Vision

To enable the most impoverished rural communities in India to achieve their full potential by ensuring they have equal access to the opportunities available to everyone else. Our aim is to help communities tap into opportunities and acquire the means, skills and understanding that will transform their lives for the better from one generation to another.
We want change that is self-driven, sustainable and impactful so we can help transform rural India.

Mission

To create local and scalable solutions for rural communities that foster dignity and prosperity in villages. A community-driven sustainable model of empowerment for rural India. These rural development initiatives provide women and the youth with skills and information to make informed choices that will help them overcome poverty and embrace prosperity. The goal is to bring about a change in the lives of the most deprived in rural communities, in the poorest 100,000 villages that we call ‘Stranded India.’

We begin by seeking to change attitudes by building hope and aspiration. As a rural development NGO in India, we work with the communities and change agents ranging from volunteers, or change vectors, to non-profit partners and the government, so we can provide the means and specific solutions for the community to prosper. We then help create a marketplace and build the manpower support needed for rural communities to become self reliant.

We call this the community, governance and market model. Each has to function optimally for rural transformation to be lasting and sustainable.

In order to achieve rural development in India on a large scale, we work with collectives of women or Self-Help Groups (SHGs) that come together for activities that provide some form of rural livelihood, greater focus on health, education and nutrition and skills, thereby improving the lives of the community.

Our first task is to help these women members set realistic and aspirational income goals for themselves and their households. We then look at the challenges they will likely face in reaching these goals and find ways to plug these difficulties by working with partner nonprofits, government agencies and private enterprises.

For rural livelihood transformation to happen, good governance is important. We help the community seek better governance from the public sector to enable the success of our development work in the villages.

We have a raft of initiatives and our rural development program could be as simple as ensuring that eligible family members get enrolled in income generation opportunities such as rural wage guarantee programmes, or in skilling so people can earn better.

Once the communities start to see that they can earn better and avail the public services meant for them, it increases their belief that change is possible and they become more amenable to a shift in attitudes.

These attitudes could include understanding that rural child education can substantially improve opportunities. As a result of our work, often illiterate parents demand schooling for their children, pregnant mothers learn to eat better and seek primary health services even in remote villages, ensuring lower infant and mother mortality.

Sometimes, it may mean farmers agreeing to a different cropping pattern that is more robust, and learning better methods of cultivation, or using higher quality seeds.

Prosperity helps communities focus on their rights and obligations. Subsequently the delivery of public services improves vastly because it is led by the community.

Our goal is to make these communities self-sufficient. To do that we also work with partners to create access to a market for the goods and services produced in rural India so there is a supply and demand cycle that helps them have a sustainable livelihood.