The following are some of the concrete activities undertaken by the Pallottine Social Welfare Centre in actualizing the above-mentioned vision and mission.

1) Study and Computer Centres

Pallottine Social Welfare Centre aims to provide children, especially poor rural children, to have access to free tuition at its Evening Study Centers. These Centres are established basically to enhance the school experience of the village children: to provide assistance in doing the homework; to clarify doubts in various subjects; to pay attention to students, who are weaker in one or the other subject; and to provide children with some nutritional supplements. The Study Centres also help children to develop skills, such as spoken English, personality development, computer education, and the like.

2) “Sponsor a Child” Programme

Children are the hardest hit by poverty. “Sponsor a Child” programme chiefly aims at helping the child to cover the cost his/her education, enabling the child to escape the poverty trap. This will foster skills and learning in the life of these children and community in general.

3) Women Skill Development – Tailoring Centres

Women have been discriminated by the male-dominated society. Hence Pallottine Social Welfare Centre helps to provide underprivileged women with practical skills. This programme aims to create sustainable skill development in women, so that they can find employment in industry. This programme also fosters in women entrepreneurship, and assists them to start self-employment projects. Recently a new Tailoring Centre was started at Surulode, in Kanyakumari District, Tamil Nadu.

4) Providing Affordable Housing

The disadvantages of the model of one-room shelters – where families must cook, eat, and sleep together – are liable to leak whenever it rains, reducing the bear earth floors to muddy puddles. Besides creating discomfort to those who live in such houses, they also bring health-related problems due to the absence of proper hygienic conditions. Pallottine Social Welfare Centre is committed to improving the lives of these underprivileged and poor families by building proper houses, which would give them protection and safety.

5) Bore-Well Project

This project aims at providing financial help to make bore-wells, particularly in areas where people have difficulties in having good drinking water.

6) Building Toilets

Toilet-building programme, besides aiming at educating people about the importance of hygiene and sanitation, focuses on providing functional toilets to the underprivileged families in slums, who are unable to construct toilet in their homes due to lack of funds.

7) Health Care for HIV/AIDS Affected People

Pallottine Social Welfare Centre gives primary importance to the welfare of the HIV/AIDS affected families and their children. This programme has as its objective better health and wellbeing of both adults and children infected with and affected by HIV/AIDS. The Centre has adopted 70 HIV/AIDS affected families. The Centre provides shelter, food, treatment, education of children, emotional and psycho-social support, and facilitate their eventual integration into their families. PSWC has employed two full-time field-workers to assist and care for them. During family visits, the field workers give council to the patients and their family members, and oversee that the affected persons take their medicines regularly. This also involves organizing support-help-group-gatherings every two months – six times in a year. On these occasions, they are given psychological, medical, and material support. Doctors, social workers, and psychologists are invited to address these gatherings. They are also able to share their daily problems, and are given motivational training by the resource persons with the aim of bringing a sense of meaning and hope in their lives. Besides, during these meetings at the Centre, nutritious food grains and clothes are distributed to the HIV/AIDS affected people. Usually, these meetings conclude with a fellowship meal. The Pallottine Social Welfare Centre also has initiated a scholarship programme for college-going students from these families to assist them academically. In order to make them economically self-reliant, the Centre provides tailoring machines and financial assistance to begin their own self-employment projects. Overall, Pallottine Social Welfare Centre gives a helping hand to these socially neglected people to get back their dignity and self-respect.

8) Need-Based Assistance to the Poor

Pallottine Social Welfare Centre undertakes projects to assist the poor and the needy depending on the needs of people and urgency of the occasion. For instance, during corona virus crisis, particularly during the time of total lockdown, Pallottine Social Welfare Centre organized relief programmes both in Salem and other parts of Tamil Nadu, which included among others, the distribution of food materials and clothes. Similarly, English dictionaries, geometry boxes, notebooks and writing materials were provided to poor students of Kollapatty Government School.

9) Pallotti’s Bread for the Poor:

“Pallotti’s Bread for the Poor” is a social upliftment programme aimed at the socially downtrodden and neglected people. It consists of giving Rs. 1000/- worth grocery items to the needy people every month. This helping-the-poor-project started on February 8, 2024. 120 poor families from Pallottine mission stations – namely, Melatur, Melathirupanthurthi, Kalaikulam, Pechiparai, and Kutathupatti – benefit from this project. The beneficiaries are happy and grateful for initiating the project “Pallotti’s Bread for the Poor”. Hopefully, this programme would reduce malnutrition and hunger, to some extent. Our sincere thanks to the Pallottine confreres of Saint Nicholas de Flue Province, Switzerland, for their generous contribution towards the project “Pallott’s Bread for the Poor”.