Susan Griffin
While the Society for Informal Education or SIEDS is the legal entity registered under the Societies Act, the CIEDS Collective is the internal organic structure within which different areas of work were initiated, evolved, connected and deepened. It was the foundation from which many individual and collective initiatives were nurtured and built until they took distinct organisational forms. Vimochana one such initiative of the Collective is the public forum under which all the women's areas of work have evolved, even if some like Streelekha, Angala and the various campaigns might have their own distinct status as projects with independent funding status.
The members of the Society (SIEDS) comprise of senior members of CIEDS Collective/Vimochana and eminent citizens from the fields of academia, legal activism et al who have travelled with us on our life's journey of work, convictions and dreams. They function as an advisory body.
Our Core Values and Principals
The search of CIEDS Collective has been a search for not only a humane and just society but also a search for alternative institutions and practices that are not entrenched in institutionalised notions of justice, equality, development and politics. We have, in the Collective, sought to live these values in both, the structures of the collective and in our political involvements.
The fundamental principals guide us specifically in evolving our structures have been:
a. Human Dignity and Personal Morality
The principal that is central to the collective ethic is that the means is as important as the ends. Therefore if our vision is that of a just, egalitarian, non hierarchical, non violent, humane society, then the structure of the organisation too must reflect it. This reflected for example, in the kind of salary structure we initiated where everyone got an equal salary irrespective of their academic qualification and position in the organisation. We subsequently attempted to move towards a more need based salary structure that would take into consideration identifiable needs like children and house rent. We have also been attempting to incorporate other criteria like responsibility and number of years in the organisation without compromising on our ideas of equality and need. These attempts reflect our commitment to a politics which places human dignity and personal morality as the baseline for social commitment and affirms the contribution, however small or big, of each individual to the
organisation.
Consensus: Decision-making process:
Following the principal of consensus all decisions go through a collective process whereby each individual member can participate and be equally responsible for a particular decision rather than be taken by a few individuals or even on the basis of a majority vote which would lead to an unequal relationship between the members of the Collective.
Individual autonomy and collective responsibility:
This has also been a core value through which we have attempted to ensure that while each member would have the freedom to initiate and choose a particular area of work and set their priorities they would be accountable to the larger collective. Informed by the experiences of the closed hierarchy of communist parties, we insisted on individual autonomy as the most significant check against totalitarianism where the individual would not be subsumed by the Collective. At the same time we did not want to follow a mindless individualism where the individual is accountable only to himself/herself which in a Collective structure like ours would have led to anarchy. This principal not only to facilitate creativity but also accountability and a transparent functioning.
Praxis as a way of life
The other important principal is the abandoning of the strict division between theory and practice, between research and activism for we realised that this division of labour would only reinforce a hierarchy of knowledge, a notion of power that we wished to avoid. So we have attempted to live out a notion of Praxis where each individual is not only involved in theoretical work but also in activism at the grassroot level.
Funding
Support for our work and the institution has come from a range of sources including international donor agencies, government sources, membership and subscription fees and individual dreamers and philanthropists. Some of the areas of our work are also income generating and have achieved a degree of self sustainability. The act of fund mobilisation is for us also the search to transform the traditionally hierarchical relationsip between a donor and beneficiary to that of a deeper partnership in which the former is as much challenged and transformed, as is the latter in the process of social transformation and change.