Meeting minutes of Jan 09, 2003 Attendees: Amalan, Swati, Arindam, Bash, Joyita, Laxmi, Preeti, Raj, Srinivas, Sunil and two new members Anupa and Savita. Items discussed: Newsletters are ready. They will be printed by Saturday and the team will meet at Bash’s place on Sunday to prepare them for mailing. UMBVS: Raj presented the UMBVS budget and the following items on the budget required clarification: What are Inspection costs? What does “contingency” include? What is the Audit fee? Raj will get the answers to these questions and post them on Asha-Seattle mailing list. The members present were of the opinion that funding should be provided for running of school and not for expenses related to training. This amounts to about 5K in total. A vote on how much Asha-Seattle will contribute will take place in the next meeting or online. Digantar: Amalan and Laxmi talked about the latest news from Digantar. Anita made a site visit earlier this year and reported that the funds that the government was supposed to provide had come through albeit late. Right now, the funding situation at Digantar seems to be under control. The allocated (but not yet disbursed) funds of about 25K were now available to the chapter. It was decided to wait for about a month and see if any requests for funds came from Digantar. In case that did not happen the 25K would be available for other projects. Bash’s Site Visits:  Bash gave the group an update on the five projects he was able to visit during his recent trip to India. He also gave the group a briefing about the recently concluded Asha- India meeting.  The projects he visited are: Vikaasana – near Bangalore Sumavanam – near Madanapalli Anugruha – in Tamil Nadu Auroville – near Pondicherry Prasanna Jyoti – in Bangalore We were able to get into the details only on Anugruha – A couple moved from Bombay and started this school in the early 90s. The school has 104 kids, 10-12 teachers (1500 – 2000 Rs. salary) and offers very high quality alternative education. The children are very confident and have even raised money for their school through a performance in Bombay. Each child gets 1hr/day on the computer. The school uses alternate methods of education (Glenn Doman) and has a lot of informational videos that the children can make use of. One of the issues that come forth is the deep-rooted caste problem in the community. Bash also mentioned that the couple running the school has not made an effort to integrate as well with the community.  The older children take care of the younger ones and all children take field trips.  Separately, they are waiting for FCRA clearance.

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