Get to know updates in India from Rajesh Haridas, Chief Operating Officer of Vibha:
Finance Workshop: A total of 19 participants from 10 partner organizations attended. Rachana & Amravati Blind School attended at Bangalore as the dates for Jaipur venue was not convenient for them. Vidyarambam & Devnar neither attended nor responded to our request. It turned out to be an excellent workshop as the content was very relevant and the methodology was totally interactive with case-studies, group work & group presentations.
The best part was that both Sandeep and Mr. Patra could come down to the level of our participants. Thanks to Deep for working on this very closely with the resource persons.
Joint visit with Volkart Foundation to HEARDS: This too turned out to be very fruitful as Mr. Srinath, CEO & Mr. Cyril David, Deputy CEO of Volkart are interested in investing in HEARDS & Sikshana. Dipika & I will be meeting them in their Mumbai office to work out the model of the collaboration between Vibha & Volkart.
The meeting with the Bangalore AC volunteers: Very vibrant group with many good intentions and plans in place. Both Sri & Rajesh were found to be very good leaders with wanting to do maximum for Vibha & projects. I have discussed with them on up-coming Pragati 2013 (a past Pragati) and the Bangalore as decided location. They appeared to be very enthusiastic in taking care of all logistics.
My meeting with Vibha India Auditor & Jeydev: It was a long meeting & discussed number of points to get financial processes in place & tax implications for the future collaborations with the corporate CSRs / larger foundations in India. I will discuss the same in the board meeting.
Meeting up with Mr. Shiv Kumar & his friend: Mr. Shiv Kumar is the Medical Technologist whose company had sponsored Vibha IPL and his friend from Birla Insurance. This was arranged by Venky & Kedar. Mr. Shiv Kumar wants to get association with Vibha through creating health related facilities for the Vibha beneficiaries located in remote locations. His friend is interested in associating with Vibha for creating digital learning facilities for the education of the rural kids. To me, both were sounding too ambitious with little practicalities though the intentions are very good. We have asked them to send us the concept note. We will discuss the same in detail later.