Asha Berkeley Newsletter

July, 2011 Volume 1, Issue 4

IN THIS ISSUE

DONATE to Asha for Education

Donate to Asha for Education Berkeley at http://www.ashanet.org/berkeley/donate.php.

GET INVOLVED with Asha Berkeley

Learn how to get involved with Asha for Education Berkeley at http://www.ashanet.org/berkeley/volunteer.php.

Asha's Work an Hour Campaign

By Suchitha Sundaram

Asha for Education’s Work An Hour (WAH) campaign annually raises funds for selected projects across the Asha network, and the organization overall. We’re gearing up for the 2011 edition in July. The summer-long campaign, which lasts until mid-September, asks supporters to symbolically donate one hour of their time in the form of one hour of their salary.

WAH was first launched in 1998, when Asha was just seven years old, and raised more than $30,000 with the support of almost 700 donors. This past year, WAH 2010 raised more than triple that amount with donations reaching over $100,000 from about 850 donors around the world. In the past thirteen years, the WAH campaign has raised over $1.3 million for education projects in India.

Every year, WAH focuses on certain Asha projects, usually choosing large-scale ventures that require more financial support than any single chapter can offer. Projects that have been highlighted in the past include: Samarth, a school in Orissa aiming to integrate disabled children into regular educational institutions; Society for Education and Action (SEA) in Tamil Nadu, which focuses on improving the lives of the fisherman community through education; and Kadam, which has been trying to provide access to basic education to children of families displaced by communal riots in Gujarat.

Donors can choose whether to give directly to one of the sponsored WAH projects or to support a specific Asha chapter with their donation. Each chapter tries to raise the most funds, and being the founding Asha for Education chapter, Asha Berkeley consistently ranks among the top 10 in WAH donations. During WAH 2010, Berkeley raised over $3000 from 28 donors, making it the 8th most funded chapter last year.

Join us by “working an hour” this summer! The campaign kicks off on July 15th, so look for our emails about supporting this tradition. To find out more information about WAH and how you can support the campaign, http://www.ashanet.org/workanhour/2011/donate/donate.php.

Awantika Vidya Bhawan - Primary Education for Rural Children

By Milla Nizar

Asha for Education, Berkeley has been funding the Awantika Vidya Bhawan project since 2007, when the Nursery and K-11 school in Madhya Pradesh first came to the chapter's attention. The school is a product of the work of the Awanti Rehabilitation Programmes and Action Networking (ARPAN) Society, a Bhopal-based NGO created in 2004. The ARPAN Society espouses the goals of imparting quality basic education to poor rural children, reducing the dropout rate of school children at the primary school level, teaching job-oriented vocational courses as a part of the formal education, and helping rural women become independent by training them in various skills such as tailoring, sewing, zari-embroidery, and crafts. Awantika Vidya Bhawan embodies these goals and brings them to the village of Samardha, located approximately 30 kilometers outside of Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.

In 2007, Awantika Vidya Bhawan was merely a K-5 school that served 92 students and employed 7 teachers in the nearby area. Over the last 4 years, it has expanded to cover Nursery and K-11 education, with 494 students and 18 teachers. The majority of the student body comes from poor families of farmers and laborers. With local government schools in an abysmal condition and private schools out of monetary reach of these families, Awantika Vidya Bhawan has filled an important niche in the community, offering quality education to an underserved demographic. One of the primary benefits of the school to the community is its ability to offer free transportation for the students to and from the school, thereby saving many children from walking several miles back and forth every day. Awantika Vidya Bhawan brings in children from 12 different villages within a 12-mile radius of the school. This particularly benefits young girls, whose parents would often forego giving their daughters an education, fearing the transportation risks involved for females. Thus, Awantika Vidya Bhawan is also doing its part to prevent gender inequalities early on.

Since 2007, Asha Berkeley has given $45,535 to teacher salaries, classroom supplies, and petrol costs for the van that provides student transportation, all of which have allowed the ARPAN Society to expand its reach in the community. The most recent installment in September 2010 sent $9,529 to the school to fund the annual salaries of 14 instructors. Asha Berkeley commends Awantika Vidya Bhawan for the inroads it has made into educating this underserved rural community and hopes to continue supporting its work in the future.

To learn more about or donate to Awantika Vidya Bhawan, visit http://www.ashanet.org/projects/project-view.php?p=872.

Asha's 20th Conference - Day 1

By Sneha Thatipelli

Day 1 of Asha-20 kicked off with keynote speaker Sanchita Saxena, the Associate Director for the Center for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley. Her talk concerned the role of NGOs in implementing social change and how Asha for Education fits into the picture. NGOs, she claimed, are able to provide people services that the government either fails to or does not have the resources to. By doing so, they challenge the government to bring about change themselves. Saxena furthermore pointed out an interesting trend regarding NGOs.

In recent years, they have “mushroomed up” everywhere, especially in Bangladesh. Such a phenomenon underscores the credibility of NGOs and since many work towards the same goal, it also makes them inefficient. In addition, many NGOs budget their resources to deliver services not provided or insufficiently provided by the government or private sector, rather than implementing long-term solutions. But implementing these long-term social changes makes it difficult to provide “results” and “evidence” to prove to others that they are effective and actually achieving what they were meant to do.

