This is a mail that Ashish Kole sent out on July 4th 2007
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Here is the mail I sent out on 30th April, 2006. Nothing much has
changed since:-(
Ashish
--- In nitdaa_blr@yahoogroups.com, Ashish Kole
wrote:
Folks
Thanks to the generosity of our host (Asit Gangopadhyay) and the free
flow of spirits at the Indiranagar club, I am jogging my mind to
recollect what we spoke about in our first meeting. Some of the things
I recollect were:
- We will be a branch of the parent alumni association
- We will leverage the existing documentation in order to register
ourselves as a "not for profit" society.
- Our scope will be the state of Karnataka.
The parent alumni association is currently in deep hibernation. It's
activities seem to be limited to inviting it's members to the college
campus when the college is closed for vacation to listen to an
extremely dull process of electing it's members, playing a game of
cricket at Lords, and finally consuming copious quantities of alcohol
in the evening.
This annual event is called the global meet (definition of global
being people from outside Durgapur - such as Burnpur - and Kolkata -
not even Bokaro - which has a significant ex-recollean population).
I've sent you all a link to some photographs that I took at the golbal
meet.
It was such a let down to see so few ex-students and absolutely no
current students! The batch of '80 provided a significant crowd of 40
with representation from all over the country and abroad (Seattle,
London, Glasgow and Tokyo)
We therefore have before us an opportunity to do different things and
do them differently (and perhaps show the way to what can be done with
a potentially significant network such as ours).
As a kind of introspection exercise that hopefully will bring some
value to our next meeting, I would like to place before you a set of
questions that I gathered from the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for
Nonprofit Management.
I quote from their web site:
http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/sat/questions.html
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"The most important management resource we need is a method to help us
think through what we are doing, why we are doing it, and what we must
do." And so we developed this Self-Assessment Tool, which presents the
five most important questions for any nonprofit organization to ask:
What is our mission?
Who is our customer?
What does the customer value?
What are our results?
What is our plan?
The questions are straightforward -- and deceptively simple.
Throughout the self-assessment process, you will examine the
fundamental question of your mission: what the mission is and what it
should be.
You will determine your primary customer: the person whose life is
changed through your work. You will determine your supporting
customers: volunteers, partners, donors, and others you must satisfy.
You will engage in research to learn directly from customers what they
value, decide what your results should be, and develop a plan with
long-range goals and measurable objectives.
We are creating tomorrow's society of citizens through the social
sector, through your nonprofit organization. And in that society,
everybody is a leader, everybody is responsible, everybody acts.
Therefore, mission and leadership are not just things to read about,
to listen to; they are things to do something about. Self-assessment
can and should convert good intentions and knowledge into effective
action -- not next year but tomorrow morning.
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Mission: Why you do what you do; the organization's reason for being,
its purpose. Says what, in the end, you want to be remembered for.
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Regards
Ashish
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