We are...  
  A rights-based child-centered community development organisation. We work towards the development of the community through a systematic process of empowerment. Our partners in its process are communities of street children, child labourers and other children in distress, including abandoned and runaway children, child victims of abuse and prostitution, children of sex workers as well as the larger communities of the urban slums.

APSA, with more than two decades of grassroots experience, has led from the front in designing unique programs. It combines paradigms of self-sufficiency at the micro level with advocacy campaigns and policy planning the state and national levels.

APSA believes in the strength of the People and their ability to fight for their own rights. We build our work on the premise that all people have equal rights irrespective of their socio-economic, political or cultural backgrounds.

    
Our Vision.  
  We will work with the community at the grassroots, with the privileged sections of the society and with the government towards preventing exploitation and marginalization of the underprivileged and to evolve social paradigms based on values of justice and nondiscrimination with those already in exploitative situations.  
Our Mission.  
  To catalyze the process by which underprivileged and deprived communities use their own strengths and efforts to solve their problems and improve the quality of their lives.

To evolve new social paradigms within which comprehensive plans could create better lives for the communities with which we work.

To enable social development rooted in justice and equity through local people’s organizations devoted to social mobilization, conscientiation and economic and political empowerment.

To ensure the participation of populations frequently under-represented in development – especially women and children.

To strengthen the expression of local cultures and issues through the use of traditional and folk forms of art, theatre, literature and music.

  
The Beginning  
In 1976, when a group of about eight young people decided to intervene to improve the exploitative conditions under which the coolies (loading and unloading workers) of the Secunderabad railway station worked, the seeds of APSA were sown. By 1981, APSA was formally registered and the coolies were sitting across the table from their employers, negotiating on new terms of strength. However, their untold suffering and the search for their liberation had led APSA’s workers on a path of more questions than answers, making their future more complex and uncertain. The problem was not merely of a solitary exploited section of workers, but of young children on the streets with no choice but to work for a living, of urban slums and new migrants to the cities with no skills with which to negotiate the system.

APSA grew, impelled by the collective will of a few activists determined to make a change in the uncertain and exploitative contexts in which these human begins tried to solve problems of survival and to build decent lives. APSA’s history too has been one of survival against many challenges. Today, APSA with its team of professionals and activists has over ten different projects in Hyderabad and Bangalore, testifying to its ability to empower the dispossessed to fight for their own rights.

 
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