So how does Asha factor into all of this? Saxena urges Asha to think about forming partnerships with other organizations, thereby bringing us together with NGOs that have a similar mission in mind. Going forward, Saxena addresses the issue of actually surveying the population of interest and getting an idea of their needs from their perspective. Doing so will help Asha better serve the people and also make us more accountable to the people we are trying to help.

As Asha continues to grow, we must also maintain this accountability and transparency, a practice that a lot of NGOs struggle to do. Donors need to know that their money is being well spent and used effectively. Because funding is and always has been an issue for NGOs, they sometimes compromise their own mission statements to get the funding they need to survive. Saxena suggests tha Asha look into other sources of funding without losing sight of our mission statement. With Saxena’s input on future routes of expansion and improvement, Asha-20 was off to a great start.

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act

By Neha Jain

During the third day of the conference, Vinod Viswanath from Asha Silicon Valley led a presentation and discussion of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE). On August 4, 2009, RTE was passed in India, mandating that children between ages 6 and 14 should and will be given free and compulsory education. It is considered a landmark piece of legislation in Indian education, going into effect in April 2010.

India is no stranger to laws requiring free, compulsory education for children. Article 45, written into the Indian Constitution in 1950, guaranteed that within 10 years, all children would be granted free education. But education was never made a priority, and the deadline to provide education was continually pushed back. Today, based on RTE, Article 21A of the Indian Constitution states that, “The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine.”

The bill asserts that all children between the ages of 6 and 14 are required to attend school and achieve some basic standards of primary education. Private schools must reserve 25% of their seats for underprivileged children, and all schools unrecognized by the government will be forced to close. It is the duty of the government, both state and federal, to ensure that all children attend school and that there are adequate numbers of schools in each area. The Federal government has established some minimum criteria for education, but has left the implementation of the bill to the states.

Some criticisms of the bill include whether the government will really be able to uphold this act and shell out the thousands of crores necessary to make their vision a reality. Others wonder whether private schools will fairly hold 25% of seats for impoverished children, whether the government school system will be destroyed rather than supported, and whether the quality of education will suffer. The bill is still highly controversial, even if at first glance the provisions seem just and reasonable. It is somewhat unclear how this bill will affect Asha for Education-supported projects. One example presented at the conference was that some projects support government-unrecognized schools, meaning those schools are technically illegal under RTE.

Regardless of how our projects are affected, education in India will certainly be impacted, making this an issue that we at Asha need to be aware of. We must work with our projects to figure out how they will be affected, identify ways to ease the transition, and most importantly, educate ourselves on the education system in India and the actions of RTE.

Gandhi Kasturibhai Village Society - An Educational and Vocational School

By Sunita Sridhar

Having been in Asha Berkeley for a couple of years, but never completely understanding the cause in which we were involved, I was thrilled to finally visit an Asha project - Gandhi Kasturibhai Village Society (GKDS) - an educational and vocational school in the village of Chengam, on the outskirts of Thiruvannamallai, South India. I made the mistake of informing the director I was coming, thus inviting a grand reception with sweets, limes and all the teachers to welcome me.

The school is composed of five centers, spread out through a maze of small villages within the town. Since the nearest government school is five kilometers away, most children only attend this school. Although the school does aim to teach the students English and Math, among other standard subjects, the primary focus is on tailoring, so that the children can earn a living once they become proficient.

As Asha Seattle, which has been funding the project for the past three years, states on their website, the goal of GKDS is to help the small farmers, dalits, and landless laborers who live in this village achieve socio-economic upliftment by empowering them with health, vocational, and primary education. During my site visit, GKDS was primarily looking to Asha to help fund more sewing machines, as each center has only one per 30 children. I visited three of the centers and met the children who had assembled there.

The first center was located inside a hut off the side of the road. I was amazed by how small the classroom was – around 25 students aged 8-16 were all cramped into a tiny space, thus posing some learning difficulties. The teacher explained that while the older students were taught, the younger ones played outside and were sometimes hard to reel back in. Despite the small quarters, the children seemed enthusiastic about their studies, energetically serenading us with Vande Mataram as we left for the next center. Typically educational classes are from 9-4 pm while the dropouts, the students who either stopped attending the educational portion or who were too old to join, assemble at 4 pm to begin tailoring instruction. .

In the following center, the children showcased their tailoring skills. Despite her initial trepidation at being quizzed by strange American visitors, one child demonstrated her knowledge of the machine quite accurately and expressed a genuine interest in furthering her studies. The visit allowed me to not only better understand what Asha currently supports but how we can take an active role in furthering these efforts. It is hard at times to see the bigger picture; caught up in classes and fundraising efforts, we may fail to envision our ultimate goal – helping these communities bring a brighter future for their children. It opened my eyes to how much change we can create and how much more we can and should achieve.

If you would like to learn more about GKDS, please visit Asha Seattle’s project page at http://www.ashanet.org/projects/project-view.php?p=801.