Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Unitarian Universalist Holdeen India Program (UUHIP)?
The Unitarian Universalist Holdeen India Program (UUHIP) was created from trusts intended to assist the impoverished people of India. The Program is committed to enabling the most vulnerable groups to improve their lives and change their social and economic conditions in directions of their own choosing.
What are the target populations for UUHIP grants?
UUHIP focuses on India's most impoverished and oppressed peoples, the dalits (untouchables) who are outside the caste system, the adivasis (tribals) who are India's indigenous peoples, and especially the women in those groups. Particular attention is paid to landless, migrant, bonded and child laborers.
How does UUHIP differ from traditional development organizations?
Rather than provide grants for sectoral, discrete or time-based projects, UUHIP supports long-term partnerships with organizations of poor and oppressed peoples to increase their collective strength, take on difficult issues, challenge unequal power relationships, and address the structural causes of poverty and injustice.
What activities does UUHIP fund?
UUHIP provides whatever strategic support our partners require in order to strengthen their organizations' ability to organize, innovate, grow in effectiveness and influence, and have a significant long-term impact on other groups, programs and public policies.
What have the partners achieved with UUHIP support?
UUHIP partners have:
- strengthened and expanded their own organizations, built cadres of confident leaders and promoted women's rights and decision-making.
- gained access for their members to new employment opportunities, credit, education, health and other social services and natural resources, and increased their incomes and assets.
- strengthened their collective bargaining power and successfully challenged exploitative social and economic conditions such as bonded and child labor, untouchability and scavenging.
- promoted government accountability and influenced public policy, laws and budgets in the interests of the poor and marginalized.
- increasingly taken on more difficult and risky issues such as campaigns for dalit rights and tribal land, water and forest rights, recognition of home-based workers and street vendors and a national agricultural workers minimum wage.
What has UUHIP achieved?
UUHIP has provided key support for major initiatives such as the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights, whose director and former Advocacy Fellow, Martin Macwan of Navsarjan, received the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Foundation Human Rights Award.
UUHIP has encouraged collaboration among all our partners in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, many of whom have formed the Campaign for Human Rights to work together on issues of land rights, bonded labor, untouchability and police atrocities. Samarthan (the Maharashtra Advocacy Institute) and the Center for Budget Studies in Maharashtra support their campaigns. Vivek Pandit, of Vidhayak Sansad, the leader who promoted all these efforts, was awarded the 1999 Anti-Slavery Award by Anti-Slavery International in the U.K. (Read the speech delivered at the award ceremony by Keshav Nankar, a former bonded laborer and now president of the union.)
The Advocacy Fellows Program is perhaps Holdeen's most innovative and influential venture. Over a seven-year period more than 60 Indian social advocates participated in this intensive six-week program of seminars, site visits and fellowships with such U.S.-based groups as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Children's Defense Fund, which use advocacy strategies to influence public policy in favor of the poor. Returned fellows have started several national and regional advocacy institutes and training programs, as well as centers for budget analysis in India, leading to a growing number of local grassroots leaders have becoming highly effective agents for policy change. UUHIP developed this program with the Advocacy Institute in Washington, DC, several Indian and U.S. NGO's, and the Ford Foundation, which supplied funding.
What activities does UUHIP conduct in the United States?
In support of the core partnership program UUHIP engages in a variety of related educational activities in the U.S. and abroad which increase the effectiveness of our limited funds. UUHIP creates and sustains linkages with a wide range of donors, NGOs, government officials, public interest, women's and human rights groups, researchers, students and journalists in order to:
- promote network building, interchange and collaboration among those who are working on issues of poverty, gender, human rights and social justice;
- generate visibility for our partners' work and issues;
- respond to U.S. organizations interested in starting or expanding their work in India or in developing new approaches to empowering the disadvantaged anywhere in the world.
UUHIP has also leveraged several million dollars in additional financial and program support from other donors for our partners and their causes in India, sometimes by providing the initial seed money for their causes. Individuals, Unitarian Universalist congregations, the Unitarian Universalist Association and others have contributed over $700,000 since 2000 over and beyond UUHIP's own funding.
For more information contact international @ uua.org.
Last updated on Thursday, June 4, 2009.
