Attendees: Shanmuga, Bash, Gagan, Shamik, Anju, Deepak, Maithreyi, Jayashree, Madhu, Anitha, Satish, Rashmi, Shweta, Shankar, Swati, Amlan, Srishti

Shanmuga from Asha-Princetion is visiting us. This was the first of a 2 part discussion. The 2nd round is on Sunday starting at 10am at Jay & Bash's place. This meeting's discussion revolved around Asha, the next session will cover more general social issues.

The discussion started with us going around the room and each volunteer talking about one thing they like about Asha and one thing they don't. Some of the pros that came up were

1. Low overhead 2. Flat structure 3. Decentralized chapters 4. Interaction with other volunteers, learning, increased awareness about issues 5. Conduit to help India, connection to India, sense of fulfillment 6. The concept - network of people who are not satisfied with Indian education system 7. Can contribute varying times depending on how other commitments in life are at any point. All volunteer time is appreciated. 8. Focus on people both in projects and amongst the volunteers

Some of the cons raised were:

1. The feeling sometimes that all we're doing is funding education - that the work is done when the check is written. 2. Interaction between Asha-India and Asha-US. Each should understand its role and be more tolerant. 3. Sense of competition between chapters. 4. Need better connection between people here and the projects and field workers in India. 5. Occasional feeling amongst volunteers that they'll step up for a task only if no one else does it. 6. Volunteers sometimes don't understand their role both within Asha and in a larger context. Not sure whether they are contributing in any meaningful way.

Shanmuga then briefly covered the history of Asha from its start in Berkeley in '91. He raised the interesting point that Asha, Aid and ILP were all started with each group unaware of the other in '91. A discussion for a different day about how much the environment and the time shape actions.

We then covered the core Asha working principles:

1. Voluntary organization - no paid employees. All admin costs are borne by volunteers and this allows us to attract dedicated volunteers. 2. Action-oriented. The general culture of the group is that debate serves a certain role but action is the essential activity of the group. 3. Secular 4. Focus on education of underprivileged children 5. Flat structure

Shanmuga then pointed out what he perceived as key weaknesses in Asha. There was a lot of discussion/argument about several of these issues, especially the first one.

1. No overall purpose/vision: Asha does not plan and work towards goals. It is more a reactive process. Our interaction point with NGOs has been defined by money. Our project selection process is skewed in favor of urban backgrounds, English speaking, fund oriented, Internet connected NGOs. One manifestation of this is the overwhelming number of projects we have near Bangalore and Chennai. We favor orgs who are able to write proposals - there are many community based orgs that cannot do this and in many cases they also need things other than money. 2. We are caught in an A to D cycle - that's accumulation and distribution of funds cycle. This is a pretty categorical statement and there are certainly exceptions to this, but if we had to summarize our activities in one sentence, this would be what we do primarily. People either fall into the projects or the fundraising roles and there is very little thinking done outside these boxes. Every action we take has to be clearly in one box or the other. For instance, there was a proposal to organize a Santal festival recently that didn't go very far. This was because it was neither a project nor was it going to be a large fundraising event. We allow other activities to go on but these are not usualy highlighted on the front page of chapter newsletters. We can potentially lose volunteers/passion if we force all activities into these boxes.

We then played out an interesting fictional scenario. Assume a new law is passed that prohibits us from sending money from abroad to India. What could we do at that point given our desires to help India? We went around the room again and here are some of the ideas proposed:

1. Send ideas/resources in the form of books/software/other materials. 2. Participate in petition campaigns, lobby internationally and US policy, raise awareness about Indian issues in the community here. 3. Spend more time in India and initiate action there after doing the initial planning here. 4. Enable communication amongst groups - do the legwork they don't have the resources to do. 5. Develop websites 6. Provide the global perspective to field workers. In today's world there are events happening at a macro level that impact everyone's lives - making field workers aware of these changes is a necessary function. 7. Work in the local community here - local changes have far-reaching effects in today's connected world. 8. Write articles/letters to Indian media - newspapers, magazines etc. 9. Engage in curriculum development and review. Take good ideas from here and adapt them to the Indian context.

