It a is a great joy and pride to announce to all of us at the Society for Participatory Research , Environment and Development – SPREAD, that we have completed 9th year with people for a positive goal. It was a partnership with the local communities with a different attitude for meaningful life and better society. Our shared vision has been that human beings hold the key to long term development process and that the ultimate goal is to offer people more options to improve their standard of wellbeing, their freedom of participation in development planning and implementation.

The SPREAD was initiated in February 2001 and incorporated under the Indian Trust Act in November 16, 2002 with the objective of bringing highly motivated young women and men into the development sector to promote rural innovations. The SPREAD functions in 8 districts, 17 administrative blocks & 158 villages of Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa.

The districts, like Purulia (West Bengal), East Singhbhum (Jharkhand) and Balasor (Orissa) have been counted among the poorest in the country. Poverty and deprivation find expression in every aspect of life of the rural folk. Illiteracy, lack of health infrastructure, high maternal and infant mortality, low productivity etc. are the indicators of the districts’ backwardness. The highly degraded state of natural resources only serves to increase the woes of the people manifold. This coupled with erratic pattern of rainfall has made districts highly susceptible to draught and famines. The poor people look out for alternative sources of livelihood, in the absence of which, they usually migrated to nearby towns and cities.

The aim of the SPREAD is to reduce poverty in its area of operation. Its mission is to build peoples’ organizations for development innovations and to upscale interventions for impacting livelihoods of the poor, thereby enabling the poor to overcome poverty and realize their aspirations. This mission emanates from its core organizational values such as ‘grassroots action’, ‘enabling’, ‘innovation’, ‘excellence’ and ‘collaboration’. It seeks to promote three kinds of organizations to achieve its mission.