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| PARTNERS |
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Projects are developed and implemented in partnership with the Indian Alliance, comprising of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers, (SPARC) the National Slum-Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and Mahila Milan.
NSDF is a community-based organization whose membership is largely made up of community groups and leaders that live in informal settlements around India (approximately 750,000 households as of 2010). Established in 1974, NSDF has a history of organizing the poor against demolitions, mobilizing the poor to come together, articulating their concerns and finding solutions to the problems they face as well as attempting to secure basic amenities of water, sanitation and such for the urban poor.
Mahila Milan means "Women Together" in Hindi and is a decentralized network of poor women collectives that manage credit and savings activities in their communities. The rationale behind the formation of MM lay in the recognition of the enormous potential that women's groups have in transforming relations within society and in improving the lives of poor families.
SPARC is a Non Governmental Organization that has been working since 1984 on issues of urban housing and infrastructure in partnership with two community-based organizations - the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and Mahila Milan (MM). SPARC supports the mobilization of slum dwelling communities throughout India [and the developing world] to improve their participation in accessing financial resources, basic services, and housing, and to improve their participation in decision-making about how their cities are developed and managed.
UDRC (Urban and Development Resource Centre)
UDRC was set up a decade ago in Bhubaneswar and is headed by Monalisa Mohanty. Since its inception, UDRC is aligned with SPARC (Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres), with the view to empower slum communities in Odisha to access housing and infrastructure. UDRC works with the Odisha slum dwellers federation and Mahila Milan in 5 cities in Odisha, namely, Bhubaneswar, Puri, Cuttack, Paradeep and Rourkela and in 3 cities in West Bengal, namely, Kolkota, Kona and Kalyani. There are about 9,000 members in 184 settlements within the Mahila Milan and the Odisha Slum Dwellers Federation fold. In 2013, UDRC received independent status as an NGO but continues its affiliation with the SPARC-SSNS alliance.
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| Why was SSNS set up? |
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The Charity Commissioner’s office has structures in place to support NGOs which receive grants for a specific project with a fixed timeline and a tangible outcome.
However, projects do not fit into neat timescales and the nature of backstopping or guaranteeing community risks in the undertaking of their projects has made the approval of SPARCs accounts by the Charity Commissioner slow and difficult. |
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One of SPARC’s roles is to facilitate communities in construction and with actual construction (where possible). For every purchase and sale, loan, payment or credit, permission was needed from the Charity commissioner. This took time and money and thus, SSNS, SPARC’s financial and construction special purpose vehicle was set up in 1998 to operate as a section 25 company.
Operating under company-suited financial regulations has really opened up the Alliance, through it’s special purpose vehicle SSNS, to deal with the financial and physical elements of construction projects (e.g. technical assistance, monitoring of construction and supervision of construction). |
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