Twenty-five years after a group of disillusioned social workers left the traditional NGO they worked for to explore new ways of working with the pavement dwellers crowding Mumbai’s streets, and the organization they founded, SPARC, is one of the largest NGOs in India working on issues of housing and infrastructure for the urban poor. SPARC and its partner organizations, the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and Mahila Milan— together known as the Alliance—work in over seventy cities across India and are active participants in the Slum/Shack Dwellers International coalition of people’s organizations. The Alliance is recognized internationally for its democratic vision, pioneering strategies, and critical role in the dramatic shift in the perception and treatment of the urban poor within India, as well as in attitudes about urban growth more broadly.

For the past several months, SPARC has been delving into the history of these past twenty-five years as part of its involvement in Equalinrights’ Transformative Learning for Human Rights project. In doing so, we seek to understand and document the impact of SPARC’s work on individual, organizational, and societal levels. To that end, we have conducted interviews with communities, leaders, and advisers, combed through old documents and recordings, and reviewed the historical context surrounding different events in SPARC’s history. Gradually, a clear portrait is emerging of a process in which rights are translated from abstract concepts to meaningful, tangible changes in people’s lives through the hard work of communities, long-term commitment to slow but steady progress, and the power of collective action.

This experience has been tremendously valuable: the dynamic nature of SPARC’s work can make it difficult to take time to reflect on processes of change. Though everyone involved with SPARC, from the original founders to the leaders of just-formed savings groups, has thought deeply about how SPARC’s work has brought about change in their lives and the lives of others, opportunities for reflection on an organizational level is rare. Capturing and synthesizing individual recollections and reflections has given us new insights into the key aspects of our work and the varied, sometimes unexpected, ways in which change occurs. We anticipate that the resulting document will provide us with a rich resource to which we can return time and time again to guide and structure our work as we move forward in the urban millennium.

In addition to our work on the TLHR project and our core activities, we are currently engaged with a number of additional projects, including assessments of risk and vulnerability in informal urban settlements, an exploratory program training slum dwellers to map their settlements using GIS technology, and two major building programs in Pune and Bhubaneswar. SPARC is also active in the international umbrella organization Shack/Slum Dwellers International, through which we seek to support movements for the rights of the urban poor around the globe and bring greater attention to issues of urbanization in the developing world.

Nyayagrah is a justice project of Aman Biradari - a people’s campaign for a secular, peaceful, just and humane world - and has been based   in Gujarat since October 2005. Nyayagrah started its engagement with Equalinrights’ transformative learning project in January 2010 with the aim of mapping out “stories of change” from the perspectives of the victims, justice activists and advocates working on the Nyayagrah project. The project will also document Nyayagrah’s theory of change based on Gandhian ideology and reflect on the integration of this theory of change conceptually and in practice at various levels within the organization as well as assess the extent to which the victims share the non-violent, ethical foundations on which Nyayagrah was set-up.

The project began with a one day Joint Reflection Workshop in Ahmedabad on 20th March 2010 where participants reflected on the history and context that led to the emergence of this unique project. This was followed up with smaller group workshops on Power and Power Dynamics, Self-Change and organizational change, conflict resolution and Human Rights held respectively on the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of March 2010. An important insight resulting from these workshops was that it was necessary and timely to create this space for self and group reflection to encourage a critical and reflexive understanding of ideas that structure Nyayagrah’s conceptual and operational framework.

Apart from this marathon of workshops, there were focus group discussions where victims were invited and requested to participate with their ideas and experiences. These sessions have again alerted us to the much needed work required to improve the ground reality of poverty and lack of access to basic amenities and services, which are the biggest inhibitors to victims wishing to bring about change in their own community or within society at large.

The next stage of the process will be a final meeting scheduled in August 2010 to reflect on Nyayagrah’s journey and consider future action in light of the lessons learnt so far.