Organisations That Hold the World Together
When the Chief Justice of India compared youth to cockroaches, millions of young people turned the insult into a movement - and kept building. Months later, they are still marching. We explore the quieter version of the same impulse: the organisations that do not trend, but endure.
Earlier this year, an Indian political movement named after a cockroach acquired millions of Instagram followers in a matter of weeks.
The Cockroach Janata Party was never really about cockroaches. It emerged from frustration, satire, and a generation recognising something familiar: that institutions which once promised progress increasingly felt distant from the realities of everyday life.
A few months earlier, Kendrick Lamar stood before one of the largest television audiences in the world and opened his Super Bowl halftime performance with an echo of Gil Scott-Heron's famous line: the revolution will not be televised.
Different moments, different mediums. Perhaps a similar instinct!
When people lose faith in institutions, they rarely stop caring altogether. More often, they begin looking elsewhere. Sometimes they protest. Sometimes they organise. Sometimes they build. The instinct is neither new nor dead.
The last time this happened at scale, across the social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, it produced revolutionary cultural moments, and more. Across different parts of the world, it helped create organisations, collectives, cooperatives, and local institutions that continued shaping communities long after public attention moved elsewhere. That instinct feels visible again today.
The Harvard Kennedy School's 2025 Youth Poll suggested that what is often interpreted as disengagement may be better understood as exclusion: young people stepping away because they no longer feel represented, not because they do not care.
And when Zohran Mamdani became New York City's youngest mayor through a campaign that mobilised younger voters while bypassing much of the traditional political machinery, it reflected another version of the same question: If existing systems no longer feel responsive, what gets built instead?
Some of those alternatives become visible. Most do not.
- A supplementary education non profit by locals, that supports children in their village in India.
- A cooperative dairy in rural Indonesia that has quietly survived policy cycles.
- The community health collective in Nairobi.
- A faith institution in Colombia that doubles as a neighbourhood's financial safety net.
These organisations rarely trend. But they are often where change becomes durable.
They are where resources become relationships, where ideas become infrastructure, and where communities continue functioning when formal systems fall short. At Footbridge, we call these Local Impact Actors - organisations directly accountable to the communities they serve.
They take many forms: non and for profits, social enterprises, cooperatives. Public services facilities, faith institutions, local government bodies, impact-first businesses, societies and charities.
What connects them - beyond differences in legal structures, sectors, operational models - are their proximity and accountability: to people and their problems.
Many of these organisations remain under-supported. The systems designed to deploy resources (financial, techology, knowledge..) to support such organisations, are often built around the definitions of 'scale and visibility', rather than local realities. They continue doing critical work they were created for, but without access to the governance support, strategic thinking, and institutional scaffolding that help organisations grow and endure.
If you are supporting Local Impact Actors, building one, or thinking about it - we would love to talk!