The point of this exercise was to emphasize the fact that we shouldn't make the money the focal point of all our activities. Shanmuga was pleasantly surprised by the number of options we came up with - this scenario has stumped a lot of volunteers in the other chapters. We should work better with the projects we have rather than count progress by just the funds raised/# of projects supported. Asha Seattle has already started moving in this direction since we had decided a while back to concentrate on our existing projects rather than continuing to pick up new ones.

Folks commented on how this has already made a remarkable difference and that are meetings are now more about familiar existing projects where we've had lots of personal contact with the folks on the field. In a lot of the other chapters, currently questions like quality of education, teacher quality etc is not discussed as an index of performance. Education thought of in this fashion soon gets reduced to just schooling and from there to literacy. The "anything that resembles a school will ", "something is better than nothing" attitude should be avoided very carefully because it actually ends up being detrimental in cases. Shanmuga's estimate was that up to about 30% of Asha's money goes to projects like this - literary centers, non-formal schools, night schools etc where the children are expected to go to after a full day's work. Non-formal centers have turned out to be an easy escape route for the Government because it is not required to spend on Rs 80000/month mandated teacher's salaries, required teacher student ratios etc.

Shanmuga's perspective on the education mechanism prevalent in India today was that it is a giant sieving mechanism to select the chosen ones who get the prime jobs. Education is supposed to be the great equalizer but in reality the laborer's son drops out in 5th standard and the doctor's son gets a degree. There is the occasional exception that everyone makes an example of but these are just rare exceptions rather than the norm. Education is the modern day caste system. Shanmuga's opinion was that Asha's mission statement to bring about socio-economic change through education is flawed because the current education system is more concerned with maintaining the status quo. Teachers in schools have exactly the same filters and discriminative behaviors as the community and so just schooling as it exists today is not enough to bring about any socio-economic change.

Asha folks often feel that we are the active agents and the recipients of our funds are passive but the reality is very different. We should not feel we are doing any charity to anyone. Slum children etc are part of a community and are actively working towards social change and don't need any charity.

There was some discussion on how there is a manual for how to apply to Asha chapters in Hazaribagh, Bihar. The template contains buzzwords like joyful learning, teacher training at Avehi, materials from Digantar, Swabalambhan etc. So we should be very careful about picking our projects.

The next topic Shanmuga presented was that in his opinion, NFE schools are valid only in the following situations:

1. In the early 90's, there were Total Literacy Campaigns in about 300 districts. The first 100 were spontaneous and then the idea was spread by the State bureaucracy without the involvement of truly passionate people and the effects were diluted somewhat. A good idea only works for a certain period of time - to keep a good thing going one needs to come up with a series of good ideas. Newsletters circulated amongst these campaigns raised awareness of the extent of prevalence of the arrack problem prompting women to come together in the well-known ousting of arrack from their villages. In such situations non-formal education does make sense. Education/literacy alone is not enough - there should be other crucial inputs like mobilization that brings the community together. Rajendra Singh had given us another great example where the harvesting of water had brought the community together. 2. Hazardous labor, drugs, prostitution situations: The NFE center in these scenarios acts as more of an escape - tool to trick the exploiter and bring the children into a safe space where the social worker can interact with the child. 3. Transit/bridge to regular school: This of course means that the regular school should be improved at the same time the NFE is being funded to make it a good goal for the child coming out of the NFE. 4. Community run schools: Community will be most aware of the limitations, where improvements are needed, what their aspirations are for their kids. NGO run NFE centers often have no commitment to the children or the communities - can transform overnight from NFE center to pre-primary center depending on where the funding dollars flow and leave the existing students in a lurch.

Sunday's discussion will start with Shanmuga's thoughts on the direction he feels Asha should go in. He will also present some of the highlights/accomplishments of Asha over the last 11 years (since we have covered the negatives already) and talk about Government education initiatives. The discussion will then go onto larger social issues.