People’s Action For Transformantion (PAT) was registered in 1997 as a Public Charitable Trust under the Indian Trust Act (1882) by a team of socially committed and concerned individuals. The objective was to empower the underprivileged in the slum communities of Trichy, and to improve the quality of their life. PAT started its operations with its Children’s Development Program (CDP) in Trichy, with support from Rotary International and Asha for Education USA & Canada, a project aimed at providing young children (aged 2 to 5) with basic early education, a safe and stimulative play environment, a nutritious diet and regular health check-ups. Few years later PAT forayed into women’s empowerment, formation of women's self-help-groups, education for children of the self-help-group members, vocational training and health camps. After a period of 5 years doing mostly social intermediation in the lives of women, children and youth, PAT decided to step into the activities promoting economic development in the lives of the clients by way of Microfinance program as part of fulfilling the objectives of the Trust. Most recently, PAT with help from Asha for Education Canada has been able to successfully operate a microfinance program which provides livelihood-generating capital to 800 women, and which consequently also generates enough income (from interest collected) to fully operate 3 CDP Centres that educate the young children of the micro-loan recipients in the slum communities.
PAT's vision is to become a self-sustainable organization empowering the urban and rural poor, economically and socially, irrespective of caste and creed. PAT's mission is to enable the urban and rural poor to attain sustainable growth by creating livelihood opportunities through delivery of microfinance and related support services by fair and transparent systems, and to provide them education centres with a safe and healthy learning environment for their young underprivileged children.
People's Action for Transformation (PAT) started their Children Development Program (CDP) in 1999 and currently run 5 Day-care centres in the slums of Trichy. These centres are essentially equivalent to Kindergarten schools where the youngest of children (aged 2-5) come and learn, play, eat, receive health check-ups and develop their creativity and value system. Many of these children having attended CDP centres go on to gain admission to primary (and then secondary) schools in the area. PAT also runs microcredit programs in the form of women's Self-help groups (SHGs) in the same community. Small, short-term loans are given out to women, along with basic guidance on financial management, so that they can start a small enterprise (eg. fruit shop, bakery, pottery, computer centre etc.) or expand an existing income-generating activity. So the organization is helping the women of very low-income, under-privileged slum community with one hand and their children with the other hand.
What is really innovative about this project is that not only do they help both the children and women of the slum community but they do so in a circular, self-sustainable way. To put it simply – PAT lends money to the women, in the form of micro-loans at a reasonable market interest rate, to run a variety of small enterprises, and then uses the interest generated from the loan repayments to run the CDP centres where the children of the same women are going every day to receive primary education and day-care (food, toys, friends and health checks). This kind of self-sustainability has been possible for 3 out the 5 CDP centres in the last 12-18 months due to large input of funds by AfE Canada to start the microcredit program. AfE Canada has been supporting the 3 CDP centres (along with AfE Stanford) since 2005 but now does not need to send any more funds for those 3 centres to be able to run smoothly for presumably a very long time. The long-term sustainablity of this project has been achieved by this innovative strategy implemented by PAT Trichy. Funds are being “recycled” within the community and the impact is on the overall economic growth of the community as well as the intellectual and emotional development of the children, who have a safe and caring environment in which to spend a part of their day. These children are being prepared to move on to primary schools and hopefully further into higher education, while their mothers are ensuring that this happens by (a) using the loans they receive responsibly to create a booming local micro-economy and generating more family income, and (b) repaying their debts in a timely manner to ensure the continuous flow of returns. The success of this project has been a result of PAT implementing the following actions - (a) training of the administrative staff overseeing microloans and repayments, (b) raising awareness, among both adults and children, of the benefits of such a program within their community (c) encouraging the women in the community to self-organize into SHGs and take responsibility for the well-being, education and development of their children, and (d) offering regular training sessions and refresher courses for the staff and teachers of CDP centres to ensure that they are maintaining good quality of education and administrative practices.
Over the years PAT has worked on improving its infrastructure and buidling facilities. This has been difficult given the lack of sufficient funds in the past, since PAT had to use most of their funds towards running of the CDP centres. Now with the steady support of funds from AfE (Canada and Stanford) for the CDP and microcredit scheme, they are able to divert their attention towards expanding and improving the condition of the facilities. They have gone from 4 to 5 CDP centres and are in the process of constructing a better buidling for the 5th one. PAT has also made efforts to constantly improve the quality of food being given to the children at their CDP centres. They vary the menu on a daily basis and have started to include more vegetables and protein sources (like eggs) to the usual rice and lentils meal.
Self-sustainability is the primary goal of AfE Canada and PAT. Currently, 3 (of 5) CDP centres are being run entirely from the income (interest) generated from the microfinance program. AfE Canada would like to help PAT bring the other two remaining CDP centres also into the loop, and for this we require an additional input of funds. With the budget proposed here PAT intends to extend their microloans to more women in the community and then use the returns to support one more CDP centre continually in a self-sustainable manner. PAT proposes to achieve this within a year following the input of funds, and this is a credible claim given that they have already shown this to be possible in the recent past.
