ProutSpace Forum
ProutSpace is a monthly global gathering dedicated to exploring and applying the principles of PROUT through grounded, heart-centered dialogue. Each session brings together thinkers, changemakers, and community leaders to share real experiences, deepen collective understanding, and envision practical pathways toward a more just, compassionate, and sustainable world. Guided with warmth and thoughtful facilitation, ProutSpace is a space for reflection, connection, and inspired action.
November 2025
Community Development in the Context of PROUT: Lessons from 25 Years of Primary Healthcare Work in West Africa
For our November session, we are honored to host Dada Daneshananda, who will share insights from more than two decades of community development work across Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria. His team’s partnership-based approach has helped expand primary healthcare—including safe motherhood and reproductive health—to remote rural areas, offering a profound example of PROUT principles in action.
About the Speaker – Dada Daneshananda
Dada Daneshananda has dedicated nearly five decades to service as a monk and whole-time worker with Ananda Marga. His early years of work took him across North America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, before settling in West Africa in 2000.
For the past 25 years, Dada has been fully immersed in AMURT’s community development initiatives in Ghana, Burkina Faso, andQ Nigeria. His work centers on extending primary healthcare access to remote and underserved rural communities, with a strong emphasis on safe motherhood and reproductive health.
Through a collaborative, partnership-based approach, Dada and his team have helped build resilient community health systems grounded in PROUT’s principles of empowerment, dignity, and local leadership. His experience offers a rare and deeply practical perspective on what long-term, values-driven development can look like on the ground.
October 2025
From Survival to Self-Reliance: Empowering Displaced Women in Greece
In this October ProutSpace, Didi Ananda Uttama will share her inspiring work with refugee and migrant mothers in Greece. Starting in refugee camps in 2015 and later establishing a day center in Athens, the project has evolved from offering medical and infant care to fostering empowerment and self-reliance among displaced women.
Grounded in PROUT’s principles of women’s upliftment—free education, equality, and economic and social security—the initiative supports women to find their voices, recognize their potential, and create strong, sustainable communities.
Didi began her acarya life in the early 1980s, serving in Asia and the Mediterranean. A former homebirth midwife, she continues to bridge spiritual service and practical action through her work with mothers and children.
September 2025
The history of Prout work in Venezuela
Born and raised in Holland, Didi Ananda Sadhana became an Acarya in 1980 and has since dedicated his life to service and education across the world. His journey has taken her to Thailand, the United States, Nicaragua, and Argentina, before settling in Venezuela where she has lived and worked for the past 24 years. In Venezuela, she helped establish a Master Unit and remains active in Caracas, where she and the local margis organize weekly Sada Vrata programs and Prout activities. Her presentation will share the history and development of Prout work in Venezuela, highlighting both the challenges and the inspiring collective efforts of the community.
August 2025
Bruce’s journey spans over three decades of practical initiatives and visionary work. As a Churchill Fellow in the early 1990s, he studied the habilitation of offenders, later helping establish the Nelson Restorative Justice Trust. Inspired by P.R. Sarkar’s Progressive Utilisation Theory (PROUT), he co-founded the Nelson Enterprise Loan Trust, which for 25 years supported nearly 300 small businesses in New Zealand. He also founded Vistara, a Proutist retreat and resource centre, and completed a Master of Philosophy degree focused on building regional self-reliance.
Through this experience, Bruce has consistently advocated for a transition from materialistic economic systems to models that guarantee everyone’s essential needs and reduce inequality through cooperative structures.
June 2025
From Charity to Self-Empowerment: A PROUT Perspective on Humanitarian Response
We warmly invite you to the next ProutSpace gathering on Saturday, June 28 at 1:00 PM UTC, featuring Demeter Russafov, a community development practitioner with over 20 years of experience.
Demeter will share reflections from his work with AMURT in Haiti, exploring a powerful shift from conventional charity-based aid to PROUT-inspired social and economic self-empowerment, especially in the context of ongoing humanitarian crises.
This is a unique opportunity to engage in deep dialogue around the relevance of PROUT in real-world humanitarian work.
May 2025
This session features Luara Pacheco Trevisan, President of Proutista Brasil, who will share key learnings, strategies, and reflections from the movement’s recent journey — offering an honest look at what it takes to grow PROUT in today’s social and political climate.
April 2025
Kanhu Charan Behura, a cooperative organizer and community leader based in Odisha, India. Kanhu works closely with the Bari Adarsha Farmer Producers Co-operative, a grassroots initiative uniting over 3,500 farmers in the Jajpur district. Together, they cultivate pulses, oilseeds, and vegetables, striving for local self-sufficiency in essential food items.
With a model that blends local processing for community consumption and strategic sales outside the region, the co-operative is a living example of PROUT in action — rooted in economic democracy, collective ownership, and regional resilience.
In this session, Kanhu will share the co-operative’s journey: how they organize, what challenges they face, and how thousands of small farmers are shaping a more just and regenerative local economy through cooperation.
March 2025
Pradiipá (Filipa Costa) holds a degree in Psychology and, since 1995, has dedicated her life to volunteering and coordinating social and humanitarian projects in Portugal and Africa, especially in the fields of Local and Community Development and Psychosocial Support in vulnerable socio-economic contexts. She currently lives in the village of Paúl, very close to the Ananda Kalyani Master Unit in Portugal. Since 2016, she has been actively collaborating with the Prout Research Institute Portugal (PRIP), where she now serves as President of the Board.
On March 29, Pradiipá will join us to share the inspiring experience of PRIP’s work in the implementation of Block Level Planning (BLP), the emergence of the Samaj Movement, and the creation of an Integral Cooperative (a multi-sector workers’ cooperative) in the Cova da Beira region, in north-central Portugal.
She will especially present the Cova da Beira Converge (CBC) project — a citizens’ movement that already includes over 100 members and is focused on strengthening the self-sufficiency, resilience, and participation of this bio-region through concrete actions that regenerate the local economy and enhance the overall quality of life.
