Staff capacity Building A very important capacity building exercise for SPPD staff members took place on 16th December 2017 in the SPPD field office at Musiri of Trichy district. Dr. Gayathri an eminent expert in women studies cum trainer imparted training to the staff members. The training was aimed at introducing our staff members at the managerial, supervisory and field level facilitators and tutors to the concepts of Participatory Rural Appraisal and Research methods for prioritising and analysing the problems and their solution. The nuances of the PRA and PRR were explained by the trainer to the participants. The individual staff members showed keen interest in knowing about the methods to be adopted in making the target communities to actively take part in the process of PRA. The requirement of collection of data in the process of evolution of a project was explained in detail by the trainer. In fact, it was an eye opener for most of our new staff members as collecting the primary data would reveal the ground level realities and the secondary data available with the official sources alone can not be blindly taken up for the purpose of our interventions. The staff learnt the utmost importance of the Situational Analysis and the concepts of Social Mapping in general and Resource Mapping, etc. The staff also were exposed to the different aspects of planning in executing the activities of any intervention. Fixing of responsibilities of different stake holders especially among the staff members was also learnt in depth by the staff members. Similarly, the new staff members got a clear understanding that the activities only have to be facilitated and the target communities have to directly involved in the same. Through Problem Tree graphical representation method, the participants were introduced to the concept of problem analysis, like direct causes and indirect causes. This gave them an insight in to There was full of individual practical involvement of the participants, as they were divided in to five different groups for Group Discussion. Under the heads of a) Education of socially and economically backward children b) Problems of Adolescent girls and boys c) The unemployed youth d) Problems of small and marginal farmers. D) Security for women. The staff enthusiastically involved in the G.D. Interesting points were raised by them in the Group Discussion. The trainer mainly played the role of facilitator to encourage the staff to have the maximum understanding of the topics given for the Group Discussion. As a whole the capacity building training gave a big opportunity to better themselves in the knowledge of working among the vulnerable sections of the rural and urban communities. The staff members said the training has given them enormous understanding and increased their level of confidence on Social interventions. They wish to have more such trainings to improve themselves.