Minutes of the meeting held on June 15, 2005 (Minutes by Priyanka and Amrish) Attendees: Hansa, Sridhar, Ravi, Kumar, Prashanth, Nachiketh (for a bit), Amrish & Priyanka Guest: Netika Raval, President of Asha Meeting duration: 3 hours Netika Raval visited us at Princeton while touring different Asha chapters on the East Coast. We started our chat by introducing ourselves and sharing a bit about our Princeton chapter history, projects, list of visitors/guest speakers etc. Netika shared a bit about herself & her advent with Asha. A bit about her: Netika joined Asha in 1995 while studying at Stanford University. She was interested in development work & luckily came across Asha through the South Asian student group at Stanford. She focused her interests and efforts mainly on events at Stanford while getting involved with, I believe, just one project. In 1998, she started the Silicon Valley chapter with Purnima. She was on & off with events planning while living in the Bay Area. She has now moved to Los Angeles where she has started the Irvine chapter (To be noted, per Hansa's request, Netika said food is a fantastic strategy in luring people to meetings!). During dinner, Netika shared a bit about the Asha- 14 Conference that took place May 28- May 30 in Chicago. 68 people came to the conference and most of the attendees were newer Asha volunteers. The conference, to her, was a great way to meet other volunteers, discuss some projects, figure out challenges ahead, discuss solutions & re-energize everyone before they headed back to their respective chapters. Day 1, at the conference, was spent discussing projects and discussions in focus groups. There was also a speech by Jay Prakash on the need to move beyond projects & raising money- towards policy intervention in Government. He provided an example of Asha being able to do this through standardized tests. We discussed this a bit further at dinner & came up with other initiatives such as running an Asha Education Conference or writing a position paper (on an education topic). We questioned, though, if we had the time, expertise and capability to produce a paper or if governments would even listen to us. Either way, long term thinking was stressed at the conference & future policy intervention will be thought about. Day 2 was focused on Asha challenges such as accounting, publicity, chapter registration, misuse of name, misuse of funds and signing contracts (during events) problems. A new solution to some of these challenges is to 1) Create an Asha for Education Global Entity that will a) protect our Asha brand name & b) set policy work and 2) Have each chapter register in their respective state. The latter solution will increase administrative costs but it will be worth it. Day 2 was also spent discussing perspectives from different volunteers, making a call in to different chapters in India and also discussing pros & cons of Asha. Volunteers were happy that many people know of Asha and are glad that we have a good PR strategy. They are, however, frustrated by the somewhat lack of direction. We asked Netika what we can do at our Princeton to keep things going well. She said that we can 1) Document our history, 2) Have joint meetings with Asha CNJ, 3) Pass on learning for new members & 4) Share calendar selling with CNJ. We also discussed adding our learning experiences to Asha- pedia (the Asha Encyclopedia). Some interesting statistics we learned from Netika: 1) Asha has had 40% revenue growth in the last 4 years, 2) We have grown to 70 chapters worldwide and 3) 80% of Asha projects & funds come from 4 chapters- Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston & NYC and 4) Our displacement ratio has gone down to .62. Our displacement ratio needs to be corrected by either raising more money or dispersing less. We discussed other topics such as misuse of Asha funds (& our name) by volunteers & if we should be allowed to boot them out. Sridhar & Hansa will update us, at one of our meetings, on how mis-use has happened in the past. We didn't discuss if there would be an Asha wide policy to be able to boot volunteers but understood that something like this would take place at the Asha Representative Council (Hansa will be our Princeton chapter representative). This council will decide on Asha wide mandates by majority vote. We also heard about the upcoming Everest fundraiser, which I think we'll know more about when details get finalized. Thank you Netika for stopping by our chapter! We learned a great deal & hope to have you back soon. Best, Priyanka & Amrish