Asha Meeting
10/21/2007
Attendees: Santhosh, Sudarshan, ArvindV, Savitha, Bhaskar, Ganesh, Charanya, Charanya’s mom, Chandar, Santhosh’s parents, Sharanya, Ashwini, Arun, Itisha, Gaurav, Murali
1. Tsunami Rehabilitation Update -
2. Update on Marathon Program
3. Project Reviews
1. Tsunami Rehabilitation Update -
Santhosh gave the background information about Asha and then about Siddamma and Bharathi Trust before talking about the motivational centers. Asha started working 8 motivational centers. Today Asha Austin supports
There are 8 villages in the Cuddalore and Thiravallur area where Bharathi Trust was working with
One of the villages Bharathi Nagar, faced a disaster recently. On September 27th, there was a fire accident and the thatched structures got burnt. All the belongings got burnt but luckily there were no casualties. The fire started because of a cooking accident. Siddamma contacted the collector and they rushed in with emergency aid and they were able to contain the fire. The permanent houses being built and the warehouse did not get damaged.
The collector provided 5 kgs of rice and kerosene to those affected. The sarpams went to other Irula villages and collected daals, oil etc as relief for the 60 families affected.
Community will return to normalcy only when livelihood options are restored. They came up with a basic list of needs. It is very rarely that we (Asha for Education) have to deal with immediate relief. The Asha President has the authority to approve the immediate release of funds but this needs to be ratified by the ARC body.
The Tsunami Relief was provided to projects we had been working with in the past.
The term ‘drop-out’ means children over 5-6 years who are not in the mainstream schooling.
Kids below five were going to the Balwadi.
Q: How do we know how effective EMCs are? Do children drop out of the EMCs?
Santhosh - It is still in the initial stages.
Q: Why do we use the Tsunami funds for the proposal?
A: The people who were affected by the tsunami were living in this area.
Murali - 1. Regarding the tsunami funds - we need to disburse funds much faster than this.
2. Bharathi Trust needs to build a corpus for immediate funds. They could build it into the proposal for the EMC.
A corpus fund - is a pool of money reserved for immediate use. If the corpus becomes big enough, they can use the interest for the running costs of the organization.
Q: Do they provide people with cash or kind?
A: The people will be provided with relief in kind. The Sarpams will probably take charge and provide the relief.
Q: Why are these families being supported?
A: We have worked with the community in the past - through the housing community and the EMC’s.
Suganthi is the accountant who created the livelihood requirements. She never sent the immediate requirements in terms of food, clothing, vessels and other immediate relief. All 8 people on the call were okay with the increase in the budget.
Savitha contacted the NSS at IIT Chennai and they had a clothes drive to collect immediate relief
Other tsunami affected families came forward to help with relief.
How soon can the money be disbursed?
A: Santhosh contacted Venki for the disbursal. The process should take two weeks at the maximum. Bharathi Trust has funds in other pools which could be used for immediate usage provided they have the guarantee that they will receive funds from another source.
There will be two ARC proposals - 1. Support for EMC from tsunami funds
Austin will have to coordinate this effort. Arvind Rao is the steward for the construction project.
Austin had raised $400 for the tsunami efforts. Cleveland chapter has raised $2000 which would be used towards the immediate relief.
Total amount required - $22175
Clevland chapter - $2000
Austin chapter - $400
Amount to be disbursed - $19775
Arvind V went through the budget items.
Rs. 864804/- is the support required for the whole proposal.
2. Update on Marathon Program
Chicago runners were not able to complete the marathon there because of the
weather. Admin fund could be used. But since the admin fund is kind of tight it
was decided that the runners (2 in number: Mohit and Meenakshi) will email to
their donors to tell them that some of the funds raised will be used for
travel/lodging expenses of the *new* makeup race.
3. Project Reviews
Sais supports the idea of having project reviews scheduled every week. She also suggests that we stick to 1 project review per meeting so that there is time to discuss other current issues in every meeting.
Arun R says that it might be a good idea to give stewards a structure on the basis of which they could make their presentation.
e.g. Original proposal, what was approved, progress since then, current requirements and need to disburse.
Gaurav and Santhosh had made a project review schedule but it was not suited to all stewards, so the original schedule has been changed.
Action Items for Gaurav and Santhosh:
Need to make a list of all projects that need help - both OLD and NEW.
Need to make the project page update tools available to all stewards.
Find a plan to ensure that all prject pages get updated - sit with stewards (let all volunteers know if help is needed).