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Minutes of Asha Seattle Meeting, June 16, 2004
Venue: Microsoft Campus (Building 24)
Participants: Ravi,
Srijan, Sairam, Sree, Joyeeta, Arindam, Paramita, Swati, Pranoti, Vandana, Akshay, Bash, Venky, Jayashree K (on phone)
The agenda discussed were
1.
Chhoti-Si-Asha: Dance, Music
& Drama by Children of Greater Seattle.
Saturday 3-7PM (Volunteers to come by 1:30-2PM)
Action items left:
·
Quiz & creative writing prizes - Joyeeta to buy 9 childrens books, 6 for quiz (age group 10-15) and 3 for
creative writing (one each for 7-9, 10-12 and 13-15 age groups).
·
Creative writing - will be
coordinated by Swati & Sairam.
Judges needed.
Quiz - will be coordinated by Sunil & Jayant.
We need to sign up teams at beginning of show and also at intermission.
20 chairs are needed on stage for the quiz. Ravi
to make sure we get these.
·
Certificates - Joyeeta
will redo last years certificates and update the
date. Jayashree to update her on how
many are needed. We will also have a booth for kids to pick up certs. Joyeeta
will handle this.
·
Food - Sree
will follow up with Udupi. Food is needed for
250-300 people. Intermission will be at 4:45-5PM. Ravi will arrange for juice.
·
Spotlights - It will be good to get 2
spotlights, one on each side. Ravi
to check with Elmo about this. If cost is too high, this is not a
must-have.
·
Help for Elmo - Several
volunteers are needed to help Elmo unload and set up. We have a small
window for setting up the sound so more the merrier. These volunteers
should come by 1:30PM.
·
Volunteer assignments:
1.
Ticketing/Will Call - Bash (replaced
by Anju since the meeting because I may not be able
to make it), Joyeeta, Pranoti,
Srijan.
2.
Ushers - Lakshmi,
Sunil, Sairam, Akshay
3.
Food/Tea - Sree,
Venky, Arindam
4.
Backstage/Green room - Swati, Paramita, Vandana
5.
Certificate booth, Directions - Joyeeta
6.
Merchandise booth - Raji
7.
Asha presentation - To be done by Sneha (Jayashree's
daughter). Bash/Srijan to help with writing
the text for this speech.
8.
Floating volunteer - Ravi (there will be many miscellaneous tasks)
9.
Ticket sales at Mayuri on Friday
evening - Srijan, Ravi, Arindam
10.
Pictures - Suvro
Datta
11.
Light and Sound - We may need a
volunteer on stage to help Elmo. This is TBD.
We are still short of
volunteers. Please show up if you can on Saturday and help make Chhoti si Asha
a big success again!
2.
WAH 2004: Swati
gave an update on the Seattle
vote for this year's Work An Hour. Work An Hour (WAH) is an Asha-wide
fund-raiser and the projects for this are picked in advance. People symbolically
donate one hour of their salary to Asha and the
donations are usually made online. This year, we are voting NO for one
project (Sai Kripa)
because of lack of site visits and high cost. The group is also
well-connected so they should be able to get funds from elsewhere.
Otherwise, Rahul has sent out the order of our vote
on asha-seattle. If you have anything to add
or any objections to the order, please email Rahul
(rahul@microsoft.com) and Swati
(sircar@math.washington.edu) immediately. If you need more information
on the 8 projects being voted on, go to http://www.ashanet.org/infoshare
and click on Events and then click on Work An Hour
2004. Srijan updated us on the issue that was
brought up on asha-wide mailing lists regarding
whether Champa Mahila
Society was a valid entry for this year's WAH. We had a brief
discussion on the mission statement being narrower than our vision.
Usually for organizations it is the other way around. We need to get
some clarification across chapters and volunteers on this.
3.
Garfield to Ghana
project: Pranoti
updated us on an effort that her high school (Garfield High School)
is involved in. They refurbish and donate computers to various
countries across the world, mostly to schools. They have 16 projects in
12 different countries now. Recently, she had been to Ghana as part
of this project. In addition to donating the computers, they also train
people on hardware, software, lab management, applications, etc. Many
of these children may have never seen a computer before. There may be a
shipment coming up to India
soon. Bash suggested that we should contact Vidya
Vrikshah in Chennai about their needs and see if Pranoti's project could benefit them.
4.
