Interview on Mountain View's KMTV Community Television, broadcast in August 2009:

“The Foundation for Freedom serves the poverty stricken people around the world by supporting schools in Asia, the Americas and Africa. In this show Community Balance’s host, Suzanne Barnett interviews Dr. Sakti Das and Niall Battson about the Foundation and it’s work establishing schools in India, Latin America and Africa.”

Our next happy hour event is Thursday Feb 18 at The Boardroom (1609 Powell St) starting at 6 pm.

Come and support our guest-bartenders, Gabby, Rachel, and Meredith, making delicious drinks for you while raising money for a great cause.

Remember, all tips earned by them from 6 to 9 pm will be donated to our non-profit.  See you then....

2009 was a gratifying and successful year for the Foundation for Freedom in the various aspects of projects, finance, communication and team building.

With fund raising through the tireless efforts of Inna Goffman and her team, we were able to maintain ongoing funding commitments to our existing schools.

We have also been able to sponsor 5 new schools bringing the total number of schools under the foundation’s wings to 15 including 2 schools that were sponsored in 2007 before we received our tax-exempt status.

Our board and committees have functioned harmoniously with the inclusion of several new active volunteers recruited through the efforts of Eva Wong. Thank you Eva.

This year after the completion of our 2 year terms, the new board of directors and committee chairs have been elected. We have also established a new strategic committee that will be headed by Niall Batson. With the help of our new member Jeff Scanlan, the strategic committee will set our short and long term strategic plans. Welcome aboard Jeff.

I would also like to welcome Jennifer Cates, Kristie Manning and Chris Murray as valuable new members in our fund raising committee.

I traveled to Bangladesh and India to make onsite visits to our schools and was immensely pleased to see the stability of the infrastructure developments and academic progress in our schools. The problem of drop outs continue to be one of our challenges and we are planning to implement specific action plans that our project committee chair Shalin Sheth will discuss.

Our website has continued to evolve and going forward this year Rajiv Pramanik is the chair person for PR committee with critical focus on website and content development.

We had our first Chicago happy hour at the Drum and Monkey last Wednesday.  it was extremely successful raising over $400 and connecting with many people interested in joining our cause and participating in the Chicago chapter.

I personally want to thank Guddi and Priti for organizing the event.  They are already planning a host of future events in the Chicago area so stay tuned as they had a number of fun ideas that include kids events and creative happy hours.

On October 21 we will hold our first Chicago event at the Drum and Monkey. Check out our events page for more details.

I am very excited to share that we had our first New York City happy hour.

Yes, that's right we are expanding to the Big Apple.  I want to thank N**lan for organizing an excellent event at Havana Central - The West End on Sept 25th, 2009.

We had a small crowd come out for our event but we made many great connections with people that were interested in visiting the schools and others that wanted to connect some of the Columbia Faculty with the work we are doing on the ground.

Thanks to all those that came out and we hope to see you again at our next NYC event.

Check out the picts from the event.

Where's FFF going next?  Stay tuned.

 I often get questions from Foundation for Freedom donors on where we have looked at expanding our supported schools and where we see growth next.  We are actively working on expanding our presence in the currently represented countries, Niger, India, Bangladesh and Peru.  Read more

I'm happy to start my FFF blog.  I hope to share updates from our projects, my future ideas for the projects teams and literacy related links for videos and interesting data.  

Here is a interesting PBS video on going back to school that Dr. Das sent me: Time for School Series

We are delighted to announce that Foundation for Freedom has been granted state and federal nonprofit status!  

This is effective as of the date 11/13/06 , our EIN is 11-3796207.

If you made a donation and need a receipt for your 2007 tax return, please send an email to contact@foundation-for-freedom.org  with the amount you donated and we will send you the necessary information.

We are encouraged by this great news and hope that it will inspire others to join us in our goal to promote literacy through primary education for children in impoverished communities.  We believe that through education, the destitute are empowered to achieve self-determination. 

The goal of Foundation for Freedom is simple: 

Educate, Empower, Emancipate.

We depend on your individual donations to continue to fund primary education projects throughout the developing world.  

Please consider giving a donation...