Welcome to AID and let us begin with a short story. A man taking a walk on the beach comes across a young girl who is doing something strange. She is taking the starfish one by one from the beach and putting them back into the sea. The starfish were washed onto the shore and the rocks by the waves, and were desperately trying to get back into the sea. He goes up to her and asks her "Why are you doing that? There are ten thousand starfish lying on the beach, how can you make a difference?" She looks at him, picks up yet another starfish and places it into the sea; and responds to him "Well it made a difference to that fish!"

That is the spirit behind A.I.D. The problems of India are humongous, and it is easy to be overwhelmed by them. But the people who started the organizations believed that if they work with commitment, they can certainly make a difference to a few villages, and that is a beginning! Over time, they found that this spirit and commitment is also contagious! Many more people from the community started joining in;A.I.D. essentially grew out of the Washington Area Indian community!

A.I.D. or Association for India's Development is now an organization with 35 different chapters in the US, and 1000 hard-working unpaid volunteers! Every year, AID supports about 100 rural development projects in 22 different states across India, with the help of individual donors like you.

So, how do we approach development work? Firstly we believe that since the problems of poverty, malnutrition, lack of education are all interconnected, therefore we should look for solutions that are also interconnected.

We take a holistic approach to development - through projects in education, health, rural technology, agriculture, water management and so on.

And how are these programs executed? Firstly, we collaborate with many sincere NGOs working at the grassroots. More importantly, we have our own volunteers and full-timers in the field in India. They are implementing our own programs in various places. Many talented, highly qualified volunteers have taken up development work full-time -âincluding Balaji Sampath and Senthil Kumar in Tamil Nadu, Ravi and Aravinda in AP and Orissa, Rachna Dhingra in Bhopal, Kamayani in Bihar. They provide the leadership for our work in India.

Before we let you go....

We all have at some point or the other thought of doing something for India but couldn't quite figure out how and what. Well, AID is a platform to do all those things for India that you have only dreamed about.