Meeting
Minutes 12/07/08
Attendees: Satish, Ganesh, Murali, Chandra, Itisha, Halley, Rahul, Karthik, Ranga, Raj, Sunita, Charanya, Savitha, Bhaskar, Gaurav,
1. Pragathi – Satish and Chandra
2.
Fund-raising proposal - Raj and Sunita
3.
Asha meeting location
4.
Khushboo Welfare Society
5.
Year-end
Review
1. Pragathi
– Satish and Chandra
- Pragathi started 4 years back and has chapters in Austin and Houston
- It was started to reach out to the older community to work in the areas of children education, women empowerment and livelihood opportunities for the poor
- They coordinate among different groups here for support like Rotary Clubs, Lions Club, etc
- Focussing on government primary schools
- Pragathi defines content and drives them to achieve the mission
- Focus on clusters, to take advantage of economies of scale
- Asha and Pragathi have worked on common projects in the past - Odanadi, Deenabandhu, Shkshana
- Started a school in Yelahanka in 2006
-
By 2007, they
picked a rural area within 30-100kms from
- Requirements Gathering meetings? Usually teachers and parents are involved in this process.
- To improve the facilities - provide infrastructure, water connections,
- There has been improvement in quality of education as measured by standardized tests by the Azim Premji Foundation
- The plan is to reach out to all schools in a district - which might include 425 schools
- Pragathi partnered with Akshara Foundation for a remedial reading program in Kannada
- ~1300 kids were assessed for their reading abilities. About 500 children had trouble reading.
- Reading Abilities are categorized by ability to read or recognize alphabets, words, sentences and paragraphs
- They include some sort of activity based learning
- Using books developed by Pratham to aid reading material for the children
- The govt. has picked it up and is planning to implement this reading program in 11 districts
- Student teacher ratios are supposed to be 40:1 but different circumstances may cause it to be higher
- Access to schools is no longer a problem but it seems that many of these schools are very small and it is hard to provide facilities in schools with 15-20 children
- Pragathi wants to scale their level of support to 425 schools
- Pragathi currently supports $3.5K towards this project
- Adding three more taluks will cost ~ $20,000
- Main cost is for the monitors and for the reading material
- The program is inexpensive because it makes use of the government school teachers
- 20 clusters with 400 teachers
- 16 teachers from a previous cluster along with 4 resource people from Akshara Foundation, form the team which trains the teachers in the next cluster
- In the long term would like to support a larger library program
-
Kodihalli is about 100 kms from
- Satish will send out the link to the details of the program
-
Such programs
exist in
- Why did they choose that district? Chose it because of logistical proximity and low literacy levels
- Trying to tap into the IT-industry for help
- In the example of Deenabandhu, they use the NGO strength to reach out to the community, rather than the government
- The cards were developed by Ravi Kumar with Akshara Foundation
- What would it take to get the govt. to accept it? Govt. has decided to take this up for 10 districts
- Akshara is part of Pratham
-
Pratham started in
- What can a volunteer from here do? Kannada would be an important requirement.
- Time commitment would be about 20-30 minutes/call in the first few weeks
- They have about 10 families to help out - from Austin Kannada Sangha
2. Fund-raising proposal - Raj and Sunita
- Been previous SAC donors and were looking to contribute back to society
- Wanted to raise money for Asha through a dinner for Valentine's Day
- Invite at least 100 couples, $200 a couple
- Half for the event, rest for the organization
- Could do auctions etc for fundraising?
-
Have
identified about 5 projects around
- Don't have the bandwidth to pull it off but may have the contacts to pull it off
- Marketing and sales is where they need help
- Will need to setup a website - either on Asha website or a different domain
- Help with flyer-ing
- Creating an attendee packet - printing t-shirts, brochures, advertising in the brochure
- Austin Marathon 2009 is on February 15th, which requires a lot of volunteer-bandwidth
-
Send out the
proposal to the
3. Asha
meeting location
- Meeting location is not reserved for next week
- Will have to check once we convene for the meeting.
4. Khusboo
Welfare Society
- Mohit and Bhavna visited the project
- Please email Ranga if you have any questions
5. Year-end Review
- Dec 21st will be year-end review