Minutes of meeting on : Date: 6/17/98

Attendees: Mahesh, Gagan, Shamik, Neeta, Maithreyi, Karimah, Archana,Ramesh, Ranjit, Maya, Sanjay, Ashok

New Project Proposals:
1. Little Stars School near Varanasi, UP:  Mahesh has confirmed the amount that we need to send to them and it is around $4500.  He will be posting the details on Asha_core and will be sending out the check within a week.  To recap, this is the project where we are supporting the one-time infrastructure cost.  Asha-Berkeley is funding the recurring costs and Asha-Syracuse is funding part of the infrastructure cost as well.
2. Astha Project in Govindpuri, South Delhi: Gagan had an update on this.
Basically, the Govindpuri part of the project has already received funding from an organization in Germany.  However, they have a very similar center for poor spastic children in Tughlaqabad.  They will be sending us an updated proposal (to Gagan).  Sanjay will be able to site visit this project when he goes home in August.
3. Seva Bharathi, outside Bangalore, Karnataka: One Mr. H. G. Suryanarayana, who is a friend of Jayashree’s dad, will be site visiting this project.  Decision on this project is pending the site visit report.
4. Anjali School in Lucknow, UP: This project has been approved since last month’s meeting.  Sandeep of Asha-Lucknow has written back to us saying that he recommends that we fund this project for one year, monitor the progress and then decide on further funding.  He will confirm the date and the amount with us and then we will send out the check.
5. Vanavasi in Kerala: Tara will summarize at next month’s meeting.
6. Maithreyi has a new project proposal from Bangalore that will be summarized before next month’s meeting.
7. Shishu Shiksha Yatan in the Sunderbans, West Bengal: Pending site visit by a person that Niranjan Benegal of PPI (People for Progress of India) knows.
8. Adarsh Project near Cochin, Kerala: This is a new proposal that came from Ashok’s uncle who is involved with this organization for spastic children.  We have sent them the application form and are awaiting further details.

Updates from Existing projects:
1. RHEDT near Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu: We had sent them money to set up a telephone booth in Karamadai with the idea that any profits generated by this will be funneled back to the school.  Unfortunately, this proposal was rejected by the government, so they have asked us if they could use this for a xerox machine or for buying land for farming.  We talked about the xerox machine idea and voted against it.  We haven’t ruled out the land idea.  Jayashree will be writing to them to get more details about how much money they believe this will generate on an on-going basis.  Once we have further details, we will be able to take a decision.
2. REDAG project in Tamil Nadu: Check has been sent by Neeta, haven’t heard back yet.
3. Anugriha project in Tamil Nadu: Sanjay found out that the check has been cashed, but he hasn’t been able to communicate with them over email for the past few days.  He needs to make sure that they received the money and will continue to try and contact them.
4. Padsare in Maharashtra, Chetanaa in Haryana AND Spastics Society in Karnataka:  We’ve received progress reports from these three projects.

Karimah brought up a concern that has come up at our informational booths - basically there is a perception that a lot of our projects are in South India.  This perception needs to be corrected since we counted and found that with the two newly approved projects in UP, we have a good geographic distribution of projects.  FYI—Our current projects are in Karnataka (1), Tamil Nadu (3), Maharashtra (2), Haryana (1), UP (2), West Bengal (1).  We also approved a project in Bihar about 2 months back but haven’t heard back from them since we wrote to them about being able to fund them.

Picnic (July 19th, 2PM):  Mahesh distributed flyers for putting up at various public notice boards and for distribution to Indian restaurants/stores.  He will be posting on the various Indian aliases, making sure the Asha web site is updated and will also advertise in Micronews.  Cooking is being coordinated by Jayashree - if you would like to help out with the cooking, send her email at mailto:jayjanar@microsoft.com.
Volleyball and other games are being coordinated by Sanjay
(mailto:sanjayan@microsoft.com).  We need volunteers for holding the spot at Sammamish State Park from early morning until 2PM.  If you would like to volunteer for this or for anything else, get in touch with Mahesh (mailto:maheshp@microsoft.com).

Work an Hour for Asha:  This is an all Asha chapter effort.  On August 14, all of the chapters are trying to get people to donate 1 hour of their salary to Asha.  All the donations will go to Asha-MIT and will then be distributed equally to all Asha chapters.  For further details on this, see http://www.Ashanet.org/Dbase/inv-hour/hour.htm.  We need to publicize this big time—the plan for this is to print out posters, advertise at the picnic, send out email on various mailing lists, get links added from the IAWW and ISA web sites and advertise in Micronews.  If you would like to help out, Neeta (mailto:neetad@microsoft.com) is the contact for this.

Getting parents involved in education:  Pam and Neeta will discuss this at the next meeting.

Computer classes for adults: Abraham Mathan came up with this idea, but couldn’t come to the meeting today to discuss this.  Basically, many of the Asha volunteers are computer professionals and we could take up the task of teaching people various computer skills such as using Microsoft Office, browsing the web, creating their own web site, etc.  Any profits from this venture would go towards Asha’s projects.  There’s a lot of details that will have to be worked out (where do we do this, what exactly do we teach, where do we get the computers from, etc.).  Maithreyi (mailto:mratan@microsoft.com) is interested in coordinating this effort.

Next Meeting: 7/15/98 at 7PM in Meeting Room 1 (this is the big meeting room that can seat nearly 100 people, so show up in big numbers!) August Meeting: 8/19/98 at 7PM in Meeting Room 4.
FYI: Asha Seattle’s web site is at http://www.Ashanet.org/seattle and our webmaster is Sachin Deshpande (mailto:sachind@ee.washington.edu).
Thanks,

-- Bash