Asha Seattle

THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN ASHA SEATTLE!

This booklet will give you an idea about Asha Seattle. Please feel free to call or email any of the primary contacts listed at the end thishandbook for more information on volunteering, making donations, or aboutour events and projects. For more information please visit

Introduction

Asha-Seattle is a chapter of Asha for Education, a non-profit voluntary organization dedicated to socio-economic change in India mainly using the medium of education. Our goal is to also address general development and human issues such as women's issues, health-care and related issues, over and above our charter of furthering children’s education. Asha was started in 1991 in Berkeley. The Seattle chapter was formed in December 1994 by a diverse group of students and professionals from the Seattle area. Asha is a secular organization and has no religious or political affiliation. The aim of the group is to mobilize the local population to collectively support and provide assistance in different forms to groups working at the grass roots in India.

Asha’s mission statement

  1. To provide education to underprivileged children in India.
  2. To encourage the formation of various local groups across the world to reach out to larger sections of the population.
  3. To support and cooperate with persons and groups already engaged in similar activities.
  4. To raise the required human and other resources to achieve the group objectives.
  5. To provide opportunities to individuals living outside India who wish to participate in Asha activities in India.
  6. To address, whenever possible, other issues affecting human life such as health care, environment, socio-economic aspects and women's issues.

Asha’s achievements

Asha's focus on grassroots development has galvanized a number of volunteers across the globe. Today, there are over 66 Asha chapters worldwide: 45 in the US, 14 in India and 7 in Europe, Singapore and Australia. Till date, Asha has supported more than 385 different projects spanning 24 states in India. In terms of project funding, almost $4 Million has been disbursed to these projects since Asha's inception. In 2002 alone, Asha chapters raised and disbursed more than $1 Million to over 200 projects. Ours is a zero overhead organization which means that 100% of all donations are channeled to our project partners.

Holistic View of Education

"By education I mean the all round drawing out of body, mind and spirit", MK Gandhi.

Education to us does not stand for “schooling” or “literacy” but for an idea that helps us inimproving awareness of the society as a whole. Health or the vocational and social needs of children or building alternative infrastructure and/or educational models or shaping legislation or community-based intervention programs, education should encompass these issues and much more. Education is more like looking around us and remolding the society on the basis of our constant learning experiences.Education becomes less meaningful when seen in isolation. There is a logical progression in the development trajectory of any community - Nutrition, Shelter, Healthcare, Education, and Income generation, Public policy, Governance.

Asha for All

As part of the Asha charter, all Asha chapters have a high degree of freedom in their activities including identification, research, support and ownership of projects. The flat, non-hierarchical structure of Asha bonds all the volunteers on a common ideological platform. In spite of this flexibility at the level of the individual chapters, there is a good deal of co-operation among chapters and volunteers across chapters. This co-operation is evident in the joint ownership of projects across chapters, formation of focus groups across chapters (e.g., Asha Sanctuary, Asha Healthcare, Asha Tribal and other Yahoo! groups), cross-chapter discussions on issues of interest, worldwide events like the Asha-Wide Conference, Work-An-Hour Fundraiser, Asha Regional Conferences and the Asha India Conference.

Role of Asha Seattle

Asha Seattle, with an active volunteer base of about 30-35 (and scores of others who chip in when needed!) has been partnering closely with number of grass-root organizations in India for achieving its objectives. We do give special emphasis to projects in rural and economically underprivileged areas. Clearly, identifying, researching, owning, funding, and sustaining projects have formed the core of Asha's activities till now. Asha raises funds for its projects in a number of ways: individual donations, corporate donations, sale of merchandise (T-shirts, calendars, mugs, greeting cards, etc.), fundraising dinners, Indian classical music and dance concerts, popular music concerts and many others. However, personal leadership that the volunteers take in carrying out Asha's activities has ushered in a sense of awareness about developmental issues in India and has inspired a whole range of volunteers to get involved in other social causes. Our chapter also works towards raising awareness in appropriate forums about various issues affecting the people of India. This awareness-raising is accomplished by organizing discussion series, invited talks and focus groups.

Our emphasis is on the following:

  • To form close partnerships with groups in India. We attempt to maintain regular contact and visit the groups we work with to form a stable long term relationship.
  • To maximize effectiveness of our efforts we seek to support groups in rural and economically poor areas.
  • To provide assistance in different ways such as financial, material and technological support to the groups in India.
  • To learn about and disseminate information on different social issues faced by the affected people in India.
  • To organize talks by different grass roots activists in India in the Seattle area.

Asha Seattle at a glance

Asha Seattle supports a number of projects spread over fifteen states in India. We are involved with issues as varied as formal and non-formal education to community awareness programs, community-based intervention programs, vocational training centers and working with children with special needs. You can find a comprehensive list at

So how do we raise the money for all this? We organize various events and activities throughout the year, attend shows and festivals to publicize our activities, and invite donors to contribute to our projects.

