General Members Meeting

Today we kicked off the new year with a General Members meeting. Everyone was invited to come and we did some important work.

We started off the meeting discussing some goals and hopes for the new year.

Some of the ideas that were raised were:

• Expanding our work into the neighboring slums, and collecting information about them via a survey.
• Finding ways to help people that aren't organized into slums, but who are a common sight on streetsides.
• Look into alcohol/drug rehabilitation programs
• Get more involved with vocational training and microfinance.
• Assigning mentors to set numbers of houses to allow for a more personal interaction with the people.
• Doing more in terms of sanitation
• Building awareness inside Sri Ramachandra Univerisity as well as possibly to other colleges in the city. There was especially a need to build awareness among students in other departments of this college.
• Developing a standard of set guidelines which will help us to determine what works and also to create a good model on which to base our work off of.

The most important function of today's meeting was to organize our network into a more cohesive group. This was done to ensure that we move forward more efficiently. The group will be divided into two wings, one of which is administrative and the other which is focused on the ground work in the slum. These were then divided into several posts with various job descriptions. People were voted into these positions. More information will be found in a subsequent post.