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Minutes of Asha Seattle Meeting, Dec 02, 2004
Venue: Stevens Court
Attendees: Paromita, Jayashree,
Vani, Rahul, Tapoja, Supriya, Shayon, Sudhangsu, Radhesh, Swati, Vibhavaree, Sunil, Jyoti, Ranajit, Ravi
Anawim: (Supriya)
- Asha Seattle previously supported
their program to extend microcredit to
villagers, particularly women, since 2001 by providing capital for them
so they can get a sustainable income from microcredit
business to provide teacher salaries.
- The program was to become
self sufficient within three years.
- They have been able to
collect a majority of these loans, but because of other lower-interest
options available have not been successful in finding customers for new
loans. Because of this they have
decided to keep the capital in a bank account and pay teacher salaries
from the interest. Since they are
no longer extending microcredit we feel that
this is not entirely in keeping with their original goal.
- The project has also
requested $10K from Asha-Seattle to build a
new tuition center and support teacher salaries.
- They have also suggested
possibly encouraging women to form collectives or cooperatives and
request credit as a group, which may be more sustainable.
- The consensus was that we
should recommend another site visit to investigate what else we could
accomplish with funding.
20th anniversary of Bhopal - A-S activities:
(Tapoja)
- Will show a film Friday
afternoon
- Could use volunteers for
setting up and manning the booth outside the Hub (?)
- Will present a relevant
petition at the booth
Booklet for women: (Paromita)
- Ranajit will drive translation
from Hindi to other Indian languages
Discussion on future of Asha: (Radhesh)
Main
idea was that we should think about future expansion of Asha
as a whole and A-S
- Where can we expand fundraising?
- How can we make our
disbursements more effective?
- How can we quantify what
has made this chapter so successful in fundraising?
- Get proportionally huge
amount of money through direct donations as opposed to events -- how can
we duplicate this elsewhere?
- We should formalize and
record the processes we use in fundraising for posterity
- One idea is that we could
form some sort of "bureau" to investigate these issues and
ideas
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