Minutes of Asha Seattle Meeting, Aug 5, 2004 Venue: Steven’s Court (UW Campus) Attendees: Venky, Akshay, Swati, Ravi, Rahul, Sunil, Parna, Arindam, Ambrish, Srijan, Paramita, Vibhavaree, Ashok (Bash). The agenda discussed were 1. Suvidya (Sunil): Sunil gave an update on the Suvidhya proposal. Suvidhya has a Request for helping in the distribution of their learning aid kit (includes Place Value - Simple Mathematics aid etc.). The kit is going to be distributed in about 100 Schools. Suvidhya has already raised 4 lakhs from Ratan Tata Trust, but requires a total of 5 lakhs. They need Rs. 60000, since Tata trust puts a condition that a percentage of the overall requirement has to be collected from some other source. Questions raised: a. Can we get a copy of their learning aid kit? b. Can we reproduce similar aids - any copyright issues? Decision on funding - Yes (All) 2. MICDA (Sunil): Sunil gave an updates from the Mathamma Project. He shared the Progress Report he received from the project. The work there is with the madiga community in AP where due to various reasons the girl children many times are dedicated as "Mathammas" and are made to lead a life of prostitution etc. Dr. Subbaramaiah works with this community on health issues, education and elimination of superstitious beliefs. There are 19 Social Workers and two heads. They have divided the issues into 'Urgent' and 'Can Wait' kinds. Two months back there was the annual Mathamma celebration. The project had good success this year, as they were able to convince the villagers to not celebrate it at all in some places or it was done at low scale in many other places. They were able to help them in Health needs. They made them aware of Hospitals and made Doctors aware of their project so that the villagers are considered. On Education front they have kids rejoin school or complete them. They also helped on the economic front by helping the villagers with things like Old Age Pension. The project need financial help to use a jeep that they have, but are not being able to use it because of maintenance cost. They have asked 1 lakh 30 thousand Rs. (~ 3000 dollars) for it. Questions raised: a. Does he (Dr. Subbaramaiah) have a schedule to visit the mandals? b. Will he cover as much distance as he mentions? c. Any other mode of connection- Bus? Not feasible. d. Instead of maintaining jeep is renting a car cheaper? No decision was taken on this, it was decided that the answers to the above questions and more detailed break up of the cost is required. 3. Bash talked about the fire in a school in Tamil Nadu that took lives of many kids, and how the TN Government has put a rule to ban thatched roof altogether. The Government is encouraging asbestos or pakka roof. Many schools supported by Asha Seattle have the same problem. There was a discussion on the pros and cons of thatched roofs. These are good for the summer heat. There are people who are ready to donate for the purpose of reconstruction of roofs. In India one professor in IIT - Madras and one more NGO (Tamil Nadu Foundation) are ready to co-ordinate the distribution of money. Two options were discussed: a. Should we as Asha or Asha Seattle take a stand against Government's sudden knee-jerk reaction (banning all thatched roofs without any reasonable time limit or any fund allocation for reconstruction)? b. Should we fund the schools affected by this new ruling? If we fund then at least from Asha Seattle’s point of view we can find out the schools that we have funded and look for a solution. There was a suggestion to use other roofs instead of Asbestos, because asbestos is not supposed to be good for health, especially in the long run. E.g.: Fire Resistant Plastic or some kind of bricks that keep the rooms cooler. Few suggestions that came up were - enforce rule for new schools, have provision of more exits, limit the number of students in each class. It was decided that we need to talk to Asha Chennai to know more about the NGO through which we might have to send the money. Need is Urgent. Summary: It was decided that a stand against the government ruling will be taken - petition saying that their process was not correct. They are not giving any funds and did not give enough time for schools to get the alternate roofs. Votes – 11 It was also decided that if we get proposals from the schools supported by us we will consider their request at that time. Regarding the donors who have already shown interest in donating for this cause, the suggestion was to tell them that we are interested and are trying to figure out the logistics and the process. At the same time, we should find out about the NGO through Asha Chennai. 4. Rahul gave an update on the current status of Work an Hour (WAH). WAH's publicity and donation is low this year. The target is 175K, but we have raised only about $20k. Options - Email friends, add WAH signatures to email, spread through word of mouth. August 21st we have Independence Day celebration by IAWW. We can setup an information booth and sell tea there. Money required for the booth is 25$. Volunteers were sought for the event. Arindam, Parna, Paramita volunteered. Everybody will email Rahul about the time that suits everybody best. Ravi brought up the idea that Asha can probably also set up a booth during the CRY-cricket tournament. IT was decided that we should at least put some AllGoRhythms flyers there. 5. Srijan gave an update about the text book review project. We have already written a petition demanding the revamp of the Social Studies test books in Gujarat. We have also started reviewing other state text books - West Bengal and Karnataka. Asha Stanford chapter has also shown interest in reviewing other state board text books. 6. Ravi gave an update on the current status on AllGoRhythm - Annual Fund Raising Concert. We need to start publicity. Flyers are almost ready. Online ticketing is going to be put up by this week. A call was made for volunteers to post the flyers and for publicity. We will incur a cost of 2500$ for the venue, sound and light. Looking for sponsors. For the sponsors we can put their name on handouts. Incentive for sponsors - for companies it is advertisement - we can mention them in our brochures and allow them to put up a booth during the concert. Two weeks from now – need to have ticket Booth at Mayuri on weekends. Suggestions: a. Reduce the price in Balcony since the quality was bad last time. Instead of reducing the price we will take care of sound affect. b. Give Mayuri or other stores the tickets to sell during weekdays. Sell the ticket to them and give assurance that we will take the tickets back and give them the money back. c. Is there an e-flyer that we can fwd to? d. Are the tickets printed - Might be done by this week e. Food ?? - We will get packaged food from the restaurants. We will have two kinds of food packages - dinner and snacks. Ticket price This year: 17 - Stall, 14- Balcony. (20 & 17 at door respectively). 7. Bash talked about Vidya Vriksha - their work with the blind people and their collaboration with IIT Madras to create s/w to convert any language text to Braille. They have already started producing Braille books. There are sixty different schools and they want to facilitate two computers per school and the free s/w to make the blind children more self reliant. World Computer Exchange (WCE) can facilitate getting the computers there. They charge $60 to assemble a computer and send to any country. They just need people to pick it up and custom is taken care of. The organization will get the teachers to Chennai and will give them some computer training. Total estimated cost is approximately $7200. It is pilot program. Questions: a. Some people had concerns about the maintenance of computers since teachers are not computer literate. b. How are they going to integrate the blind ppl in the mainstream as they propose to?

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