Asha Meeting
10/14/2007
Meeting at Santhosh's place.
Attendees: Ashwini, Arun, Gaurav, Santhosh, Ganesh, Itisha, Vineet, Savitha, Bharat, Pankaj, Mohit, Ankur, Santhosh's parents, Sais, Murali, Sharanya.
AR is Action Required
I Pranjnalaya presentation on vocational education endeavour:
II Balakumar's ( from Parents against media violence) overview on "walk against media violence"
III Savitha's presentation on Tsunami relief funding proposal from Bharati trust.
I Pranjnalaya presentation on vocational education endeavour:
Overview of Prajnalaya by Ankur.
Fishery Project started on 25th Apr 2007 has been started & getting good benefits. Photo of 3 organic fertilizer tanks funded by Asha shown in the ppt.
Q: Wasn't the funding for pucca tanks where as the photo shows only a dug up trench with no concrete structure.
This needs to be checked up with earlier mtg minutes to see what the funding was for.
Overview of the handloom unit, farming, poultry, mushroom cultivation.
Q: How many handloom units are there? Probably about 4, the consumers will be the students.
Q: Do they have enough staff for these different units? The idea is to show the youth that there are different ways of getting employment.
Santhosh looked up the prev minutes & raised the point that the initial proposal had a funding breakup for
a)
Shed
b) Concrete structure or pucca tank 3 tanks = 15000
c) Tools and implements = 2500
Need to find out why the plans were changed?
How are they getting funded for the other units? Only through local funding apart from Asha.
Review the initial proposal from prajnalaya & find out what actually has been done.
Prajnalaya's account for the funding.
Construction of 3 temp non-concrete tank = Rs 18000
AR: Ankur to find out why plans for the pucca tank was changed & for what exactly the money from Asha was used.
AR: Ankur to find out from Asha India for prajnalaya expense reports.
For future, it will be better if the project can send a short update when plans change to Asha rather than waiting for the end of the year review.
AR: Ankur to find out exactly what the status is on each of the line items in the initial proposal .
AR Gaurav: Request Biju to get more info from a site visit.
AR Ankur to e-mail the document with all the expenditure info to the group.
II Balakumar's ( from Parents against media violence) overview on "walk against media violence"
Austin chapter of PAMV's first event.
Request Asha volunteers to join the 2007 Austin walk against media violence & also spread the message to friends.
- parents should bring down the # of hrs that kids watch tv.
- Awareness among parents
- Boycott violent media products like video games etc.
Asha volunteers to spread the message to all Asha runners. Nov 17 th 2007.
Santhosh to send Bala info on other running groups.
III Savitha's presentation on Tsunami relief funding proposal from Bharati trust.
Proposal to support 8 E.M.Cs in tsunami-affected villages for 1 year.
The E.M.Cs have been started in the tsunami affected areas after the basic re-habilitation needs were met.
- Previous organizations withdrew support after a specific time period ( save the children, action aid)
- Occupation in these villages is fishing & the EMCs are open to all villagers not just Irulas.
- 8 villages are currently being supported. 8 E.M.Cs
- Is it that the kids here are getting out of fishing? No, the education is beyond what occupation the kids choose. It is for the overall devpt of the child & is not trying to get children out of fishing.
- How are the EMCs received in the village? The Sarpam recognizes these as positive devpts for the village & it is run by the Irulas theselves, it is community driven.
- Irulas originally were forest dwellers but moved into fishing & fishing supported occupations.
AR: Check with Siddamma if the kids will be given time to learn fishing so that they have time for both school & to learn fishing.
- Good to check on the attendance of the kids in these EMCs.
- All EMCs work as child care centers & as EMCs.
- What is the # of people dropped out signify in the spreadsheet? Lets take agram pudhu nagar. It has 85 kids, 33 went to govt schools, 13 dropped out.
AR: Make sure that our analysis of the numbers are correct. We need to understand the break up of the #s of children in EMCs, govt schools & drop out rate.
What is the reason for the dropout ?
AR: Find out the various reasons, is it to help parents or is it to supplement family income.
Every school has a misc expense. What is that used for ?
AR: Find out details of the misc expenses.
What happens when we fund 13 kids & a little later 5 kids drop out. What happens to the funding? This the work of the project steward to track the progress & status & report back to Asha.
