Minutes of the meeting held on July 1st, Lalbagh at 11AM


Attendees:

Alok, Anita, Sanjeev, Sharad, Sriram.


Minutes:

1. We discussed the issue of routing funds to Parikrama.
Last year, Asha SV routed a donation from Adobe (in SV) to Parikrama.
However, they were not completely satisfied on the details of how the
money was spent by Parikrama. This year too, Adobe wishes to route US$
63K to Parikrama via Asha SV. Asha SV would like to hold the money until
they have more clarity on Parikrama's expenditure. This is where Asha
BLR had stepped in, to interact with Parikrama and get more details (we
also did a couple of site visits in the past month or so, reports from
these site visits have been posted to the list earlier).

Action item: It was decided that Alok and Sriram would call up Parikrama
and request them for a detailed annual budget or financial report. Once
we get this information, we will take it from there.


2. We got a proposal for funding from Dhwani Trust. The trust operates a
resource cente r in Bangalore. Their goal is to come up with teaching
aids and practises for better instruction of 1) the Kannada Language 2)
Social studies 3) Environmental studies. From what we could gather from
their proposal documents, their efforts are geared towards teachers (and
teacher training). They focus on teachers from schools in urban slums/or
with most children from poor backgrounds.

Discussion: Sanjeev raised the following points:
1) The trust has a teacher centric approach. It is not clear
how effective this would be. Many a times teachers learn innovative
methods in training workshops, but the reality on the ground is that
most of their efforts go in handling/policing large classes with poor
facilities/support. Hence, many of these techniques simply go unused.
2) Is substantial effort for better instruction for Kannada
language really necessary - in his experience Kannada was one
subject that many students (in govt. schools, with poor backgrounds) had
reasonable proficiency in.


Action item: It was decided that Sharad would call up Dhwani and 1)
Schedule a visit to the resource center 3) Request copies of the
material developed by Dhwani, preferably soft copies, so they can be
circulated within Asha.


3. Info session for marathon training - covered in Anita's mail earlier.