SST's Approach

Organise communities into social units e.g. Self-Help Groups (SHGs) of poor women, User groups, Watershed Committees and strengthening them as Peoples Institutions to leverage institutional finances for community livelihoods, education and health.
Identify schools in the remotest villages and adopt them with the help of local corporate for three to five years period and work closely with the government department to enhance education. If necessary place volunteers /resource teachers for shorter time span.
Identify suitable economic activities to increase productivity and incomes among target families; building collaboration with other stakeholders, banks, government departments, corporate houses etc.
Mobilise financial resources from government agencies, donors, banks, and other financial institutions: for supporting education of children from poor families, livelihood enhancements, creating assets and infrastructure.

Setting up mechanisms to ensure the sustainability of the activities initiated for the benefit of the poor communities. SST adopts cluster saturation approach by developing prototype models that could be replicated on a large scale. We identify cluster of villages having considerable number of underprivileged (poor) population. We follow standard methodology of wealth ranking in these villages to identify the most deprived in the community and organize them in small groups of SHG, User Group and Cooperatives. These small groups generate strength of collectives and help us in reaching economy of the scale. After detail resource analysis, we carry out livelihood planning for these families, where they can visualize what they want to achieve in life.

SST tries to promote livelihoods through Integrated Natural Resource Management (land treatment and water harvesting), improved agriculture (intensive agriculture with scientifically proven new crops) and agro pastoral development through horticulture. We also adopt the approach of reaching landless families through our livestock promotion program, where we introduce genetically improved breed, health, rearing and sanitation practices; collective marketing etc.

In education, we support government schools to develop them to institutions of excellence. In each school that we adopt, the work begins with infrastructure investment and supporting learning outcomes by placing resource teachers in school. Working in collaboration with the government and private market players, we firmly believe that quality education can be delivered to the poor at their doorsteps and this integrated approach will bring about drastic change in the lives of thousands of student from deprived households.

SST strongly believes that increasing income or education alone is not the solution for the poor. Therefore, we work to promote people’s institutions /collective institutions (Schools, School Management Committees, Cooperatives, producer organization). These institutions help in sustaining education initiatives, negotiating in the market, procuring collective inputs and accessing entitlements to government schemes.

SST strongly believes that increasing income alone is not the solution for the poor. Therefore, we work to promote people’s institutions /collective institutions (Cooperatives, producer organization). These institutions help to negotiate in the market, procuring collective inputs and access to their entitlements to government schemes.