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In February 2020, 11 people from the U.K. set off to India to study what we call Self-Reliant Groups, an idea born in India. There they are variously called Self-help Affinity Groups -with the unfortunate acronym SHAG- or Self Help Groups, which in the U.K. suggests recovery from alcoholism. There have been other study tours like this. Noel Matthias, an Indian by birth, brought a group of women to learn from his home country nearly a decade ago. The result was WEvolution, an organisation to promote the movement in the U.K. Roughly 100 Self-Reliant Groups have emerged since. In India the number of groups cannot reliably be determined, but the count is in millions not hundreds. The purpose of the 2020 visit was to learn about scale. Our number comprised four women in Self-Reliant Groups in Scotland, two staff members from WEvolution, two funders of innovation, a government policy maker, an expert from the third sector, and me, a research scientist. Emma, Kate and Sarah work for funders and government, creating the conditions for innovation to flourish. The views they express here are their own, not necessarily those of their organisation.