  • Work closely with project partners in India.
  • Raise funds for our projects.
  • Increase awareness about our activities through events and discussion groups.
  • Get more people involved in our activities, including our fundraisers, bimonthly meetings and project reviews.

How Asha Seattle is organized

Asha is a volunteer driven organization and there is no paid staff. Though strictly a non-hierarchical organization, Asha Seattle does have an organizational back-upfor functional necessity (doesn’t that make life simple sometimes!). Typically a chapter coordinator’s role includes the following:-

  • Tracking intra-chapter activities at all levels (new work areas,projects, events, correspondence, any chapter related activity).
  • Intra- and inter-chapter correspondence.
  • Handling queries about the chapter from both donors andvolunteers.
  • It is important that a coordinator be accessible to all volunteers.
  • Backup all tasks that slip up when volunteers get busy with othercommitments.

Ourpresent coordinators are:

Preeti Chauhan………

Ravi Manghani ……

Srijan Chakraborty…

In addition, we have project coordinators, individual project stewards and a finance team which oversees all money related issues. For a comprehensive list of contact persons, please do visit or check out Appendix II.

What you can do

We are actively looking for volunteers to be a part of Asha Seattle. There are various ways in which you can help us. Do not worry if you feel that you might not be able to meet the time commitment that these tasks ask for. It must be stressed that the ‘line’ between the coordination team and other volunteers is blurred at best, and anyone with a desire to help out with a coordination task can help out depending on your aptitude and time availability. Asha as an organization tries to promote a volunteer spirit based on participation and not fixed roles. Every new volunteer is free to take on, define and participate in his/her role within Asha. You can pick a task which you feel you can do justice to and well, let’s rock!

Project Stewardship:Each project of Asha Seattle has one (or more) project stewardwho is an Asha volunteer responsible for working closely with the project partner in India. On an average, you’d have to work 5-6 hours a month for this work. In addition to keeping in touch regularly over email, phone or regular mail with the project contacts in India and donors, these are some of the responsibilities of the project steward:

  • Make sure that checks are sent twice a year (if applicable)
  • Arrange for at least one site visit every year - it is ideal (though not necessary) if the project steward himself/herself is able to visit whenever they go to India
  • Get an annual survey completed by the project partner and present this at a meeting along with any other updates that we have on the project
  • Upload proposals, site visit reports, surveys and photos to the Asha web site and keep the web site up to date

Finance Team: We have a finance team that looks after all the financial aspects of the chapter. Theprimary responsibilities of the finance team are entering every check/cash/online donation in the database, depositing checks in the bank, sending thank you notes and receipts to the donors, reconciling the database against the bank statements, mailing company matching forms, adding donor addresses to the address database, preparing the annual finance report for tax filing, budgeting, issuing checks to various projects. Depending on the number of volunteers in the team, finance work typically requires a couple of hours of volunteer time per month.

Textbook Reviews: In this current project a group of volunteers are systematically reviewing various text books taught in schools in India. At present the effort is limited to social studies text books. This effort include systematic content evaluation to look for comprehensiveness and coherence, presence of communal aspects, biases, stereotypes andfactual inaccuracies and any other inappropriate elements in the text books. Volunteering for this typically requires three to three and a halfhours volunteer time a week, including a two and a half hour weekly meeting.

 Learning Aids:We make learning aids & games from throw away things like empty cardboard boxes, paper rolls, one sided print outs (sp. on colored papers). These aids & games are easy to reproduce but stretch the thinking of the children. Till now, we have made flashcards, a game of cards, number rods, red stairs, place value cards, card counter, and fraction cards & distributed these to children in Asha-supported schools in India. A new volunteer can initiate new ideas for aids & games and take part in actually making these. We typically meet on Saturdays for a few hours.

 Safeway Cards: Asha sells Safeway cards in different denominations. Safeway offers Asha different percentages of commissions (4-5%) on the total amount of groceries bought with these cards. The basic duties of a volunteer would be to buy and distribute these prepaid Safeway grocery cards and maintain an inventory of the transactions.

 Merchandise: Asha merchandise includes calendars, mugs and hand-crafted stationery items made by children supported through Asha-funded projects. The basic duties of a volunteer is to inventory these items, coordinate setting up of stalls at various events for selling these merchandise items and maintaining the accounts for the same. The total time commitment depends on the number of events per year, and is usuallya couple of hours in a month.

