Asha Kids Chapter

New: Books Drive for the under-resourced classrooms in America

Immensely inspired by our Arizona chapter, we approached and encouraged a group of middle school and high school kids [and their parents] in the Dallas area to see if we could interest them with some of our work. We wanted to see if we could help them appreciate better, why some of their parents volunteer and donate to Asha for Education’s cause. We organized an information session presenting to them what we do here in Dallas , in the US and how we are trying to affect a change in India . Information was presented by the chapter coordinators to the kids and parents who had assembled at the Liberty Recreation Center in Plano in June 2008.

We were pleasantly surprised to see them quickly grasp the essence of Asha for Education’s work in the US and other countries and enthusiastically embraced the idea of volunteering for the chapter in Dallas . Volunteering, however, was not new to many of them as they were already closely involved in local tutoring efforts and volunteering for other community and school projects. With a “never too young to volunteer” attitude, they formed a ‘Kid’s chapter’ consisting of 12th graders all the way down to 6th graders. They planned to spend a major part of their summer break to kick start the chapter hence becoming its founding members.  

Founding Members: Sruthi Sundaresan, Uma Ramesh, Anagha Krishnan, Easwar Venkatraman, Aarthy Sundaresan, Anjana Ram, Chinamayee Venkatraman, Janani Ramesh, Shilpa Sethuraman, Surya & Pallavi  

2009 Projects  

2008 Projects  

1. “Be Healthy Be Happy”- A short movie on sanitation and health

Summer vacation 2008 – Aarthy Sundaresan (Age 14). During this much-anticipated time of the year, school kids of all ages are seen having the time of their lives as they party, play, and have fun. But among these kids, about of a dozen of them made the decision of taking part in a very beneficial non-profit organization called Asha for Education. This organization, which raises money to fund for the education of millions if illiterate children in rural India , and also many in the Dallas area as well, interested us kids so much that we decided to form a kids chapter. The kids chapter, supervised by the adult volunteers, comes up with project ideas that would help the conditions in India in some way. After doing a bit of individual research and collective brainstorming, we all agreed to address the major hygiene and sanitation problem that most kids in India are unaware of. To go further on this idea, we chose to make a short 30-minute video showing the consequences of unhealthy habits versus healthy habits. After all the filming and editing, this video will be shipped to many of the rural-area schools in India where the children will be able to view this video and learn from it. As a group, keeping in mind the greatness in the cause we are all working for, we all feel that this whole 3-month experience has been extremely fun, and morally rewarding. We all greatly benefited from our involvement in this organization, and we hope that we will recruit new members, because the time and effort you put into this cause is truly worth it!

2. Dallas White Rock Relay Race - The team consisting of Easwar, Aarthy, Chinmayee, Meghna and Jananie raised more than 2500$ to support different Asha projects. Here is the news article from Plano Stars describing their accomplishment.