Minutes of Asha Seattle meeting on 01/18/07 Venue : RTC LWSD No 414, Morton Johnson Room, Redmond, WA Attendees: Palani, Brian, Vibhavaree, Kunal, Saurabh, Swati, Subhasish, Ameya, Srijan, Ken, Shailesh, Lakshmi Kumar, Vijay, Eera, Swami, Ram, Sudarshan, Nitin. Project – V-Excel – Presented by Palani § Palani Went over the V-Excel project proposal and the answers he got from them that were raised in the last meeting. § He talked about the group's size and finance, funding for salary for teachers. There were some concerns on how receptive they are and how our involvement with them can be of benefit for both. § The program they are asking for funds right now primarily cater to middle class / upper middle class children. § However, Swati raised the point that even in upper middle class families. mentally challenged children have very limited privilege. § Many questions came up during the discussion including whether our donor's money will be well spent here or somewhere else with focus on underprivileged children, how many schools are there catering to mentally challenged children etc. Vote: Fund V-Excel in it's current proposed form (full amount about $70K) : Favour: None Against: 15 Abstain : 2 Funding at some level: Favour: 8 Against: 6 Abstain : 3 Palani to follow up on whether V-Excel will be open to some kind of scholership program where they can support some number of underprivileged children in the same facility under the same program. Vote : Provided we have a good site visit, support 20 underprivileged children Support specific parts of proposals? Favour: 3 Money should go to poor children? Favour : 11 Project : Nitin Wagheshwar Vidya Vikas School Building Construction Project – Presented by Nitin Ved § The school is from 1-12 standards, Currently serving 1900 boys / 600 girls. § They want to build 10 classrooms. § Already they have 22 classrooms and a marriage hall (owned by the teacher's association). Some members had some questions about the project and we discussed. We need to look at financials on the site visit. VOTE: Build the 10 school rooms Favour: All (17) Against: None Heros of Humanity Event - Presented by Brian § "Heros of Humanity" Event happening in 50 cities. § Invitation for asha members to show us since of of the Asha volunteers is a nominee for the award. § The event is on Feb 3, 2007 1900 PST. § People from different organizations will be present there. Brian talked about how nominations are done and what this event is going to be like. He also gave an introduction to the Art of Living Foundation and it's various activities for uplifting communities and environment, development of the self. This event is to celebrate their 25yr anniversary. Palani will get back to Brian on how volunteers want to participate. Announcements/Updates by Srijan Few announcements/updates on overall chapter activities: § Project Stewards workshop on feb 24. Project coordinators went over their updates. § We have a documentary screening on: Vidarbha suicide on 23rd Jan. Saurabh went over the details. § We need a steward for "Parijat Academy", a project in Assam. It'll be good to take up this project since we have limited NE presence right now. § Newsletter- We need one or more person(s) to coordinate our quarterly newsletter. We also need to make the process more democratic, since right now only a few people generally review the newsletter before it is published. Vibhavaree suggested that we should send a mail to Asha-Seattle asking for volunteers to review the newsletter contents every time before it is published. Update on Meetings Time and Venue decision by Ken Monthly meetings VOTE: Saturday: 3 Sunday: 10 Afternoon 5 Based on this, we'll start scheduling monthly meetings on Sunday afternoons.	Br

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