STRENGTHENING ORGANIZATION

Strengthening Organisations at Grassroots Level

Overview

In our early days, our mandate was to facilitate the emergence of organisations, which could plan and implement development within the community. For our 15 years, much of our work has been focused through these organisations.

Today, however, we view our role more as a facilitator, to strengthen these organisations at grassroots level and to enable them not only to participate in the development processes but also to influence decisions that affects their lives and to advocate for their rights.

Our partners within this broad society or so called “apex organizations”, networks or federations of grassroots groups, are wide and varied and represent a cross section of rural and urban entities.

We have also accumulated considerable experience of “capacity-building through partnership” with some major South India NGOs and have stared to develop coaching and mentoring methodologies for capacity-building work with smaller ones. We have worked extensively with national or state or district or municipal departments of agriculture, health, education and have combined advocacy with capacity building up to the national level. The vast majority of our capacity-building efforts focuses on people and groups who work at the ‘grassroots’ – that is, the local level, and are generally referred to as community-based organisations.

What distinguishes these groups is the fact that in the main they are socially, politically, economically or culturally excluded. Through our programmes of research, capacity building, advocacy, training, information and networking with other organisations, we have sought to facilitate the process of including the marginal women’s groups into the fold of the broader society.

At the centre of our work lies the desire not only to improve the quality of life of communities through these various organisations, networks, federations and grassroots groups, but also to respect the values of equality and social justice, and to do our work with integrity and courage. The challenge now is to go beyond an understanding and a definition of the social exclusion of the communities we work with and to facilitate the process of their inclusion in all processes that define, redefine and decide on global governance.

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