STAND (Student Training and Action for Neighbourhood Development) the brain child of the Society of St. Francis Xavier, Palayamkottai works with the mission to ensure justice through equity and access, to include the excluded for empowerment, to engage in relevant research activities and to promote LAB TO LAND programmes.
STAND is a unique village adoption programme where the society converges with government and corporate sectors and other NGOs to achieve Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs) namely, no poverty, good health and wellbeing, quality education, gender equality, clean water & sanitation, affordable & clean energy, reduced inequalities, climate action, life on land and life on water through tangible rural development programmes
During the last five years, STAND has worked in 45 villages of which about 60% of the people are marginalized and downtrodden. Around 9,880 village people are benefitted. As a mark of silver Jubilee of STAND unit, ‘WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS NETWORK’ was implemented.
The modern emphasis on taking University Education to the
village so that the poor of the rural areas may benefit from the fruits of
research, teaching and learning in our institutions is the sole aim of this
pioneering outreach programme STAND introduced in the academic year
1993-94. The primary objective of this programme is to contribute to
the total development of people through awareness and training. It aims
at creating a sense of social justice and social concern among the students
through exposure to rural realities leading to a committed involvement
towards the integrated development of the rural poor.
In the history of nearly 100 years of our college, STAND, the
outreach programme, celebrated its Silver Jubilee (1993 - 2018) in the
academic year 2018-19.
This is a compulsory programme in which all II year UG and
I Year PG students are required to participate and it earns one credit for
UG and two credits for PG students. A fee of Rs. 70/- will be collected
from each student right at the beginning of the first year for incidental
and travel expenses of the whole one-year programme.
Every Department will be allotted one village situated around
Palayamkottai within a radius of 20 to 25 kms.
After an orientation programme, the students will be required
to visit their "adopted" villages and interact with the people at
regular intervals. This involvement and exposure, under the
guidance of the staff, will make their learning socially relevant
and useful both to the villagers and to the students. Each
department will have one member of the staff as contact person
to whom the students could refer matters concerning this village
programme. The main activities that will be taken up by STAND
are
- 1. Environment;
- 2. Literacy;
- 3. Health and Nutrition;
- 4. Helping the villagers to attend to their basic needs like drinking water, electricity, transport, patta for housing, road-laying etc., by contacting Government and Voluntary agencies.