How effective will it be to track 8 schools for one Asha chapter? Siddamma will be the main contact. The effort on co-ordinating this will be much less than other projects. We can't track each & every kid. We will be tracking overall progress.
How does the money get disbursed? We send the money to BT & they give the money to community & we get audited statements to track progress.
How do we get statistics for each school's progress? Siddamma will provide it to us.
How do we do site visits to 8 schools? All these are in 2 districts. We should try & do this.
Has there been a site visit so far? AR: Find out if Ani/Sanjeev have done this.
Need to get more volunteers for this project & also for others. There seems to be a lot of work here & not enough volunteers.
Isn't it better to support a co-ordinator at BT? This seems to be becoming big for just siddamma. We can find alternative contacts for Siddamma for these projects.
More than access to Siddamma but rather it is a question of project mgmt. It is not that only Siddamma is involved but there are other people too involved.
AR: Santhosh to find alternative contacts. Find out if Siddamma is the only one. Find out other people involved. Find out if they would like a project co-ordinator.
How will the site visit requirement affect the funding for 3 months. The ARC process takes 2 mo.
- Do we need to have a site visit, we already know about an EMC & have visited these in the past. We also have worked with Siddamma in the past.
- But the EMCs are being run by Sarpams, so we would like to find out how the particular EMCs are working not questioning Siddamma or past work ex with BT.
We can work on getting a site visit done while we work on getting the ARC proposal through.
How should we tie the site visit to the vote on the proposal? Should we not disburse approved funds if we are not able to do a site visit. By default we will have to do a visit within 1 yr. But if we have to wait for a visit for the funding then it may delay this a lot. Let us just go ahead with the voting & fund disbursal but make a commitment to have a visit done for all 8 schools within 6 months.
Site visits take a lot out of volunteers. How would it work to employ/ support individuals who would do site visits. Vibha does this & seems to work well. Asha as a whole is considering something along these lines.
This proposal is for 1year funding & normally we fund for 6 months, do a review & then continue but in this case they already don't have funding since May & we still have to go thru the ARC vote. So, in this case we need to disburse the full yearly funding if approved.
Is this going to be treated like a new proposal? We have worked with Siddamma, BT, with resource center and so we won't be treating this like a new project.
So, will these EMCs become full time schools once they get funding or will they still be part time? They have also borrowed funds from other pool to fund these, so how will they be able to manage with the amounts being proposed? Do they need to revise the amounts as they will be operating without funds until they get our funds.
AR: Need to find out about this. Get revised numbers & do a online vote.
AR: Get the total amount in rupees as we need to send the correct dollar amt due to exchange rate fluctuations
AR to all volunteers - Read up on the proposal & vote when the online vote is put up. Need to explain exactly what was discussed in this meeting before the vote. All questions & concerns should be addressed to Savitha & Santhosh.
The vote should not be anonymous & so we will know exactly who voted .
Santhosh's Dad : Why don't you have an audit firm appointed by you in India to oversee the disbursal of all funds.
For BT they had their own auditior, every project steward needs to get an audited statement from the projects. An audited statement alone is not the idea but also overseeing the project progress. We (Asha - Austin) doesn't have the ability to find out bogus accounting very easily. Vibha has monitors in India and still had 3 project cancellations out of a total of 40 which was due to bogus accounting. ASS honeybee issue.As volunteers we cannot learn much in a day or 2 day visit. We need better monitoring for sure. Ex. cited of Jim Mentor of DC who went & monitiored the projects.
The monitors need to be sensitive to the projects & just report out. The monitor will not have a say or vote. But how can we get professionals like this? Vibha monitors have background in social work, in accounting. The onus is on the project steward to get good info. Having an external steward causes a lot of overhead.
Do we accept that stewards are not doing enough to ensure that there is no problem. We can definitely think of a monitor as a 3rd person's opinion. You don't have to follow Vibha's model but we can ask some other org. But we are already doing this with Asha India volunteers when we request them to do a site visit. Ex: of Vallabh.
Employing monitors doesn't mean that we as volunteers should shirk from our responsibility but this is a big concern for Santhosh.
Asha honour has hired an external auditor when being close to all the sites. But the NGOs are started by Asha volunteers & so in this case they do need external auditing.
Santhosh thinks that we need to prioritize tasks as a project. In a site visit we should go and talk to beneficiaries, children separately.