Minutes of Asha Seattle meeting on 08/14/08

Venue : RTC LWSD No 414, Morton Johnson Room, Redmond, WA

Attendees: Vijay Kanagala, Nagendra Singh, Kavita Sharma, Shiwani Sambarey, Jay Dave, Jaya Udayasankar, Binay Pathak, Srijan Chakraborty, Tulika Agrawal, Ken, Hareesh, Megha, Eera, Bhavna

 

Item 1: Saakshaar. Presented by Tulika

  • School for slum children in New Delhi.
  • This is a donor specific project. Need approval for 2008 budget.
  • Slum children need help coping. Aim to get children to government school
  • It’s an Asha Delhi project
  • Donor has already given money and wants some of it to go to this project.
  • There are around 100 students of different age groups. There are more children during September (exam time). They aim to get 30 students into government school.

Questions and Answers

·        Do we run it like other projects?

 As long as we’re comfortable and make sure we check for site visits, etc, it’s ok

·        How much funding for a year?

 They’re asking for $9371 for this year for rent, salary, mid-day meal and stationary.

·        What is the age group of the children?

 There are around 100 students of different age groups

·        What is the total budget for the project?

 They have not sent the entire budget. There are three locations and they require funding for one location.

Approve the project site visit pending:

In favor: 11

Abstain: 4

 

 

2.     Item 2: By Jay Dave    
Name of the Group:  Jana Seva Mandal  Established:  1969  With Asha:  N/A
Location:  Nandurbar, Dhule, Maharashtra

·        Provide boarding/lodging to Advasi children from villages surrounding Nandurbar in Maharashtra. They have a variety of other activities, but they are seeking funds for this purpose.

·        $15,450 per year for at least 3 years (Rs. 450 per student for 120 students)

·        120 students (60 boys/ 60 girls)

·        Site visit report exists.

·        Mainly for social work, has been around for 15 years. Require funding for boarding for adivasi boys and girls. Separate boys and girls facility. Kids come from 40-50 km away.

·        The facility is set up to try to encourage them to study

·        Appoint volunteers as and when needed

·        Run by Jeevan Vidhya part of Nirmala Niketan

·        50-60 women volunteers. They’re not paid; given food and occasional gifts.

·        No consistent donor so far. Need more funds so they can admit more kids.

·        4 people are paid a total of Rs 42000/year

·        Nandurbar is 12 hours from Bombay by bus/train

·        Asking for funding for 120 students - $13,000. They do not want to go to parent organization (don’t have enough funds)

·        Jana Seva: Boys, Jeevan Vidya for girls. They have different parent organizations.  

Q&A

·        How is the electricity situation?

Government gave 15 solar lamps, 5 of them to the girls facility

·        Is there one particular school that these kids are targeting?

Yes

·        What is the ratio if boys and girls

50% each

·        Will we be providing the vast majority of funding?

Mainly for the boarding

·        How old is this facility?

Boy’s facility is 15 years old and girls facility is 1 year old

·        Since it is 15 years old, is it an organization that reaches to alums?

Those who graduated went to doing activities like farming

·        What about medical care?

Did the person who performed the site visit stayed there overnight?

·        No, he stayed there for the day. Dilip Menon from Silicon Valley did the site visit. He mentioned that kids get a chance to decide the menu.

Do these wages seem fair?

·        Yes, it’s a very small and remote village

Is the organization secular?

·        Yes, the site visitor asked the kids and they said that they were encouraged to celebrate all festivals

·        How can we send funds to Jeevan Vidya?

There are technicality issues about who to send the funds to.

·        We need some background about this new organization.

 

Vote for overall funding in principle, pending how we treat it and who we send the  money to.

Yes: 14

Abstain: 1

Discuss technicalities in the next meeting

 

3.     Item 3: By Nagendra Singh

Asha West Coast Conference. Seeing voluteers to help out organizing the Asha West Coast Conference.

·        Need help with registration, taking minutes, etc

·        Two groups of people to be supported - one from Silicon Valley and one from Vancouver

·        Will anyone be interested in hosting the visitors?

·        Need help with transporting people to and from the airport

 

4.     Item 4: By Binay

  • Will require a vote by the deadline 8/25. Will present it today and ask for an online vote
  • How do we deal with the general funds common to all the 65 chapters
  • Binay: I will send the slides to everyone and put the details online, so they know what the five options are. The five options are:
    1. Distribute funds equally among all chapters.
    2. Support large scalable projects.
    3. Hybrid Model.
    4. No vote.
    5. Keep money in general funds

Q&A

  • How does fund raising happen for general funds

Whenever there is no chapter specified, the donations go to the general funds

 

5.     Item 5: By Srijan, Finance

We recently had a finance review and a budgeting meeting for 2008-2009. In the last meeting we went through some of the proposals that we came up with in the budgeting meeting. I've already sent a detailed mail with the meeting notes. Will cover some more of the items from those proposals.

How do we reduce $1.1 mil outlay to $800K-$900K

Option 1: No major extensions to existing projects for the next one year. Major extensions means anything above inflation.

Ken: Only large projects or all projects across the board? Srijan: All projects across the board

Voting: Yes 9, Abstain: 1

Option 2: Reduce funding for all large projects by 20%. We’ll need to discuss this in detail in the next meeting.  Srijan: I will give handouts and a presentation with options.

There are other options like eliminating bottom 10% of the projects. We will discuss all these options in detail in the next meeting.

 

 

Minutes taken by Bhavna Krishan

 

 

 

 

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