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Aniruddha Vaidya presented the activites of AID - State College.
This was followed by a talk by Dr. Parameshwara Rao titled "Only a Genius Can Make India Poor".
The next session was the General Body meeting. The following items
were discussed.
1. Overview of legal issues in AID - tax-exempt status of AID,
how to maintain it, what are the implications for treasury, projects etc.
2. Presentation of the annual accounts for 1998.
3. What are the administrative costs of AID? What statements
can we make about AID?
("Zero Running costs" - No!! AID does have administrative
costs.)
4. AID India's FCRA status, and in general FCRA issue for projects
- the do's and don'ts. How we can help AID India's fundraising.
5. Getting AID incorporated - what does it mean? What are the
issues involved? Should we authorize the legal team of AID to work out
incorporation in the next one year?
The last session on the first day was the Chapter Co-ordination. The topics discussed were introduction of AID's Board of Directors, the Executive Board, issues related to the treasury, projects, AID's internet web sites and the various means of communicating the AID news and activities. The most important question that came up in this session was "Does AID need to endorse national/political issues" and if yes "what is the democratic process by which a vote can be taken from all chapters".
The next day started with an interactive session with Dr.Rao.
All the chapters presented the action items resulting from the discussions
that they had. The 3 main areas of focus that came out from all presentations
were -
1. Democracy in action (voter awareness)
2. Education
3. Volunteerism
This was followed by a visit to a Co-op. Aravinda led the team to a co-op store and explained the working and benefits of a co-op.
This was followed by a Projects and Treasury workshop. The Project workshop covered information on the different aspects of a project review process such as sources of projects, the necessary forms, review, feedback, visits and maintenance of project files. The Treasury workshop covered information on the working and maintainence of the chapter treasury and the diffferent legal issues involved.
This was followed by presentations from different chapters giving a brief account of the Activites at their chapters.
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Aniruddha Vaidya presented the activites of AID - State College.
The last session on the second day was the AID Forum session where different individuals put forward their ideas and thoughts on different issues. There were insightful presentations on issues like education, women's empowerment and people's rights.
The third day started with a update of AID-India's efforts by Aravinda. She talked about Support to AID Projects, Appraising Directions in Development, Awareness & Advocacy, Work in Villages, Ways AID can help AID India and Ways AID India can help AID. She presented a letter by Balaji Sampath to all AID volunteers.
This was followed by a personality development session. "AID identifies
a variety of causes that result in poverty and injustice. Poverty and injustice
are not problems happening far away to some other people. They are with
us in our daily lives, wherever we are. How can we better recognize and
counter act the powerful forces that make us part of the system which spreads
poverty and injustice?"
This issue and many more related to it were the focus of this session.
This was followed by lunch on the banks of the Ohio river and a general get-together.
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The Online Proceedings of the conference can be read at :
http://www.ececs.uc.edu/~sganesan/aid/conf99/