Guiding Principals

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All our work and programs will center on our vision and mission of 'happy children'. People, their institutions, natural resources and environment are the focal points of our programs and activities.
We will approach our goal to redefine the way we work with children as a vital task of great magnitude. We will create an enabling context for the children to live and grow, learn and participate, decide and implement, monitor and evaluate, analyze and change.
All of our activities will be organized to ensure the conservation of our natural and cultural heritage. We will undertake no work that is in conflict with this principle.
'Happy Children' is a quantifiable and measurable factor. This indicates that we want the development process to focus on the advancement of man's sensibilities and values. In the absence of these all development is restricted to material development, which in our view is often limited and skewed. We believe it essential for the development process to establish and revive values and sensibility.
Our way of working will reflect that of children - unrestricted by established norms and based on equality and freedom for all.
Gender equity has always been an important principle for us. We believe that men and women should have access to opportunities based on their material, educational and societal merits. We also believe that often it is important to encourage women to take advantage of opportunities.
We believe that 'self sustainability' is as important as 'process' in development. To achieve sustainability, evaluation is imperative at every step. We will adopt the mechanism of frequent monitoring and evaluation in all our activities.
We believe that all development activity should be undertaken with the consensus and collective agreement of the concerned community. Social Development organizations should play a part in society's activities, innovations and attempts, and not the other way around. Therefore our work will be community based. We will work towards the empowerment of communities so that they can take the initiative. We will help them acquire the capacity necessary to collect facts and develop independent and relevant plans and, if the need arises, be able to gather governmental or non governmental help. Also, they will be able to evaluate their programs and, after they are finished, to deal with their maintenance and to make necessary amendments.
People/ organizations that are working for a better world face immense challenges with limited resources. Money is a scarce resource for poor communities and for those who are working for these communities. Keeping this fact in mind, efforts to create change must be focused, sustainable and cost effective and they have to go to scale. We need to utilize resources with proper research, feasibility studies and with proper and well-thought methodologies and strategies and with conscious/ designed evaluation, impact assessment and documentation plan. This will help in developing cost effective replicable models for scaling-up the interventions. This will also help in designing advocacy strategies and sharing of learning with other partners. In short, research, advocacy and communication shall be the integral part of our program designing and implementation to maximize impact and to ensure cost effectiveness.
We realize that to achieve sustainable change we will have to work on attitudinal and behavioral change among all the stakeholders of the change process. Attitudinal- behavioral change can be achieved through providing an enabling environment to all the stakeholders. We believe that training, credit or financial support alone cannot change behavior and cannot provide the enabling environment for the poor for his/her empowerment. Behavior and attitudinal changes can be seen when the enabling environment pushes them to act and behave differently. The timely inputs of training and credits can make a difference if an enabling environment is already effective. Hence, working with the government and community groups/institutions to create enabling environments for the poor is a precondition to achieve sustainable, cost-effective and large-scale change.
We are committed to the principle of accountability. All our activities will be governed by complete accountability and transparency. We believe that work that is not accountable has no positive impact on society and in fact can lead to negative trends in society and limit the impact of future development processes.
Our activities will work towards ensuring equality. Inequality is a breeding ground for violence and violence is dangerous for development. Inequality in some Himalayan areas has already led to violence, communalism and terrorism. A development process that is based on inequity is a process opposed to development. We will undertake a serious attempt to root out inequality and lay the foundations for complete equity.
All our efforts will be set within the parameters of sustained and continued development. We believe that interventions that are not sustainable are not complete. We will concentrate on work that communities will eventually adopt and will feel inspired to carry on.
We will work towards creating a feeling of ownership for all programs that directly impact the communities we work with and thereby ensure the continuation of interventions. We will also work towards the involvement of people who feel that they have no direct link with our work.