The meeting with the twenty-five selected partners from the North India regions was held at the Caritas India (CI) office in Delhi on October 7, 2019. Twenty-four Diocesan Directors and five Regional Fora Directors participated. The meeting was Facilitated by Mr. Khilesh Chaturvedi, the external advisor. The purpose of this meeting was to establish clarity and consensus on the closer accompaniment of selected Dioceses for Implementation of Strategic Plan (SP) and CST in the coming years.

It was decided that in the pilot phase, Caritas India (CI) would be intensively working with fifty dioceses to implement the Key Strategic Pillars (KSPs) on the ground. So, this meeting was an effort to come together, discuss, build consensus and discuss the way forward. It was also meant to establish clarity on the role and expectations of the partners from Caritas India and vice versa.

Caritas India had invited partners from the North, East, North-East and Central regions in this meeting. Envisioning it as a common journey where each of the participants would travel together as a team, it was important for all to know about the journey, why are we part of it and what are we expected to do.

Since it is difficult to take the Strategic Plan forward as a national agenda due to geographical and other factors, CI decided to identify a closer and smaller group, to begin with, the focussed Strategic Plan (SP) accompaniment. Hence, 50 partners were identified out of 174 Diocesan Social Service societies pan India. The criteria of selecting the partners were two-fold – one was the good track record and the second was the perceived interest of the partners to take the vision forward.

It was highlighted that the effort is to change the traditional way of engaging with the community and other stakeholders for greater impact of our work with the communities. The four KSPs, developed based on hands-on experiences and guidance of the experts, give us motivation and clarification on how social work could depend on people-led movements. The future strength of social work lies in these four KSPs. If these get understood and operationalise properly, we expect to see tangible changes in future. Thus, the journey one is embarking upon is not a project-based, rather an approach and culture which needs to be integrated into all the initiatives for sustainability. In this partnership, the four KSPs form an ecosystem for all the engagements and social work. So, the invitation to the partners in this journey is to visualise how each of us can contribute to it. With this purpose, a team was constituted and named “Animation Reflection Committee” (ARC), consisting of panel of experts and few CI members who would guide Caritas India and critically examine and analyse the processes of Strategic Plan Implementation. Caritas Strategic Team involving CI staff, Forum Strategy Team constituting of 14 Regional Forum Coordinators, Diocesan Leaders i.e. the fifty Directors of the identified partner organisations and identified Community Leaders, mobilised from the community will be the part of this journey.

Each diocese was asked to express their willingness to travel along in this journey and put forward their views and expectations regarding this initiative. All 24 Diocesan Directors and the Regional Fora Directors unanimously expressed their willingness to be part of the journey.

The meeting ended on a positive note where everyone suggested various ways to move forward, such as diocesan and Regional Plans to be aligned with the KSPs, identifying the point person and orienting them and so on. It was agreed that Caritas India will come back to them for the next course of action in cluster mode to encourage greater participation and ownership of the processes.