In 2006 - 2007, there were more news stories than ever on the issues we care about: providing education, closing the socio – economic divide, helping vulnerable families in and around West Bengal, reducing extreme poverty, and saving lives by improving health in the inaccessible areas. Many of these stories praised us and our well-wishers, but some of them raised important questions about our strategies.

Questions like: Given our focus on preventing disease, are we doing enough to help people who are already sick? And, does our Education program have the right approach for improving girl child education?

These are good questions—and we’re going to try to answer them.

As an organization, we will help people know not just what we do, but why we’re doing it, how we’re working, and what we’re learning. This is one of the samity’s top goals for the coming year.

Why does it matter? Because to solve the problems we need work together with governments, community based organizations, other NGOs. We’ve worked hard to help make that happen. But as we collaborate in public and private partnership on a large scale, our partners, grantees, co-funders, and the public should know more. They should understand our values and the role we want to play in improving people’s lives. They should know what we’re learning from our social welfare services: what is working, and what isn’t. And they should understand the impact we want our well-wishers to have and know whether it’s actually making that impact.

But as we grow, we’re also working hard to bring more people in the samity who can guide us on our core issues and help support our mission. We’re taking great care to making choice of programmes and then implementing it in the right area to make real progress touching the issues of health, education and empowerment of women, specially.

This is truly an exciting time in SHIS’s history: Improving the lives of millions of people, but more out there which is still out of reach. The more deeply we get involved in these issues and see what’s possible, the more all of us will want to strive for the betterment.

I hope you’ll find this year’s annual report one step in the right direction.

We’ll also continue or expand some of the things we’re already doing to reach the unreached specially the geographically challenged people. In the meantime, every one of us at the samity is looking forward to making more progress on the issues we care about. And we’re looking forward to sharing the results—whether it’s good news or bad—with our well-wishers and the public.

We are thankful to the magnanimous Dominique Didi and Dada for their constant support and to our beloved brother Gaston Dada for his endless blessings for giving us strength and power to fight for the right cause.

Sabitri Pal
President