Ragamala-Pratidhwani Utsav: This is happening Oct 7-10 and we have been asked to put up a
booth and sell tea/merchandise. We should identify volunteers for this
since it is a great opportunity. We can also publicize our giving
campaign at this event. It may be worthwhile for more people to get the
food permit before this event. Arindam, Paramita and Suprabha currently
have the permit. This is an easy test to take.
5.
Marathon: Sree
discussed the marathon that we're holding later this year. We have decent
participation so far, but do not have a westside
coordinator yet for the training part. Rahul,
Binay and Raj are the
overall event coordinators. If you want to volunteer, let one of them
know. We also need contacts at Boeing & Amazon. Joyeeta has volunteered to get these contacts to the
marathon team.
6.
Shanti Sadhana Ashram: Srijan discussed this project in Assam. They
run a number of pre-primary schools. There were questions that came up
at the last meeting that have been answered. No site visit has been
done recently because the volunteer who was supposed to visit dropped out at
the last minute. We can try and get an Asha-Kolkata
volunteer to do the site visit. Different salaries for teachers are
because they are all at different levels. We decided to get the site
visit done and then vote on the $2500 that we want to consider sending to
them.
7.
Swanirvar: Srijan
discussed this as well. This is an NGO in West
Bengal. They have been around since 1988-89 and lots of Asha chapters have been working with them since
1996. Swati has visited and her impression
was good. The site visit reports are also positive. They are a
very professional group and the extended family feeling that we get with many
Asha projects may be missing here. They are
well connected but also have a large budget. They do a lot of work
including working with panchayats, microcredit, agriculture, etc. We did fund-sharing
last year of $5K. We want to consider the same this year. They
are asking for $13.5K out of which Stanford has committed to $3.5K, an
individual donor is giving 0.5K and SV is also reviewing. We voted and
decided to commit up to $5K this year as well. Sree
had a suggestion that we should try and get them to network with and help
other NGOs in W.Bengal that we are working
with. Sujit Sinha
of Swanirvar will be visiting US in Sept/Oct.
We will get him to come to Seattle
and arrange a talk by him. We could give the check also at the same
time. We had a short discussion that talks should in general be organized
in UW so that more people attend. We should also get people to donate
the suggested amounts so that the cost for flying the speaker here is offset.
8.
Odanadi Sewa Samasthe: This is a project in Mysore,
Karnataka. This group works with children of sex workers, rescued
girls, etc. Hansa of Asha-Princeton
is the project steward and this is also an Asha-Sanctuary
project. The proposal is to build a house for children of sex
workers. They have about 450 children who have been saved in the recent
past. This was funded by WAH 2003. They were expecting funding
from AIF but the funds got pulled out in the last minute because of a clause
that AIF doesn’t fund construction. Asha CNJ
is funding $3.5K but they are still short by $41K. The question is
whether we can give a one time big grant of the order of $20K. Since
this is a big amount they are asking for, we want to do more research first
both on the project as well as on the finance situation. Srijan, Joyeeta & Paramita will study this project in more detail and Bash
& Srijan will check on the finance
situation. There was a question that came up about why the HIV positive
girls are separated from the non HIV positive girls. This is one
question that needs an answer before we commit to this.
9.
Talk by Vanaja Ramprasad: She is with the Green foundation and has been supported by
AID-Bay Area. She received the Equator prize from the UN recently and
is making a tour of the US.
She will be in Seattle
around the end of the month and is supposedly an eloquent speaker. We
would like to try and organize a talk by her at UW regarding seed
conservation, organic farming, farming rights, etc. Joyeeta
& Ravi have offered to talk to various departments and come up with a
date. Possible dates are June 28, 29 or 30. Bash will reply to Karuna of AID-Bay Area regarding this.
10.
Donor Specific Readers Project: There's an M.Phil student in Chennai
who is visually impaired and needs the help of Readers to finish up his
research and thesis. It is not cheap to hire a Reader and this student
cannot afford it. The cost comes to about $500 from now until he
finishes up his thesis. There is a donor who is ready to donate $250
towards this and get it matched and there's an NGO with FCRA that is willing
to accept the funds. Bash has reviewed the NGO profile and there was
nothing to be concerned about. We voted to go ahead with this.
Bash will follow up. The couple of things to follow up on are: 1) We should put this student in touch with Vidya Vrikshah if he already
doesn't know about them. 2) We should ask people in Chennai about the
NGO that we're routing funds through. We had a general discussion about
routing funds through different NGOs (e.g. Ravi Aluganti's
fellowship) and about how much we need to be concerned about this as Asha. Conclusion was that we need to definitely
have some minimum level of scrutiny of the NGO.
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