Attendees: Deepa, Kamal, Murali, Param, Subbu, Vidya, Vineeta, Vishal

- The main topics of discussion were the Work-An-Hour projects.
Please visit "http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~lists/archive/asha-v" for mails
that contain more information about these projects.

After an hour-and-an-half's debate, we arrived at the following decision.

The nays:
---------
--> Jyothi Nilayam:  The project proposal was not well-planned and the
budgetary requirements appeared very unrealistic.  Further, the current
project only benefits 16 children, and the whole project didn't appear
to be well thought out in terms of following up on the education of these
children.  Hence, it was felt that this project cannot be funded in its
current "avatar".
--> MVF: Though this is a VERY GOOD project and has acquired a very good
reputation for the work that it has done in the field of providing education
to children, the funding that it requires is for the establishment of a
corpus fund to see the project thru' those times when funding agencies are
tardy in disbursing funds allocated to it.  However, it was not clear if we
wanted to "lock up" the money in a corpus fund where there are no immediate
perceived benefits from the money.  Moreover, this project is so well
established that it should not have problems getting funds from other sources.
Hence, it was felt that it made more sense to allocate the funds to projects
that are more needy.

The yeahs:
----------
--> The Seva Nilayam project, is a truly deserving project.
     It is a well-established project that runs a school for children
     and a children's home primarily for girls that have lost one or both
     parents and provides these girls with clothing, food, medical care,
     education and vocational skills.  Currently, this home houses 25 girls
     and they want to expand it to accommodate 100 girls.  Considering that
     girls are its main focus, and given that they have already done a good
     job in the past, it was felt that this project deserved funding.
--> The Astha project concerns itself with rehabilitating disabled children,
     raising awareness, and also works with slum-dwellers in Govindpuri,
     New Delhi to prevent disabilities (by providing them with preventive
     vaccinations and medicine).  They appear to have done a good job in
     the past.  The center has been active for at least 3 years.  They require
     funds to acquire infrastructure and other expenses for a new centre.
     The project seems to be well-established and networked with other groups
     and funding agencies (like UNESCO, etc).  It was felt that this was a
     good project to fund.
--> The AID-Bihar project attempts to break the cycle of bonded labour in
     a number of areas in Bihar.  This group has a number of full-time and
     partime volunteers working towards this.  A number of centers have been
     established in the past and at each center, AID tries to work on as many
     problems as possible to arrive at comprehensive solutions.  Of the 10
     centers for which funding was requested, it appears 9 of them have already
     obtained funds.  So, one suggestion that was made by the St.Louis chapter
     that proposed this project is to fund them to open more centers.  Based on
     reports from site visits, it was felt that this group is doing a good job
     in helping children caught in bonded labour.  However, funding is only
     contingent upon AID having enough resources to open more centers.  Else,
     the funds should be allocated to some other project.
--> The Ballia project in UP proposes to start a center for providing
     children with an alternative education system based on inculcating
     in them principles of "samajikata" and "swawalamban".  The education
     provided will be apart from the normal text-book form of education and
     will be activity-oriented.  This group has already experimented with
     this system in the past 4 years and based on its experience wants to
     expand this to other children by opening a separate "Asha school" at 
     the proposed center.  The only question that we had to address was if
     we wanted to allocate funds to an alternative education system.  After
     some debate, we decided to go ahead with it, especially since Sandeep,
     the person who is behind this was the person who started the Asha
     movement.

In the end, it was decided to submit 2 votes: Seva Nilayam and Astha were
on both votes.  AID-Bihar project and Ballia were the choices for the 3rd
project in the 2 votes.