meeting minutes 27 april 2008

Attendees:
Geeta, Ramani, Ram, Sanjeev, Anita, Siva, Sid, Sridhar, Arvind, Anand

1) Sita School
- Background information of the school was given by Anita. Most
of this information is available at:
http://www.ashanet.org/bangalore/projects/proposals/SitaSchool/
- Siva and Sanjeev added their impressions of the school. Well
run school of good quality and important to support such initiatives
and learn from it. The school is a mature effort and are quite honest
and real about their efforts and it's impacts.
- Ram spoke of his interaction with Jane as a teacher trainer and
stressed on the importance of taking up as much administrative roles
so the school can function as much as possible as a resource base
where we can conduct trainings for teachers in the school itself.
- We discussed the budget and it was approved.
- Siva and Ram presented their view of the finances and are
convinced that it is possible to support the project through chapter
funds.
- The other discussion was regarding the support-a-child program.
However, some volunteers had questions of finding volunteers within
asha-bangalore who will be able to follow up with donors consistently
over the years and it was decided to revisit SAC as a possible
fundraiser after 6 months and support the school with chapter funds
for now. There was also some concern on expectation of donors if they
are from India in terms of interaction with the children beyond just
visiting the school.
- Geeta mentioned some grant programs of IISc that we could
apply to next year for the same.

2) Chaitanya
- I could not take rigorous notes on this. We discussed many,
many aspects of the project, the recent report, drawbacks of gauging
projects with sampled statistics, activities of Chaitanya in their
profit making enterprises, where the project could go, what
expectations we can set.
- The discussion, however, could not be completed.
- Anand has volunteered to organize a meeting with the
teachers and ask some of these questions to set realistic expectations
from the group and continue the discussion.