 Fundraising and Events:Asha Seattleorganizes several fund-raiser events which include Asha marathon, the Microsoft Give campaign, Work An Hour, popular music programs like ‘O Podu”and ‘AllGoRhythms’ and children’s programs like Chhoti si Asha.Asha Seattle's biggest fundraiser is our participation in the annual Give Campaigns run by various companies in the area. We raise a bulk of our funds through this event which usually runs from early September to late October every year. In addition to this, we hold a number of annual signature events to showcase local talent. We always encourage new ideas if somebody wants to propose a new fundraiser for Asha and help coordinate it (examples from the past include Golf tournament, Diwali party). The basic duties include coordinating with the web designer and designing flyers/posters, updating information on the website, taking care of reservations, ticketing and related paper-work, interfacing with performers, coordinating with event volunteers on the day of the event, etc. Depending on the event in question, the volunteer time varies, but with ample of support from all other volunteers, is an enjoyable experience.

Interactive Discussion Groups: As part of the learning process, Asha Seattle organizes talks and other events for all of its volunteers. For example, we hosted Dr. Balaji Sampath and Mr. P. Chennaiah at Seattle this year. In addition, we have an open forum in the form of Asha-Seattle yahoogroup where we discuss various issues ranging from education and health to microcredit. We also plan to organize more public events, including film screenings, to broaden the base of Asha’s activities and increase the awareness for issues confronting us.

New Volunteer Team: Being a new volunteer, you can appreciate how important it is to have a new volunteer team, especially having a buddy who can guide you through the initial stages of confusion. For this, you have to have an open mind, an awareness of what Asha stands for and a belief in Asha’s ideologies. You have to interact with new (as well as old!) volunteersand gather their feed back, be a buddy to new volunteers and make them feel welcome to Asha.

Webpage Maintenance:This is perfect for someone with a flair for the computers. Day to day activities involve updating meeting information (locations,schedules and minutes), setting up pages for events and online ticketinginterfaces, uploading newsletters and any other maintenance as and whenrequired. In addition, you might have to do some webpage enhancements, like setting up recurringdonation interfaces for special events.

Design work:If you are the one with design skills (especially if you are comfortable with Adobe illustrator, Macromedia Freehand etc.), then this is for you. Asha Seattle takes out quarterly newsletters and frequent flyers to publicize events. We need volunteers who can design such documents and handle the responsibilities involved, which typically involve about 2-3 hours every month. Any skills - painting, drawing, illustrations, crafts, rangoli designing, henna designing etc. combined with designs for posters/fliers will definitely help us make better posters.

 Asha Tea: As you already know, Asha Seattle is a “zero-overhead” organization. Asha tea is one way we try to get money for covering the organizational and overhead costs. Basically, we set up and sell tea at different public events in and around Seattle. You should be willing to sacrifice an occasional Saturday or a Friday evening for this. As a starter, you’ll also need to get a food handler’s license from the city of Seattle.

 New Ideas:Finally, you can bring a new idea to Asha Seattle, get it approved at a meeting and run with it. This is how the chapter has evolved over the years.

Frequently Asked Questions about Asha projects

 What is a project?

With respect to Asha, a project can be defined as providing financial support for a task undertaken by an NGO working on educational activities in a community. It also constitutes Asha volunteers working closely with the community and the NGO. Asha strives to identify non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India that work on educating underprivileged communities in the rural and urban areas in India. By education, we do not restrict ourselves to literacy-based education. We look into all forms of education that act as a powerful agent of social change and empowerment.

 How does one find such projects?

Asha chapters receive project proposals from different non-profit organizations in India. Volunteers of Asha go through these proposals carefully, and correspond with the organization, soliciting more information where required. Various factors are considered like the past history of the organization, objectives of the project, proposed plan of action, number of children covered, number of people involved in its implementation, an itemized budget, and any other relevant information.

 How do you evaluate it?

An Asha volunteer visits the project site (at his/her own expense) to evaluate first-hand the organization, the site and the feasibility of the proposed project. It is only after s/he and the chapter volunteers are completely satisfied that the project is approved for funding. Asha chapters are fairly autonomous and it is up to them to choose projects independently or work with other chapters jointly in funding projects. Asha strongly encourages volunteers and people from the local community to recommend projects that they have first-hand information about and which could be monitored by people they know well in India. This process typically takes about 3 months.

 How are these projects monitored from here?

Asha requires the organization conducting the project to provide complete financials, narrative reports (and photographs, if possible) on the progress of the project at least once a year and up to four times a year. In addition, Asha volunteers going to India visit project sites unannounced to evaluate for themselves the progress of the project and verify the reports sent by organization. Asha reserves the right to terminate funding at any time if it is not completely satisfied with the situation at the project. Realizing that the children involved are the ones most affected if such a situation arises, Asha volunteers invest a great deal of effort in choosing the projects and the organizations implementing them.