ABOUT US
IMPACT Community is the work of a team of lawyers, community workers, development professionals, volunteers, and others who are committed to ending discrimination and poverty in rural Dalit communities in India.
We do this through strategic education, youth capacity-building, empowering women, innovative farming, community health initiatives, and the pursuit of social justice.
Our History
In the early 1900s, the American Baptist missionary Rev. Frank Kurtz arrived in Madhira with the intention of establishing schools to educate Dalits. He was refused permission and so opened a school across the border in another state in 1934. The mission constructed buildings in 1948 and added a middle school ten years later. The high school was established in 1975.
Sudheer Bontha began work among the Madagi Dalits in 1984. By 2007, there were 24 villages in what was called the Madhira Field. This number later grew to 30. In 2007, he and Regina Alexander, his wife, formalized their efforts and established IMPACT Community, a registered non-profit organization in Andhra Pradesh.
In 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh was split in two. Madhira along with 20 other villages were assigned to the newly established state of Telangana and nine villages to Andhra Pradesh.
Today, IMPACT Community works in all 30 of these villages within a radius of 100 kilometers of Madhira.
