This has been a long overdue mail from my end. Finally I found time to draft this quickly. As always, read it as ease.
I am of the opinion that dividing the overall contributions (leaving aside case specific or field specific contributions) will be a good solution and a better picture against our goal as a group. Correct me if I am wrong, but, we dont' intend to limit our help to a particular area of need, but would like to extend it to all the fields in general. Overall improvement in society is what we aim for. Said so, I as a member would be way more satisfied when I look at an year behind and see that efforts and money going into all or more fields such as education, medical, awareness campaigns, distribution projects & so on. Lately I gave much thought on this, and somehow, I have not been too happy that huge to major chunks of money went' only to medical cases. Ofcourse the nature of these cases differ a lot from eachother, a year of education might not cost anywhr close to what it takes saving a life. But again, we can never choose one over the other right...as important is saving a life, equally imp is making sure a kid is not left without proper education. Some of the benefits I see doing this, would be: I wouldnt' be having qns that more of money went' only against medical cases. Not that one field is better than the other, or one help is better than the other, but, extending the help in multiple cases and multiple fields is more fulfilling to me. Once we divide funds on a % basis (since we cannot guess the amount we will recieve in a year ahead), qns on whether we can still go ahead and help a case, how much can we put into it, will all be okay with this (not taking up the case initially part, but more so the amount of money and so on), chain of emails and discussions, and frustrations and not getting enough replies or replies at all, all this can be avoided, somewhat. It might make things more easy to decide on comparitively. We know how much we will have on hand, and to where we can stretch ourselves aswell. Having funds set aside from the budget will prompt us to put in equal efforts in all directions. There are funds waiting to be used in a particular field, this will only make us work on that field better, and more, look around and research on the needy. Now that we have teams for diff sub-groups, follow ups on funds would be easier aswell. Dependency will be less on the overall management head/s. I wish to add another option to members, if the suggestion gets enough votes. This is giving more specific rights to members reference their contributions. Members can also choose to which feild their contributions be channelised, or be added into the general pool. This will ensure optimum satisfaction to members. If particular, they can always mail us what part of their contributions be to what field and so on, and we can just forward the numbers to particular sub-group funds. Iam unsure if I said this as clearly as I wish to, but hope u get the overall picture. Now that steps are being taken for Registering the group, I think, we should also take the group structure & working, a step further. Till now we were more like frnds putting in money, ok with however we spend eachother's contributions, betting on the trust we have for the ppl who run the group, and never questioning where the funds went' even when we cannot show penny to penny accounts updated many a time (keeping busy with so much stuff in & out of the group ofcourse), who have come together to make a difference. >From now on, if we can add to all the above a well organised network frame, I think it will give us all, and new joining members specially, some good idea on what to expect & look forward to, and a better sense of the whole group and its outlook. >From a group of close knit circle of frnds, we have added some of our frnds acquaintances, and from there some of their acquaintances, colleagues, and so on. If we can pick up our working style up another step, I think, we will kick off ourselves to working at an organisation level, from mere circle of frnds. Many other things are already on the way to make this group work as an organisation or an entity of its own. I thought, its about time we added this in aswell. I for one, would surely like to see this come in, and would feel more happy to see each rupee gng into each sub-group, even if its just 3 rupees overall that I might donate in a year. Having said all of this, I do oversee that there might be some good group work and field work involved, but again, we already have active members who have chosen to represent some of the sub-groups. And in any case, volunteers always come together in need, whichever sub-group a case belongs to. So members can still work the same way, but focus will be into all directions, rather than waiting for cases. Also, I think, becos what we find around easily are medical related cases, we are more prone to taking up these in general. Education and so on, ppl really donot approach as much as for medical reasons, may be becos its a life we talk about, though I completely donot agree that I would choose only one over the other. Hope I made some good sense :) and not hit it all over the roof. As always, open for comments. Shoot them my way guys...... :) Divya
