Liby Johnson returned to Gram Vikas in 2017 as Executive Director, nearly two decades after he first arrived in Odisha as a young IRMA graduate in the immediate aftermath of the 1999 Super Cyclone. In those early years at Gram Vikas, he led multi-disciplinary relief and reconstruction teams across 15 districts, and went on to shape the organisation’s programmes in rural livelihoods, natural resource management, habitat development, and renewable energy. He had come to this work through ADITHI in Bihar, where he spent three years building livelihood and empowerment resources for women in Santal Pargana after graduating from IRMA.
In the years between, Liby coordinated post-tsunami reconstruction with the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. He then joined Kudumbasree, Kerala’s pioneering poverty eradication mission, where he set up and led the National Resource Organisation as Chief Operating Officer, adapting Kerala’s model across ten Indian states under the National Rural Livelihood Mission. He later served with UNDP as an expert in entrepreneurship promotion.
At Gram Vikas, Liby has continued that work at the intersection of practice and policy. He served on the National Task Force for the Jal Jeevan Mission in 2019–2020 and contributes regularly to policy thinking on rural water, sanitation, and livelihoods at national and state levels.
Liby is a graduate of the Institute of Rural Management, Anand.