From Zoom Screens to Real Rooms: Meeting Partners in India, Cape Town, and Mexico
Jan 30, 2026
At Ember, our partnerships are built on care, trust, and deep listening. We work alongside community-based mental health organisations through a partnership model that includes remote mentoring across areas such as wellbeing, creative storytelling, impact, strategy, and organisational development, alongside opportunities for peer connection, travel, and global networking. These different strands inform one another and, together, contribute to the sustainability of the partners we work with.
Remote support helps us stay connected across time zones and shape conversations in ways that work for partners on the ground. It keeps support continuous, accessible, and easier to engage with alongside busy programme realities. In-person visits then add a different kind of depth, helping us understand context beyond what screens can hold.
We meet partners not to assess or oversee, but to learn together, strengthen trust, and listen more deeply in practice. These visits often strengthen other parts of the partnership too — from how we approach wellbeing and creative storytelling to how we think about impact, visibility, and long-term sustainability. This blended way of working helps us offer support that is grounded, connected, and responsive to what partners truly need.
How meeting in person impacts our partnership work:
Deeper understanding of partners’ work and context: Community-led mental health initiatives are the experts of their own context, and meeting teams in person gives us a fuller understanding of the realities shaping their work. It helps us better grasp the complexity of delivering community-based mental health support, as well as the wider systems, pressures, and possibilities surrounding that work.
More tailored and effective support: Meeting in person strengthens our tailored approach, helping us shape the focus of the partnership and offer support that is more relevant and grounded. It helps us better understand both immediate challenges and longer-term needs, which in turn shapes our mentorship and other areas of support.
The importance of relationships and of deeper listening : Relationships are at the heart of how we work with partners. Meeting in person creates more space for informal moments, such as shared meals, laughter and stories, which build trust and connection in ways that don’t always emerge in the same way online, but which shape how we work in partnership. As a global team working primarily online, truly and deeply listening to our partners is crucial to our work. Spending time together in person gives more space for conversations to evolve organically and gives us a chance to listen even more deeply than conversations behind screens can sometimes allow.
These in-person meetings often become a space for our team to go the extra mile- beyond emails and documents, to witness the lived reality of people we work with.
India
Our time meeting the India-based partners meeting in person created space for moments and conversations that weren’t planned often found over a shared meal, a cup of hot chai, a favourite song, or a mutual ex-colleague but which deeply shaped our understanding of partners’ work, their wellbeing, interests, dislikes, and passions helping us connect as people in similar walks of life.
Mata Jai Kaur: Connection, care, and conversation
Mata Jai Kaur Maternal & Child Health Care Centre (MJK) works in the Sri Ganganagar district in rural Rajasthan. Their Khushee Mamta (translated as "Happy Motherhood") Programme, born in response to the recognition that maternal health cannot be separated from mental health, trains community-based counsellors to provide evidence-based, cost-effective mental health services to pregnant women and new mothers experiencing depression, gender-based violence, suicidal ideation, and lack of economic opportunity.
Ember team members Jen and Rini decided to meet the MJK team at the Regional Hearth Summit in Bangalore, a day before the summit began. While the day was anchored around mapping their model, we were intentional about creating time for connection and conversation, through sharing a meal, spending time together without pressure to move quickly, and following conversations where they naturally led. Throughout the day, many discussions emerged organically, including the topic of team wellbeing – specifically, the need for non-work-focused spaces that foster connection, joy and creativity, and the importance of permission-giving around wellbeing in roles centred on caring for others.
These conversations continued and deepened over the following days at the Regional Hearth Summit. It was a real privilege to spend time with the team, and this time together helped to strengthen our relationship and deepen mutual understanding.
Urja Trust: Seeing care in action
Urja Trust works in Mumbai, supporting homeless young women who have faced gender-based violence, caste discrimination, and mental health stigma by providing shelter, healthcare, employment, education, legal aid, access to civil entitlements, and a trauma-informed, holistic, and inclusive therapeutic approach that nurtures the mind, body, and soul through counselling, expressive arts therapy, and Dance Movement Therapy.
