In early December SMERU will be hosting two important events. On December 6, the Persepsi Daerah team will be reporting on the major findings arising from its numerous provincial surveys on the impact of the regional deregulation process. The following day a conference on "Monitoring the Social Impact of the Crisis: Lessons Learned in 1999" will draw on the experience of a range of individuals and organisation who have been involved in tracking the crisis over the past twelve months. We hope to report on both these events shortly. Monitoring the effectiveness of the government?s set of emergency measures - the Social Safety Net Program - continues to be an important focus of SMERU?s work. We include here a summary of a recent SMERU Working Paper from our data analysis group which presents some key findings drawn from the ?100 Village Survey?. We also report on a recent SMERU visit to Sulawesi where the involvement of NGOs in the monitoring of these SSN programs was the prime topic of discussion. We need all to be concerned for the victims of the on-going crisis and here we highlight the human dimensions of the crisis with some brief accounts drawn from our field investigations among those directly affected by the closure or down-sizing of factories and business enterprises. There are now a variety of measures underway to as sist local communities and civil society recover from the crisis, and in particular to empower the poor and under privileged sections of society. In this edition we report on one such pilot project that has been moving ahead in Bandung, West Java, with assistance from SMERU. In the next issue we will report some of the key findings from our Crisis Impact team’s recent appraisals of the impact of the crisis on health and education