Minutes of the meeting held on February 19, 2005
(Minutes by Priyanka.)

Attendees: Ananya, Hetal, Hansa, Anirban, Amrish, Anish, Sridhar,
Sudhakar, Ravi, Anil, Ravinder & Priyanka

Meeting started at 5 pm. Anirban presented & led a discussion on the
Vocational Rojgar Training Project (short for VRT project) proposal
that he received from Prof. Hari Bist. We have been approached to
help with professional/vocational training to unemployed students (of
both sexes) in Uttaranchal. We questioned how this project fits into
our Asha mission & vision, why Prof. Hari Bist sent 10 different
project proposals to 10 different Asha chapters and why he approached
Asha- Princeton, specifically, for vocational training help rather
than pre school and primary school help (as his other projects
outline). After discussion & voting, we decided to learn more about
this project by asking Prof. Hari Bist the following questions
(Anirban will ask these question more eloquently, of course, but here
is the gist of it):

1. Procedures/Guideliness of Asha project proposals need to be described
2. Is Savidya independent of HWSTVAPSS?
3. How will you handle all the projects, at one time, if all of them
are accepted?
4. Why the breakup of 9, 9 & 36 as specific number of students?
5. What is locally useful as trades for these 36 students?
6. What is the difference between trade & workshops?
7. Why running expenses of $64,000 for the first year and then the
drastic drop to $9,000 for consecutive years?
8. How many members are there in this team? What is the role of the
Savidya team?
9. Why is merit an important criteria when looking for vocational 
training?
10. What, exactly, will your teachers be paid for?
11. Can you give us more demographic information?
12. Has the organization approached any other organizations and other
Asha chapters?

Prof. Bist is very responsive & accessible so Anirban & Anish will get
in touch with him right away & get back to us with feedback. After
more information about his plans, we can discuss if we want to look
further into the project, make a site visit & etc.

Anirban: Reminder to send Asha projects an e-mail about this project 
proposal.
---------------------------

We then discussed out upcoming fundraiser.
* More tickets were distributed at our meeting. Please do not loose
these tickets & do start selling them ASAP. Also, please start looking
into sponsorships!
* We have some volunteers for MC's: Hetal, Hansa, Vijay, Tanvi (Anil's
daughter) & Priyanka (maybe). We also have volunteers to make our Asha
presentation: Sridhar, Hansa & Priyanka.
* Photo slides & themes will be done by Venki & Satish.
* Amrish: Reminder to check with Dipali about the database.
* We decided that we liked the look of last year's fundraiser poster
and would like to maybe keep this theme consistent during our future
Asha- Princeton fundraisers. We would only like the Asha logo and the
Princeton word a bit larger.
* Sridhar: Reminder to bring brochures & calendars to our next meeting.
* [Added by Anirban] It was decided that we will be unable to sell tickets 
for (share our donor list with) Asha CNJ because we have our own 
fundraiser around the corner and it will not be easy to ask the same set 
of people to pay for two Asha events in a short span of time. It was also 
felt that in the future, it will be good if fundraisers between nearby 
chapters are coordinated.

Ananya will graciously post meeting minutes from now on- thanks Ananya.
Our next meeting will be first week of March- same place, same time.

Thanks!