AID is a non-profit charitable, volunteer organization that supports a wide variety of social and development projects addressing problems such as literacy, healthcare, rural credit, vocational training, and children's welfare. AID was started in 1991 in Maryland by a group of students and professionals. AID now has about 36 chapters across the USA, over 2000 members and about 500 active volunteers. AID is funding over 80 projects in 15 Indian states, the primary source of funding being the Indian community in the US. AID believes that the problems of poverty, illiteracy, ill health, and unemployment are all interrelated and an effective solution is one that tackles them all. The long term goal of AID is to establish `seed villages', where AID will work as partners with the villages and the focus will be the all round development.

The Bay Area chapter of AID was formed in August 1997. We are now a committed set of over thirty volunteers who are involved in a variety of tasks like fundraising and awareness generation, reviewing projects, community service and miscellaneous administrative work. We also organize talks by leading personalities in social development from India and the US. We meet twice every month in Milpitas.

The activities of the chapter can be broadly classified into 3 categories, viz., evaluation of projects, awareness generation, and fund-raising activities. For effective functioning of these activities 3 committees, Project Committee, Publicity committee and Fund Raising Committee respectively have been formed. Volunteers choose to participate in one or more of these committees depending on their skills, interests and availability of time.