Note from the CEO

Dear ICC community,

After more than six years as CEO of the India Climate Collaborative, and nearly a decade inside this work, I have decided not to renew my term. I will step down at the end of May, with the institution in a strong place and the right team to carry it forward.

When we began, climate philanthropy in India was barely a sentence waiting to be written. The people who might have answered the question together, researchers, organisers, funders, communities holding knowledge of land and water older than the word policy, were largely working alone, each unsure who else could see what was coming. The ICC was built, slowly, on a simple recognition: that no one should have to carry these questions by themselves.

What that took was not only funding but field-building, moving Indian philanthropic capital toward climate where it had long been cautious, building the language and frameworks a field needs to act, and widening the circle so that grassroots and community-rooted voices could sit in the same room as the largest funders and be heard. Over the last three years alone, the ICC helped mobilise close to two hundred crore rupees of domestic philanthropic capital towards climate action in India. But the number matters less to me than what it stood for: trust beginning to move ahead of capital, institutions that once behaved like islands learning to behave like an archipelago, related, and stronger for it. And perhaps most lasting of all, a new generation of young people who entered climate work through the ICC and found, instead of a single job, a whole field opening in front of them.

None of this was the work of one person. It was built by an extraordinary team, by partners and funders who believed early, and by a Board, past and present, whose stewardship protected a long imagination from short-term panic. I owe particular gratitude to Mr. Ratan Tata and Ms. Rohini Nilekani, who understood before most that an ecosystem is not produced by shared concern alone, it must be tended. And to everyone who has worked at the ICC across these years: the institution carries your fingerprints, everywhere, even where your names do not appear. Thank you.

I leave with confidence. The ICC today is more connected, more ambitious and more alive than the organisation we first imagined. The team carrying it forward has tremendous capability, and I trust them to take it forward. Perhaps this is the closest thing institution-building offers to grace, the knowledge that something once so uncertain has become real enough to walk on without you.

I am not leaving the work. I remain inside this ecosystem, still committed to its questions, and looking forward to the next way of contributing to a climate future for India.

From far enough above, the earth is no longer a place but a single turning thing, whole and quiet in the dark. A decade looks something like that from here. Lived from the inside, it was a thousand separate mornings. From this height, it is one unbroken curve. And what the curve shows me is continuity.

A path exists, in the end, because people keep walking it together.

Shloka Nath