THE CENTER FOR
COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
FISCAL SPONSORSHIP
Society for Children
Society for Children (SOCH) has been helping children abandoned at railway stations in India in various difficult circumstances since 2012 in Odisha, India. The organisation has already rescued more than 5,000 children from child trafficking, child labour and other difficulties.The organization through their residential rehabilitation programme has helped more than 100 children to come out from addiction issues and go back to school. They have also assisted youth having no family and difficult family backgrounds to start life on their own via counselling, mentoring, skill building, etc.
In 2020, SOCH Founder Manoj Kumar was awarded a fellowship by San Francisco based Gratitude Network and as a result of the recognition, he aspired to build his network in the USA to support SOCH's work in India. As part of Gratitude Network's Alumni Support Programme, Manoj is being invited to the USA every year during Gratitude Network's Leadership Summit. During his yearly visit, he is looking forward to meeting SOCH's donors/supporters in the USA. Kindly visit SOCH at www.sochforchildren.org to know more about his work and consider supporting SOCH via CCED to get tax benefits in the USA.
Friends of the Children of Orissa
Friends of the Children of Orissa are a small charity which was set up in 1992 to assist Palli Unnayan Seva Samiti (PUSS) in Orissa, who are still our main partner. In July 2012 we started a new project, to rescue runaway children from the railways.
For twenty years we have been supporting the children at the PUSS residential school near Bhubaneswar, the capital of Orissa, India's poorest state.There are now some 400 girls at the school; they have come from a variety of disadvantaged backgrounds. Some are children of sex workers, or of beggars, some are from leprosy colonies, and some were abandoned as babies. They get a good education and loving care at the PUSS school, and when they leave school they go on to further education, to formal employment and to other worthwhile occupations. We raise the funds for this through this website, through 'word of mouth' publicity, through fund-raising events, an annual classical music recital, and a variety of other means.
Friends of Shivia USA
Shivia’s goal is to empower the poorest in India to create livelihoods, boost income and inspire permanent, positive change. We do this through our Livelihood Programme (livelihood development), which aims to give whole families, particularly women and children, the skills to enter new enterprises and radically improve their earning power. We have selected backyard farming enterprises that enable families to earn their own money to lift themselves out of poverty. We currently work in four distinct locations and cover 600 villages in rural West Bengal, India. We started with poultry rearing in 2011, a market-led enterprise which requires no land to develop. Our Poultry Development Service (PDS) is delivered through the Shivia Poultry Toolkit, which provides everything a family needs to start and sustain their new enterprise. The toolkit comprises 10 one day old chicks (or ducks); vaccinations and medication to prevent disease and mortality; initial feed for 2 weeks and, most importantly, expert education and training over 6 months in all aspects of poultry husbandry, financial management and how to market the produce. Since operations started in 2011, we have provided training and poultry toolkits to over 6,000 home-farmers in rural areas surrounding Kolkata, indirectly impacting the lives of over 35,000 people as each home farmer has, on average, 5 or 6 dependents. Shivia’s livelihood development model is based on enterprise and not just aid and our beneficiaries make a small financial contribution to the programme. This not only gives farmers the sense of ownership and responsibility but also contributes to the long-term sustainability of our projects. In the PDS, each toolkit costs Shivia approximately $22 USD and the farmers contribute, on average, $6 USD. In 2014, we started a new enterprise in agricultural development, Agri-management Services (AMS), in response to requests from our home farmers who have small but un-productive plots of land. AMS provides soil testing and training into how to develop these plots to produce high yield crops and a new source of income for the family.
Marin Media Institute/Point Reyes Light
The Point Reyes Light is a Pulitzer Prize-winning weekly newspaper published since 1948 in western Marin County, California. It is generally considered the newspaper of record for the region. The Light gained national attention in 1979 due to its reporting on a cult, Synanon, and the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the paper for this coverage. The paper has since been purchased by the locally owned Marin Media Institute. The Institute aims to promote excellent local journalism through a variety of media and educational programs in west Marin County. Governed by a board of journalists, writers and educators, the Institute fosters rigorous local news reporting and analysis that reflect the needs and values of the region and its connection between local, national and global issues.[1] The Institute supports inclusive civil discourse; provides a voice for the region’s culturally diverse populations; and furthers the craft of village journalism through internships, fellowships, educational forums and public seminars.
Grassroots Finance Action
https://www.grassrootsfinanceaction.org/
Our mission is to learn about, help shape, build to scale, and facilitate the global exchange of locally developed grassroots financial solutions
Grassroots Finance Action challenges the top-down approach to development by recognizing the incredible capacity of local communities to improve their own living conditions. GFA empowers local solutions by doing the following:
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Not coming in with our own solutions
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Asking many questions
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Identifying community leaders/geniuses who have innovative answers
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Asking the community geniuses how they would spread their ideas to others
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Providing resources and support for the community geniuses to test out their ideas
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Connecting community geniuses with one another to facilitate the exchange of information
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Documenting the results to promote future scaling
