About Find Your Feet
Find Your Feet works in partnership with poor communities in rural India and Malawi to bring about real and long-lasting improvements to their lives. Using their own skills and knowledge, Find Your Feet enables people to build livelihoods and access services that allow them to develop long term solutions to their poverty.
Each of the communities Find Your Feet works with has its own specific problems. By working with the communities, our projects are tailor-made to respond most appropriately to local needs. Our work encompasses a range of issues, enabling people to develop skills and confidence so that they can build a better future for themselves and their families.
Building Stable Livelihoods
70% of the world’s poor live in rural areas where there are few stable employment opportunities. Denied the possibility of earning a decent living, whole families are trapped in a life of poverty. By providing vocational training, low-interest loans and ongoing support, Find Your Feet helps poor communities both to preserve traditional livelihoods and to develop a range of small business ventures that bring in new sources of employment and income to local people.
Improving Harvests
In poor rural areas, farmers are often unable to afford good quality seeds or tools and have limited access to training. Find Your Feet works with vulnerable farmers providing access to seed banks, low interest loans and training in sustainable agriculture techniques like crop rotation, multi-cropping and composting. Our work helps to ensure farmers are able to grow a harvest to feed their families all year round and produce a surplus to sell whilst also protecting the soil and environment for future generations.
Empowering Marginalised Communities
Women, tribal communities and groups stigmatised because of their social status make up a disproportionate percentage of the poor. These social groups often find themselves marginalised from the rest of society and lack access to good employment opportunities, education, healthcare and land. Find Your Feet projects work with traditionally excluded members of society to establish a stable livelihood and to raise awareness of their rights so that they can lobby government officials to improve local services such as access to healthcare, education and water and ensure that policies that benefit the poor are implemented.
Addressing the Challenge of HIV/AIDS
Currently around 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, 95% of whom live in developing countries. The spread of HIV/AIDS is having a devastating impact on the ability of people to build a better life for themselves. Find Your Feet projects work in rural areas raising awareness of HIV/AIDS, providing counselling on how to live positively with HIV, improving access to prevention, testing, treatment and care and challenging the stigma that many people affected by HIV/AIDS face.
Our history
Find Your Feet was founded in 1960 in response to the refugee crisis in Central and Eastern Europe. Over the last 40 years our approach to alleviating poverty and suffering has evolved from providing humanitarian aid to supporting long-term rural development programmes.
Find Your Feet currently works in partnership with poor communities in rural India and Malawi to bring about real and long lasting improvements to their lives. By working closely with local partner organisations, we ensure that our work involves whole communities in the process of finding solutions to their problems. Our experience in grassroots development has taught us that this is the most effective way to address the causes, and not just the symptoms, of poverty. Before starting a project we work together with our local partner to build a comprehensive picture of the challenges each community faces. We then direct our resources to where they will have the most impact while ensuring that the available local resources are used as effectively as possible. It is this co-ordinated approach that allows us to respond rapidly and effectively to local needs.
In the UK, raising awareness of development issues by targeting policy makers and donor agencies is a vital aspect of our work. We are also engaging the public in challenging injustice through our multi-media project, ‘Go Global’, which is helping to dispel negative myths about the developing world.