Empowering rural communities to uplift and transform themselves

Our Story

Founded in 2018, CNIMS Research Foundation serves the underserved rural communities of Lathur and Thirukazhukundram blocks of Chengalpattu District, Tamil Nadu. Adopting a holistic approach, we empower rural communities to mobilize, organize, and work towards their own upliftment.

We ensure equitable access to education, health, and socio-economic development with a special focus on women and the marginalized population. Our initiatives have empowered our beneficiaries to break free from the diverse challenges and reshape their future.

Vision

CNIMS envisions an equitable future where rural communities are empowered to mobilize, organize and work towards their own upliftment

Mission

CNIMS is on a mission to empower rural communities, with a special focus on the marginalized sections. We seek to ensure equitable access to education, health and socio-economic development through a participatory, evidence-based approach, educational programmes, network building, community outreach, training, campaigns, and more.

Objectives

• Improve access to quality health and education to the communities
• Improve health, hygiene and sanitation indicators in our project implementation areas
• Organize and manage research and development activities in arts, science and education
• Strengthen access to correct information and increase awareness for informed decision making
• Improve livelihoods of rural communities, focused on youth, through linkages to relevant resources
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Core Values

Our core values form the foundation of everything we do, guiding us in all our endeavours and propelling us in the accomplishment of our goals.

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Our Approach

At CNIMS Research Foundation, we use an evidence-based, integrated, and multidimensional approach to create a lasting impact for beneficiaries. Our integrated approach ensures that our initiatives lead to a sustainable outcome that can drive transformative change.

Evidence-Based

We ground our work in an evidence-based approach to maximize the impact of our interventions. The evidence-based approach enables us to know, in measurable terms, what works and what is effective in achieving long-term, sustainable results. It helps us to understand the effectiveness of best practices, and identify programs, tools, and implementation strategies.

Participatory with Grassroots Action

Community-level participation is critical to the success of our projects and interventions. This is why, we use a participatory approach with grassroots action. Without this, the impact will be short-lived at best and the risk of project failure increases. So, we actively work to help the community and the direct beneficiaries understand the need for the project, make them aware of their rights, encourage their participation, and empower them to take action to improve their quality of life.

Strategic Partnerships

We simply cannot achieve missions alone, by ourselves. That is why we actively nurture strategic partnerships with other NGOs in the area, local bodies, communities, government departments and others, ensuring synergy. By working synergistically, we leverage each other’s strengths, broaden our deep and drive long-lasting impact.

Comprehensive

We ensure that all our interventions and projects are comprehensive in nature and not one-off solutions or unidimensional. We go to the root cause of whatever issues we seek to address and gain a deep understanding of it. This combined with our evidence-based, participatory approach and synergistic working enables us to drive greater success.

Result-Orientation

Delivering measurable results is extremely important to us. We set clear goals aligned with our mission and develop strategies with measurable outcomes for each of our initiatives. We constantly monitor progress, analyse data, and streamline our approach to ensure we are making a tangible difference in the lives we aim to improve.

Where We Work

Having lived in this area and worked with the community in the implementation areas, we observed that the number of girls entering into higher education is quite low. This is owing to the intersectional burden of gender, caste, class, and location combined informational poverty. Lathur and Madhurantakam blocks have the over 40% SC population, among the highest in Tamil Nadu.

Since familial situations, prevailing gender norms, and poverty prevent women from pursuing higher education, they tend to get married early. This leads to early pregnancies and higher fertility rates. They are relegated to domesticity and unpaid domestic and care work. Further, without proper skills and knowledge, these women are only able to access casual or daily wage work that pays them a pittance. This is why we started our journey here.

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“Our vision at CNIMS Research Foundation is to create happy, healthy, aware and empowered rural communities. Through holistic and research-based activities, we are working towards empowering rural communities at large, with a special focus on socio-economically disadvantaged women, children and youth.” - Founder, CNIMS Research Foundation