Ember team members Jen and Tanya visited the Urja Trust team in Mumbai. Our first day in Mumbai was spent moving through the different spaces where Urja Trust shows up for women and their communities — visiting their crisis shelter, joining outreach at one of the city’s busiest railway stations, and learning more about how they work in close coordination with the railway police. We also spent time at their community outreach centre and ended the day at their long-term housing home for women and children who need sustained support. These visits helped us see the Urja team in action and understand how their crisis response connects to longer-term care. We got a chance to meet the people and the foundational team behind Urja Trust — faces and stories that often get lost behind small Zoom squares — and to better understand the environments where care is practised every day.
On the second day of our visit, we sat down to speak with the team, in their beautifully curated rooftop space at one of their shelters. We met without a formal agenda, and being together in person allowed the discussion to unfold organically into a conversation about wellbeing, guided by what the team wanted to share in that moment. Team members spoke openly about the realities of community-based work, including the practical and emotional demands inherent in the work, and the challenges of sustaining wellbeing in roles that require constant care for others.
Here’s what the Urja team had to say about meeting Ember!
These conversations, with both Mata Jai Kaur and Urja Trust, gave us a far deeper understanding of the well-being needs of their teams than we could have gained through structured meetings alone. Moments of connection and care like these reinforced why we prioritise meeting partners in person wherever possible, placing importance on connection, reflection, listening and care at the heart of our partnership work.
Mexico
In Mexico, Ember team members Anna Kydd (Co-founder & Director), Olivia Gutierrez Sarmiento(Project Manager), and June Larrieta (Head of Impact) visited several of our partners. These included Centro 32 (Ember Partnership Cohort), which provides psychosocial support and practical guidance to women, children, adolescents, and LGBTIQ+ people in contexts of human mobility; Redige (2025 Impact Fellowship awardee), a network supporting the mental and emotional wellbeing of women activists, human rights defenders, and survivors of violence; and Pandeo (2025 Creative Award recipient), a multi-disciplinary cultural project centring emotional health care through arts-based initiatives.
One thing that stood out to us was the creativity with which each organisation approaches its work. Although they address very different issues, creativity is central to all of them: whether through Centro 32’s cookbook and arts pieces, Redige’s use of embroidery as a form of activism, or Pandeo’s holistic support for independent artists throughout their creative journeys, including attention to mental health.
In a context of increasing political uncertainty, all the teams demonstrated adaptability in finding ways to continue their work. What was also striking was how deeply the founders’ personal stories are connected to the missions they serve — not as a “backstory,” but as something that shapes the way they lead, respond, and keep showing up.
Across each visit, we also saw how embedded these organisations are in their communities, and how much people rely on them to keep going: migrants navigating the journey across the border at Centro 32, families continuing to fight for justice through Redige, and marginalised communities finding ways to express their realities through art, especially where support is often limited, through Pandeo. These are truly movements led by the people!
For the partnership, these visits helped bring more clarity on what each team most needs now, and where Ember’s skills can genuinely complement what is already being led from within the community - whether through strengthening visibility and strategic networks, supporting sustainability planning, capturing their story, or helping build pathways towards longer-term resilience in an increasingly volatile context.
South Africa
In Cape Town, Ember team members had the opportunity to see Ember Innovators in action and spend time with Pedal Project and Inside Out.
Pedal Project empowers under-resourced children to overcome trauma and instability through mountain biking, combining physical activity with caring mentorship and therapeutic support to build emotional resilience, confidence, and connection in a safe and joyful environment. We spoke with the team about the project, investments and strategy, and drove to Phillipi Village to see part of the project in action.
InsideOut NPO is a collective of trainers and community workers dedicated to social justice, healing, and transformation, supporting individuals and communities affected by violence and oppression through a people-centred, systemic approach. We spent time with the team facilitating a session to better understand their methodology, vision, and the structural challenges they face in sustaining community-led work.
Across both visits, these moments on the ground deepened our understanding of how Ember’s support translates into real, lived impact — and where further mentorship and partnership can strengthen what is already taking root.
