ASHA: Minutes of meeting held on Jun 10, 1999

[Kamalkumar Gursahani <gursahan@cae.wisc.edu>]

Attendees:
Chandru, Kamal, Neeraj, Param, Venki Iyengar, Vidhi, Vineeta, Vinod

Minutes: 

	3 projects for WAH 99 were reviewed. These were: Bhoomi Heen Seva
Samithi, Vivekanda Education Society for Children(VESC), Jyothi Nilayam
(JN). For more details about WAH 99 and projects, please follow links from
the website www.ashanet.org/Infoshare. 

	Vineeta gave a brief summary of the Bhoomiheen Seva Samithi project.
The project aims to provide basic education and skills to children of 
landless in Banda, U.P. Funds requested: $6200 (recurring cost) and $13000
(fixed cost), per annum. WAH99 funds are being requested for the
non-recurring part only. (Please follow above link for detailed project
proposal).
The following were the questions raised about the project:
1) Why are the budgets from the Samithi proposal and Mahesh's site visit
report inconsistent ? 
2) Given that the project has been running since a while, how successful
have the skill development activities been in making the students
independent ?
Vineeta has volunteered to get answers to these from the project contact
and present them at a later meeting. 

	Venki presented on the Vivekanada Education Society for Children 
project. This is a project based in semi-rural West Bengal. They are
presently running two schools at temporary locations. WAH funds were
requested for covering non-recurring expeses (approx. $8500) which can be
used to build a permanent school. 
Questions raised:
1) Part of recurring expenses has been earmarked for Self Help Groups.
How are these funds utilised ? 
2) Since the school caters primarily to child laborers, will the students
continue to work while attending school ? 
3) Since the schools are only uptp Grade V, are there any middle schools
nearby where students can continue education ? 
4) Money sent two years back by ASHA AZ, Berkeley, Colorado has not yet
reached VESC as they did not have FCRA clearance. Are they exploring
options to get the funds through ? Can we use some other channels of
sending money like ASHA-India to reduce this beaureaucratic delay ? 
Venki has volunteered to get clarifications from the contact persons. 

	Kamal summarised the Jyoti Nilayam project. JN runs a temporary
kindergarten in rural AP for 16 less privileged children. Funds are  
requested for starting a primary and secondary school with 16-24 students
in each grade. Budget: $39000, $26000, $32000 for 3 successive years. It
was felt that the project had too high funding requirements and catered to
a rather small number of children (16 per class). Also the WAH funds would
be unable to meet the complete funding requirements. JN did not have any
alternate plans in case they did not manage to get the requisite funds.
There was not much support for this project to be funded in its present
form. 
 
	There was a discussion about whether it would be appropriate to
use funds for infrastructure typically non-recurring expenses like
buildings and if such funds were committed, should the organization
running the project have ownership of the property. In such cases the
organization must have established some credibility. This could make it
difficult for new projects to procure funds for infrastructure.

	There was an argument over whether the ultimate goal of funding 
projects was to make them self sustaining i.e. they could be run on funds
solely from the Govt and NGO's or whether they needed continued support
from chapters in the US or if they were to be self sufficient by 
generating revenue within the community through the skills imparted by the
school. It was decided to defer this discussuion to a later meeting. This
would help in framing our chapter guidlines as far as selection of
projects to be funded goes. 

	We would be meeting again next week wherein the remaining 3
projects for WAH 99 would be critically reviewed after which the voting
process can be started.  Please note that for the rest of the summer
we'll meet in Memorial Union/Union Terrace and not in Union South on
account of summer camp.