ChangeLabs is the impact arm of BehanBox. It is where journalism becomes the infrastructure for change.
BehanBox has spent over half a decade on the ground reporting on gender, labour, care, health, climate, caste, and marginalisation across South Asia with a uniquely feminist lens. That work has generated more than stories. It has built datasets, surfaced systemic patterns, shifted policy, and forged deep relationships with the communities whose lives sit at the intersection of these issues.
ChangeLabs converts that knowledge into action.
We work with organisations, researchers, funders, and institutions that are trying to shift power – offering what five years of rigorous, community-accountable journalism has produced: grounded intelligence, trusted narrative, and the capacity to translate both into forms that influence how institutions understand inequity and how they act to dismantle it.
We are not a consultancy. We are a long-term knowledge and narrative partner with field presence, editorial independence, and community trust built over five years of uncompromised journalism.
Narratives shape policy and praxis.
BehanBox shapes the terms on which debate happens. We work with organisations and philanthropies to design and execute narrative change strategies from early-stage conception through campaign rollout, aligning narrative thinking with program goals at every stage. Anchored in a feminist lens and field-based evidence, we build narratives that are politically sharp, structurally informed, and designed to influence how institutions think, fund, and act.
Our work combines deep ground reportage, rigorous documentation, strategy design, and creative production, including multimedia stories, campaigns, and communication assets tailored for policy, philanthropic, and public audiences.
We also convene. On questions where public discourse is thin, contested, or shaped by voices far removed from the ground — the gendered implications of AI, the political economy of care work, the futures of feminist funding — BehanBox brings the right people into the same room and builds the shared language that new frameworks demand. This is how emerging issues get the grounding they need before they harden into policy.
Research must move beyond journals to effect change.
We partner with academic institutions and researchers to translate rigorous scholarship on gender and marginality in South Asia into accessible, public-facing work that travels. We bring our editorial rigour and sustained field presence to these collaborations – supporting fieldwork that is ethical and community-accountable, and transforming findings into multi-format, multi-platform and multilingual forms: reported features, policy briefs, multimedia stories, explainers, podcasts, and creative outputs that translate complex findings without flattening it.
We help research move in two directions: outward to policymakers, funders, and wider publics – and back to the communities whose lives inform it. This is how scholarship informs debate, strengthens advocacy, and earns a public life beyond the institutions that produced it.
Philanthropic and policy decisions are often made at a distance from the communities they aim to support. ChangeLabs bridges that distance with grounded, field-based intelligence.
We provide foundations, policymakers, and think tanks with real-time insight into how policies unfold in practice beyond official narratives and surface-level metrics. Our work includes private landscape scans that map actors, movements, funding flows, and emerging debates within a given field; cohort and portfolio analyses that help foundations understand how their grantees are positioned relative to broader ecosystem shifts; field intelligence briefs that translate ground-level developments into decision-ready insight; grant ecosystem mapping that identifies gaps, overlaps, and emerging opportunities across a funding landscape; and tailored policy briefs that help partners interpret fast-moving developments and refine strategy.
Grassroots organisations do transformative work that remains invisible to funders, policymakers, and the public.