About Us

St. Xavier’s Social Service Society (SXSSS) is a charitable Jesuit organization founded on 13-10-1976 by Fr. Ramiro Erviti, S.J. Fr. Erviti, a teacher at Loyola School, along with other staff members through its Social Service League (SSL) outreach program went out with their students to slums of Ahmedabad in the 60’s. The outreach program later took a formal shape giving birth to SXSSS, an organization working for poor and marginalized in the city of Ahmedabad and the state of Gujarat. St. Xavier’s Social Service Society (SXSSS) always believed in the motto, “To help poor, to help themselves”. The organization has been intervening in the lives of the poor over last 30 years …

The organization believes that to build a more humane, peaceful and just society attempts should be made at the bottom of the society, the grassroots level. The organization is convinced that its vision can only be realized when the urban poor and the marginalized are truly empowered. The experience and deliberations over the years have led us to focus on three potential areas of empowerment of the poor: 1) Education, 2) Organizing them into people’s groups, and 3) Leading people to action that would enable them to address their own problems and improve the quality of their life.

Thus, people and their organizations have become agents of empowerment and continue the process of empowering their people at the grassroots level. In the process of empowerment, the organization plays the important role of a facilitator and not a doer. SXSSS “facilitates” rather than merely implements the process of empowerment. It facilitates people towards action through educating and organizing them. In other words, it helps people to help themselves.