From:  Asha Princeton <ashaprinceton@y...>
Date:  Tue Jan 8, 2002  12:58 am
Subject:  Minutes - Asha-Princeton Meeting - 01/05/2002


Attendees : Priya Rajan, Kumar Ramaswamy, Vinay
Iyengar, Sumathi Iyengar, Anirban Hazra, Dipali Desai,
Uday Jain, Aswini Ramkumar, Shanmuga, Sriranjani
Ranganathan, Sridhar Desikan, Diana Chattraj, Achla
Parekh, Asha Kher, Vikas Sawant.

Discussion summary :

Chapter Requirements and Fund-raiser(s) :
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Priya presented a summary of our chapter financials in
2001, and our projects' requirements in 2002. We need
to raise atleast $16,000 this year, in order to meet
requirements of projects[For details of financials,
please refer to email sent by Priya on 01/06/02
subject "Asha Princeton 2001 Financials" or contact
Sumathi at sumathivinay@y...]. We decided to
raise the money by :
1. Organizing an "Asha Info Night" (March-end 2002),
serving free food for attendees and give detailed
presentation of our project soliciting new volunteers
and donors.
2. Contacting companies : organize info sessions in
atleast some of them,
3. contacting ex-donors,
4. getting volunteers to contribute,
5. get donations from setting up Asha table at
cultural events, etc.
If we are not able to raise all our funds by these
means, we would need to organize a bigger fundraiser.
Diana offered to organize an info session at Ranbaxy
Inc. Shanmuga and Sumathi volunteered to do a
presentation there.

Volunteer tasks to be performed :
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
[Please contact respective coordinators if you can
help in any of the tasks.]
1. Organize "Asha Info Night" :
(A) Food : for about 100 people. Coordinator -
Achala(sandeepP@r...). Food will be cooked by
volunteers themselves. Vikas also volunteered to help.

(B) Location : Coordinator -
Diana(diana.chattraj@v...). Find the cheapest
and most convenient place to organize the event. All
volunteers - Please look for appropriate places.
(C) Contacting people : Coordinator -
Priya(pr32@c...). We will contact people in our
donor database and others.
For all other questions contact Sumathi
(sumathivinay@y...)
2. Prepare Newsletter : Coordinator -
Kumar(ramaswamyk@t...). The work involves
assimilating latest project details(including
pictures, articles by children in projects etc),
summary of Asha summer school 2001 that was held in
the Princeton chapter, summary of Dr. Sandeep Pandey's
visit and Dr. Vinod Raina's talk. Newsletters would
be circulated among all the people being invited for
the Info night.
3. Find cultural events to set up Asha table.
Coordinator - Vinay (vinayi@h...).
4. Contact companies. Cooridinator -
Sumathi(sumathivinay@y...). Try and organize Info
sessions in companies, persuading them to fund
specific projects fully/partially.

"Vasundhara Science On Wheels" :
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The new proposal was presented by Vikas. It included
extending their project to :
1. 60 schools from the current 40.,
2. Include experiments for 5th, 6th and 7th graders
too,
3. Include Maths, Geography, Literacy too to the
"science on wheels" experiments projects.
4. Develop New Syllabus and Teaching-learning Process.
5. Develop Teachers Group to Improve Science Education
6. Involve School Students in Out of School
Activities.
etc.
The extension necessitates hiring new staff, procument
of new equipment and material, etc. The funds
requested - Rs. 7,00,000 ~ $15,000 .

Several questions were raised, including :
1. why are 5th, 6th, 7th grades also being included.
the science experiments in these classes are
relatively simple.. can be more effective by training
the teachers to demonstrate experiments.
2. extending to 60 schools, would result in some
schools not being visited even once in a whole year...
is this the purpose ?
3. What exact experiments are covered in Maths,
geography etc ? Why include them ?
etc.
(Please contact Vikas Sawant(asha_dude@y...) for
more details of the proposal and questions raised.)

Decision to fund the project will be made after
getting answers to all the questions raised.

Thanks,
Sumathi