Introduction
Partnerships
and coalitions in development are critical for maximizing resources, scope, and
impact. Founded in 1984 to work with
the pavement dwellers of Mumbai, the widely-recognized NGO SPARC (the Society
for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers) is self-described as “one of the
largest Indian NGOs working on housing and infrastructure issues for the urban
poor.” SPARC actively works through a
coalition – referred to as the Alliance
- with two other organizations, the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF),
and Mahila Milan, a network of women’s micro credit and savings collectives.
Activities as an Alliance
NSDF: organizes and mobilizes the urban
poor and negotiates with resource providing institutions.
Mahila Milan: supports
and trains women's collectives to administer and manage their community's
resources and participate in NSDF activities.
SPARC: provides the
administrative, financial, policy, documentation and other support necessary
for these processes to be successful on the ground.
Successes/Strengths as an Alliance
- Very successful at large-scale community mobilization e.g. played an integral role in the community-led resettlement of 20,000
slum dwellers along Mumbai’s railways
- Active and vocal in their support
of the residents of Dharavi.
- Regular meetings of the Alliance; meetings very inclusive with high participation of stakeholders.
Weaknesses as an Alliance
- Financial
and Power imbalance - SPARC responsible for a greater proportion of
funding. As a result, holds sway over group activities e.g. last year
Mahila Milan successfully proposed only 1 of the 10 enacted projects.
- NSDF and Mahila Milan have limited direct communication. Instead, they prefer to communicate via SPARC.
- In
government negotiations, the Alliance has not always been united.
Individual groups have negotiated independently, sometimes to the
detriment of the Alliance, and its constituents.
Scenario
With
the start of the new year, the Alliance
has to decided to hold a planning meeting to formulate a joint strategy for
addressing the impending development of Dharavi. Among the issues on the agenda for the meeting
are to establish the Alliance’s
priorities in Dharavi for the coming year and to allocate tasks and resources
among the organizational partners.
3 Day Workshop Agenda
Day 1:
Create a baseline via the Evaluation Eye (anonymous)
Card & Chart to generate priorities as an Alliance.
Day 2:
Social with Pukar: introduction of Pukar members, and outline of their setup.
Use media (appropriate to technology availability) to engage the group
initially. e.g. videos, pictures, sound recordings of past successes.
Resource allocation & feasibility to rank priorities with the
participation of Pukar, another NGO with technical knowledge.
Use inclusive tools like voting beans to ensure power and knowledge disparities accounted for.
Day 3:
Inclusion of other partners e.g. gov't
Determining which NGO will be responsible for what tasks
Final evaluation eye measuring expectations for the coming year
Pukar Profile
Goals
The goal of PUKAR
is to create a world class incubator for knowledge, debate and
innovation about cities and globalization. It takes Mumbai as its
conceptual base and laboratory for cross-disciplinary research projects
which can create new urban knowledge, thus enhancing circulation of
ideas and concepts between the local and the global.
PUKAR aims to democratize
research and broaden access to knowledge among disenfranchised or
weakly institutionalized groups and to create a space from which their
non traditional and non expert knowledge can contribute to local,
national and global debates about their own futures. It promotes
research as a right for everyone inside and outside of the formal
educational system and uses research as a tool for pedagogy, advocacy,
transformation and intervention. PUKAR is designed to complement, on
the social and cultural side, the current growth in technology driven
knowledge initiative in India.
PUKAR
regards knowledge, action and research as interactive and recursive
processes. Knowledge involves documentation and intervention. Action,
in this perspective, involves exploration and innovation. Research, not
simply a prerogative of the academic world, is a disciplined means of
acquiring new knowledge. PUKAR seeks to reinvent the terms of the
relationship between knowledge, action and research.
