ASSAM FOUNDATION OF NORTH AMERICA

AFNA General body meeting

Report on the Annual General Body Meeting of AFNA
By Partha Gogoi
www.assamfoundation.net

The AFNA meeting started at 5:30 pm on July 4th 20008 in Atlanta Westin. There were 25-30 attendees in the meeting. Dr Atul Sarma of Louisville Kentucky, Prof Dilip Datta and I presided over the meeting. At the outset, it was really good to know that people are aware of Parijat Academy and Prajnalaya – a testimony to all the hours that many of us have put in over the 2 years. The audience got to see the benefits of having sustained focus on the two school project. The audience also saw the Rickshaw bank initiative that we have started in 2006. In 2007, AFNA has sent 4 Rickshaws. This year in June, 8 more rickshaws were sent across.
Dr Atul Sarma was presented the Distinguished Service award by Prof Dilip Datta – on behalf of the entire AFNA family. Dr Sarma has worked very closely with AFNA since its inception. Although he has retired from the post of the Legal Agent and the Director of AFNA, we hope that Dr Sarma remains closely associated with AFNA – with his guidance and experience. Dr Sarma spoke about the need to maintain transparency and accountability and getting dynamic people involved to continue the good work.
After reading out the financial statements, we got down to talking about the projects that AFNA had undertaken over the past 2 years. As we have learnt - one of the key elements is to focus on the projects long term – have specific targets and goals. Education, as all of us know, will remain a priority area.
Smita Das of Florida and Sid Mahanta of Texas (and now Washington DC) presented to the audience their experiences of working with several NGOs in Assam. They profiled 30 NGOs before figuring out that sSTEP was doing the most involved work – especially with domestic workers. It has been observed that domestic worker industry is highly disorganized and hence a lot of them get the wrong end of the stick – for the lack of a network. sSTEP is attempting to fill in the void. Both Smita and Sid spent 6 months in Assam working closely with the group – just goes to indicate the level of seriousness with which they have got involved. We hope that this effort will be supported by
community members in the North American continent as well as others.
Amongst others, Mr Amiya Das of Florida spoke about his trip to Assam in the spring of 2008 and the challenges of getting things done there. We missed Debrabrata Sarma of Seattle, WA – he and Satyajit Nath had initiated the Rickshaw Bank. The Rickshaw Bank has a report on the people who benefited last year – please see the section “The Rickshaw Bank”. As always, we encourage community members ( anyone interested in Assam - Assamese Americans or Indian Americans or Americans) to join us in this journey of social change – every helping hand counts!