Minutes of the meeting of Wed Sep 8 1999, 18:30:00 EDT to 20:30:00 EDT

Attended by: Ajay, Bratin, Devesh, Hitten, Kakoli, Karna, Manoj, Meenakshi,
Rahul, Ramdas, Rupa, Sainis, Shipra, Vineeta, Vinod K, Vinod S, Vinod V

1) Kakoli's site visit. 
	Kakoli visited Sharada Kalyan Bhandar this summer when she was in 
	India. The impression she received was that the money was being
	well spent. Our money was being put to trifold use :
		- buying uniforms
		- buying textbooks
		- providing morning breakfast and snacks
	for the kids. The classes are taught in Bengali. The students are
	not entirely tribal (infact only a 13% are), but conform to a huge
	mixture of people who mostly speak Bengali. Currently they have 
	250 students from 7 villages and an 8th village is asking them to 
	take students from their village as well which will bring up the
	student strength to 390. Some students of this school have gone
	ahead with their studies and are now in the US either studying or
	working. Some people in the meeting (Hitten, Rupa, and Vinod_S) 
	wanted to know if it was possible to meet these graduates here. 

	More details (with pictures) on this site visit will be up on the
	Projects web page soon.


2) Ramdas brought up the point as to whether we want to look into large 
   projects or be a major donor and play a major role in a smaller project.
   Vineeta said that this was an Asha-wide problem. The decision was that
   it is quite project dependent and all projects will be considered duly
   before deciding for or against any.


3) Karna Basu's visit.
	Karna visited a small startup school Anandan in calcutta. Details
	on this project can be found at 

	http://rum.cs.yale.edu/asha/toplevel/projects/stm/anandan.txt

	Briefly, the school is for financially underprivileged children
	of the slums of Calcutta. Started in April 1999, currently the school
	is run by and on volunteer money. They need funds for purchasing
	text books for the kids, hire and train teachers. The goal is to 
	enrol more children. Currently they teach kids upto 4th grade. 

	Concerns expressed at the meeting were
	  - how effective would a short term education like this would be?
	  - do the children study after this education?
	  - how soon does this organization require funds?

	Decisions made were
	  - the project has potential for Asha to get involved and provide
	    funding
	  - we should get into dialogue with the contact person of the 
	    organization to obtain more details
	  - we should offer our suggestions but not impose our ideas as
	    their goals.


4) Some details of the coming up Food Fest were discussed.