Profile of Asha for Education

Overview of Asha HTML, Powerpoint(3.8M)

Asha's mission is to catalyze socio-economic change in India through the education of the underprivileged children.

Asha for Education was established in the summer of 1991 at the University of California, Berkeley, by Sandeep Pandey, Deepak Gupta, and V.J.P. Srivastavoy. Their vision was simple-to provide education to the underprivileged children of India. They believed that education was the catalyst to bring about a change in the social order. This belief led them to form Asha, which means Hope in many Indian languages, to signify the hope they were planning to bring into the lives of India's children. Asha has also come to signify the hope we volunteers feel about bringing a change in the society, a hope that we will be able to one day create an equal and just society.

Asha for Education raises awareness of issues and supports children's education projects in various parts of India. Asha works with several non-governmental and governmental organizations in India to bring about a positive change. Our interventions include support for infrastructure such as classrooms, teachers' salaries, meal programs for children, providing learning aids, and promoting socially meaningful curriculum development and child-centered joyful learning techniques.

Asha for Education, in addition to providing education to the underprivileged children, also addresses other topics affecting human life such as health care, environment, socio-economic aspects, and women's issues. Thus, the groups supported by Asha are diverse in their location, target population, and approach to education. However they all have one feature in common-Asha for Education supports only projects that have no political or religious affiliations and do not discriminate on any basis, be it gender, religion, background, caste, or race.

Today chapters of Asha for Education are spread across US, Europe, Australia, and India. Each chapter works individually towards our collective goal. They do this by supporting the activities of groups in India that work to improve the lives of people through education. The chapters have a high degree of freedom in their activities including the identification, research, support, and ownership of the projects. However, there is also a great level of cooperation as evident by joint ownership of projects across chapters and international level events like Work an Hour.

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Asha for Education is a volunteer driven organization. The volunteers come from all walks of life-students, scientists, professionals, artists, the young and the aged. The organization is unique in that there is no hierarchy and that it is a zero-overhead organization. Today Asha for Education has 1000 active volunteers across the world, and several thousand supporters. The organization supported 152 projects, disbursing $849,000, in the year 2001.

Perhaps more important than these numbers is the personal leadership that the volunteers take in carrying out Asha's activities. Further, involvement with Asha for Education has produced awareness about developmental issues in India and has inspired a whole range of volunteers to get involved in other social causes. Thus, Asha for Education, while making a difference in the lives of underprivileged children of India, is also preparing a group of people who are more socially aware and socially responsible in their lives.

In the future, Asha for Education hopes to continue playing an important role in the socio-economic development of India. We realize that there is still a lot to be achieved since there are millions of children in India who do not have access to basic education. Debates and discussions are now underway among the volunteers about ways in which we can make a greater impact on the situation. As part of this learning process, we are undertaking projects to evaluate our efforts over the past decade. In the end, we hope to be able to better understand the impact we have had, and where we should focus our efforts.

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