SAPAC Mtg Minutes--Nov 10th

SAPAC Meeting on Nov. 10th.

Attendees: Aparna, Prateek, Shashi, Neeraja, Sadaf, Yasmine, Rehm, Raj, Susan, Nilofer, Sanji

Regular SAPAC meetings--Now that our numbers have grown it no longer seems feasible to have meetings at Coffee Chicago. From now on SAPAC meetings will be held at:

Alternatives, Inc., 4730 North Sheridan Road, Chicago, Il. 60640

The next meeting is Dec. 1st at 5:30

Shashi will communicate with the promotor to identify new dates and e-mail a list of groups for outreach.
All SAPAC members are asked to contribute e-mail addresses to this outreach list as it will also serve as our master outreach list.
Sanji is responsible for visuals
Prateek will do outreach for spoken word artists
Nilofer will set up SAPAC bank account

Building Bridges--for the last several months a core of SAPAC members have been actively involved in planning for a cross-city coalition of groups building unity around issues of secularism and harmony. Last Saturday was the kick off event for this broader coalition. We discussed where this Coalition matches our interest and where it does not. The coalition is focused on secularism in India and--for pragmatic political reasons is not interested in working with non-Indian (e.g. Pakistani) groups. It is also reluctant to discuss the issue of communalism directly--focusing rather on positive goals of peace and harmony. The following decisions were made:

SAPAC will continue to be involved in the Building Bridges effort, with Shashi serving as the key point person
SAPAC will also work to establish a broader vision for its work around this set of issues that includes an agenda for combatting communal or religious based violence in the region as a whole. Our next SAPAC mtg will be largely focused on discussing possible directions for this work.

VOR3--This is a performance and art event focused on creating a forum for South Asian Artists. A draft of the call for artists was reviewed as well as outreach materials. Revisions will be made based on group feedback and the call will go out beginning of December. The event is scheduled for February 27th, 2004. We also discussed putting out a separate call for SAPAC members to put together a joint piece that we could use in multiple events similar to the Uranium project which included 6 SAPAC members and was performed several times two years ago.

3rd Eye--This new group will be screening South Asian films on a regular basis. The core planning team includes several SAPAC members and we anticipate working closely with 3rd Eye as part of building a cohesive progressive South Asian community in Chicago. An initial first screening of South Asian Shorts was held at Northwestern and at the University of Chicago.

Discussion group on gender dynamics in the South Asian community--Sanji raised this as a topic that he would like SAPAC to host a discussion on. He will contact Rahul Sharma to serve as a potential facilitator. Neeraja offered to serve as a co-facilitator.

World Social Forum--Five members who attended the meeting will be attending the World Social Forum. We briefly discussed logistics such as housing, etc. Those attending will be holding a small meeting on Nov. 24th at 6:00, 1419 W. Greenleaf, 3S. If you are interested in coordinating with SAPAC members going contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

A number of members will be going to the South Asian Awareness Network Conferenceat the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Jan. 30th to Feb 1st. SAPAC members will be carpooling. For conference registration go to: www.saanconf.org To coordinate with SAPAC member going contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

People felt having the connection to South Asian news was helpful, but should not be on the main page.
We wanted to see a clear description of the key ongoing projects on the main page that would link to more detailed descriptions of each of those projects.
In general we wanted to move forward with making a site transition as the information on the old site was out of date.

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