The year 2010 marked a new era in SMERU’s life. Early this year we finalized the process of purchasing our own building. The property is located at Jl. Cikini Raya No. 10A, Central Jakarta.

After several months of renovation works, the building was ready by the middle of the year. The process of moving to the new office was accomplished within two weeks in July. However, it took several more weeks for the staff to adjust to the new office until things resumed their normal courses. Indeed, the whole process had been tiring yet exciting for the staff. Having our own office building had been our ideal since the very beginning. It took ten years of hard work to realize it.

In the first ten years of SMERU’s life, we rented large houses for our office. And we had started looking for a permanent office space since 2007, as we thought it was time for SMERU to be more established physically. But it was the letter from the Kota (City of) Jakarta Pusat Government around the end of 2009 that really pushed us to search more seriously for a building for sale. The letter requested us to move from our then office building, as it was located in a residential area. We finally settled on our current office, as we thought it had the right size for us and was located in a commercial area with easy access to our stakeholders.

During the whole busy and sometimes complicated process of searching, purchasing, renovating, moving, and adjusting to the new office, SMERU staff managed to continue producing high quality research. As recorded in SMERU’s biannual reports and verified in Project Consultation Committee (PCC) meetings during this period, the quantity and quality of SMERU’s outputs continued to increase. All SMERU staff have always realized that the future of SMERU as an independent research institution is much more dependent on its ability to continue producing high quality research than on owning an office building.

In terms of funding diversification, two important developments in 2010 need to be highlighted. The first is a reengagement between SMERU and Ford Foundation. For seven years since the establishment of The SMERU Research Institute in 2001, Ford Foundation had provided core funding for SMERU. After a vacuum for three years, in 2010 the then new Ford Foundation Representative in Indonesia, David Hulse, visited SMERU and conveyed his intention to resume the partnership between Ford Foundation and SMERU. As a first concrete action of this partnership, Ford Foundation will provide a grant for SMERU in 2011 to conduct a study on urban poverty in Indonesia.

The second welcomed development is the forming of a partnership between SMERU and UNICEF. It covers a broad range of activities, from research on child poverty, organizing a conference on research on children issues, forming a network of research institutes working on children issues, to capacity building for UNICEF staff. Both developments indicate the trust international organizations have on the quality of SMERU’s work.

In SMERU’s effort to influence policy, 2010 also witnessed a new benchmark. In 2010, SMERU’s senior research fellow and former director, Sudarno Sumarto, was appointed policy advisor at the National Team for Accelerating Poverty Reduction (TNP2K) at the Vice President Office. This is a form of collaboration between researchers and policymakers in the policymaking process, which is considered very effective in feeding research findings into policy. At the same time, this is a recognition of SMERU’s research quality by the policymakers.

All of these achievements are made possible only by a combination of hard work by SMERU staff and strong supports from our stakeholders. Therefore, I would like to extend my gratitude to SMERU staff, SMERU Boards of Trustees and Supervisors, and our donors and partners for their unrelenting hard work and continuous supports to SMERU. In particular, I would like to thank AusAID for their continuing core-funding support to SMERU since its establishment. Finally, I hope this annual report will inform our stakeholders and the public of our outputs and achievements during the year 2010 and provide evidence that the supports given were indeed used effectively for the common good