The overarching idea of JPIC has integrated the concerns of the 21st century: care for the planet earth, emphasis on women, youth, children and indigenous groups; a holistic view of life and a search for rootedness in a life-giving culture and creation spirituality.

The history of collective experiences shows that every positive wave is due to the resiliency of the human spirit that is essentially creative especially when it has to preserve and promote life.  The social question has been brought about by centuries of mechanization and technological advancement, exploitation of the environment, and materialistic endeavors evidenced in a highly capitalistic economic system.  This process has led to dualism, fragmentation, an extreme collectivistic spirit and/or impersonality in human relations.  Science, for utilitarian and pragmatic reasons, has become allied more with commercial and industrial interests and less with people’s well-being.

Modern and post-modern life which has been highly institutionalized, highly rationalized, highly organized and highly monetized has become more and more complex.  The system is defeating to the simple farmer, fisherman/woman, laborer, miner and indigenous person.  Poverty alleviation indeed has become more complex.

It is in this context that the Graduate and Post-Graduate School of ASI ensures an appropriate social science-based training and formation of leaders in all sectors and levels of society – leaders who will help resolve the manifold problems involved in addressing the growing divide between the rich and the poor, and thus engaged in poverty alleviation with emphasis on people/community empowerment, because there is no change in the divide unless the marginalized play an active role.  The main objective of ASI’s graduate and post-graduate program is to form social development facilitators and leaders of various institutions that give support to movements toward integral human development and access to information technologies and resources for community well-being especially of the marginalized person-families-communities in society.