Minutes of Asha Seattle meeting on 04/09/08 Venue : RTC LWSD No 414, Morton Johnson Room, Redmond, WA Attendees: Vijay, Arvind, Ken, Vibhavaree, Sree, Srijan, Prashant, Marina, Nagendra, Megha, Binay, Deb, Eera, Smita, Sravanthi, Shailesh, Hareesh, Malti, Sunil and Soumya.  Item #1: Requesting Funding Approval for New Budget Year (2008 - 2009) Presenter: Malti Raghavan Project: SUPPORT (Society for Undertaking Poor People's Onus for Rehabilitation) Location: Mumbai, India SUPPORT is based in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.  Help street children who are drug users by detoxifying them.  ASHA, Seattle supporting them since 1999.  ASHA, Seattle supports only the vocational training of the boys. Detoxification supported by other organizations.  Vocational training provided to kids who have been through detoxification. Vocational training in areas like carpentry, welding, etc. Requesting an increase in funding for the year 2008 - 2009. The increase is about Rs 7,00,000 -- from Rs 10,00,00 to 17,00,000. Requesting increase in budget mostly due to general increase in rent, rent for the godown, Director's salary, and the rent of carpentry facility.  There is a drop in the # of boys being supported from 70 (2007 -- 2008) to 48 (2008 -- 2009).  Decrease in # of boys is due to many reasons  Their operating space has decreased this year as half of their rented building got demolished to make space for a mall.  boys are difficult to manage.  Acquiring space in Mumbai is becoming difficult.  Q: Are we funding based on the # of boys? No. Only a part of the funding, i.e. stipend, is based on # of boys.  Q: If you take out the new additions (carpentry rent, godown rent ) what is the increase in budget? It's only the salary of the Director. Q: Where did they get the funds for the carpentry unit last year? From sources other than ASHA, Seattle.  Q: Why don't they plan to get the funds for the carpentry unit from other sources? ASHA, Seattle supports their vocational training center.   Q: How was the audit for 2006? They had a lot of reserve funds. They plan to buy an acre of land.  Q: How much has their operating space decreased by? From around 39XX Sq. Ft. to 29XX Sq. Ft.  Q: How much was the budget for the past years? last year $25000, and the year before that $22000.  Q: Director is being paid Rs 86000, which is 12% of her total salary, for her work in the vocational training center? Why is the director getting such a huge salary? Not sure. Q: Has the director put her money into SUPPORT? No. Q: The audit, for SUPPORT, was carried out by an auditor for a Fortune 500 company who generally hold a very high bar for audits. Organizations like SUPPORT are typically not held to such high quality bar.  Q: What if we say no to the increase? They are already skeptical that we will fund the increase. Q: Are we voting for the increase or the whole amount of the budget? Only the increase. As this is a repeating project, money that was approved last year can be distributed this year.  Q: Are we ready to vote? No. We need more information.  Q: Do you note that cost has gone up significantly per student? Yes, but we never paid per student.  We need more information about what items remain same, what items have been newly added and what items increased.  Need more scrutiny in the next site visit.  Need more volunteers for the project. Item #2: Approving "strings" for the funds that were approved to purchase land.  Presenter: Megha Project: PLANET WHY Location: Delhi, India.  ASHA, Seattle supports WHY (note: it's different from Planet WHY) which runs centers for after school education for children in slums of New Delhi.  ASHA, Seattle supports 13 of these centers.  PLANET WHY consists of 2 plots of land which will host a children's home, women's center, and a guest house. The proceeds from the guest house will fund the women's center, children's home and WHY centers.  In the previous ASHA meeting, ASHA, Seattle approved 20,00,000 Rs, which will be used to partially fund the purchase of one of the plots, on the condition that appropriate "strings" are in place to ensure that the funds are utilized properly in case PLANET WHY doesn't work out as expected. Note that the conditions/strings are on a good faith basis as these cannot be legally enforced by ASHA, Settle.   The proposed conditions are  If land is not purchased, it will go toward the recurring funding that ASHA, Seattle provides to WHY.  After 4 / 5 years, ASHA, Seattle will decrease the recurring funding to WHY by 30 - 60 %. Results of the voting: Yes: 16 No: 2 Abstain: 0.  Item #3: Project Update SHIKSHANA Presenter: Arvind Project: SHIKSHANA Location: Bangalore, India This is just a project update. Renewal of budget will come up for approval later (probably in the next meeting).  Can we bring the project update and the renewal of budget, for discussion, in the next meeting? Arvind: Yes.  Item #4: Chapter Update AHSA, Seattle has Eera as the official nomination for the ASHA wide secretary team. The secretaries team will have 2 members and they will hold the office for 2 years.  Geetanjali was a huge success. Full house show. 700 people. Sold out 5 days before the event.  Talk on 22nd by Madhukishwar on gender issues in India. UW will also organize his talk. Many site visit updates are not in yet. Many were called out during the meeting.  Project stewards who haven't requested checks please do. Request to be placed in Indian Rs. Project stewards should not update the funding information on website. Finance team will do it.  Wheels of Change. Seattle to Portland biking event. Select 2 projects for display. Proposing "Betsy Elizabeth Trust" and SUPPORT.  Item #5: Reviving Hope Update Project: Reviving Hope - SAC Location: Holalkere, Chitradurga District, Karnataka.   This project aims to provide support and assistance to people suffering from hemophilia. Hemophilia is a hereditary disease where blood has difficulty clotting. Affects mostly men. Blood can be made to clot by injecting factors into the blood after an injury.  The project started out by supporting two families who had this disease. They don't need funding anymore.  These families were supported by Kuvempu trust.  Hemophilia society is an organization, est. 1983, which has a similar purpose as the Reviving Hope project.  Hemophilia society has a full time doctor who works with kids who have the disease. They want to fund an increase in his salary.  Exploring the possibility of supporting many kids -- either directly through Hemophilia Society, Kuvempu Trust, or Support A Child.  Hemophilia Society has FCRA clearance.

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