Attendees : Amitha, Mala, Mugdha, Neelesh, Radhika, Rajeev, Sachin, Shweta, Srinivasan, Swapna, Vaishali
Minutes:
- Finalised newsletter contents
- Update on Marathon kickoff
- Talk by Mr Ramamurthy. Notes, anybody?
Venue: MIT
Room No. 2-103, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139
Date:
April 23, 2006, 10.00am - 1.00pm
Agenda:
- Finalise the newsletter.
- Marathon update
- Talk by Mr Ramamurthy about his work with Sikshana (see below for details). The talk will start a little after 11:30
- Time permitting, asha-wide elections
Mr. Ramamurthy is
the founder of Sikshana
which is focused on improving
government schools in the Bangalore area. By a variety of low-cost
approaches, Sikshana, since it was founded four years ago, has been
steadily seeing good results in the schools they are working in. In two
of the early schools they started working with some encouraging trends are
seen (1) there was reverse movement of children from private to the govt.
school (instead of the standard movement from govt. schools to private
schools) (2) teachers took such pride in their school that they
voluntarily created advertising pamphlets which was distributed among
villagers to encourage their children to come to the govt. school, and (3)
high schools in the area pro-actively seek students who have finished
class VII from Sikshana supported schools since it is now known that these
children will do well in high school and consequently the SSLC (class X)
examination. These successes have been achieved by focusing on the
improvement of reading, writing, and expression skills. Everyone working
in education talks about these metrics, but Sikshana is able to share with
us very simple yet concrete methods used to improve reading, writing and
expression.
Asha-MIT/Boston's involvement has been to route project-specific donations
to Sikshana. Mr. Ramamurthy would like us to continue this, and in
addition might be interested in (1) getting support for materials such as
paper (2) lobbying support for specific things such as the release of
multimedia material generated by the govt. Amitha has volunteered to be
the project steward and I plan to be involved as well. There has also
been quite a bit of interest asha-wide in Sikshana's work. Some AID
chapters are also supporting them financially. Asha's webpage, which
includes an annual report is at
http://www.ashanet.org/projects/project-view.php?p=397
As always, I greatly encourage everyone to use the opportunity to interact
directly with a project coordinator from India. In addition, Mr.
Ramamurthy, as the CEO of a large public sector company before he retired,
brings a unique perspective to NGO operations in India.