the entire world is that systems change is always top-down. It's the doing. It's not in the thinking; it's actually on the ground.
Sanjay Purohit, CEO, Centre for Exponential Change
Nurturing Practice through Three Pathways
Creating immersive, field-based learning spaces where practitioners build the mindset, tools, and real-world experience needed to navigate complexity and drive systemic change.
Documenting, synthesising, and sharing field intelligence, case studies, tools, and frameworks that make systems practice more visible, accessible, and practice ready.
Building a collaborative ecosystem of organisations and practitioners to amplify learnings, foster peer exchange, and enable collective approaches to complex challenges.
Partnering with those who share our vision
