SMHA's Goals

Southern Mutual Help Associations goals are:

1. To help people in rural south Louisiana help themselves by providing community-based learning opportunities and creating institutions designed to help them:

• Enrich their education and self-development so they can work together to achieve the goals they set for their own communities and so they can take advantage of opportunities to enter the economic mainstream.
• Build assets and create new wealth in their communities so they can begin reducing poverty faster than it is created.
• Assume an active role in public policy formation so they can help shape institutions and systems that impact their families and communities.
• Improve their quality of life through the just management of resources, opportunities for healthy lifestyles, and stewardship of their land, air, and waters.

2. To encourage and help public, private and nonprofit institutions invest effectively in low-wealth communities using a leveraged self-help approach.

3. To give face and voice to the faceless and voiceless by paving the way for them to tell their own stories in a public forum and draw the attention of the nation and policymakers to the needs of marginalized communities.

4. To provide leadership and develop ideas and models that can be used at the regional and national levels to further the work of building healthy and prosperous rural communities.

5. To reposition and build the capacity of SMHA so we can have the institutional framework, leadership, staff and funding necessary to have the impact we want.

Southern Mutual's Rural Recovery Response to help communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita embodies these goals.


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