sakti's blog

We have some wonderful pictures of the construction project and students at Gopalwadi School in Orissa. 

Gopalwadi is the brain child of Sujata Das, one of Foundation for Freedom's Project volunteers. Sujata just returned from Orissa, talking to the trustees, engineers and others involved in the project to ensure due completion of the school building.

As you'll see from the photos, this really is her dream coming true!

Spring Fundraising Event

Our year started well as we reflected on a busy and eventful 2009. In addition to continued commitment and support of our previous schools we sponsored 5 additional schools in 2009. In 2010 our fundraising through the website as well as through the efforts of Kristi Manning continues to bear fruit. Our new fundraising events coordinator, Jennifer Cates, did a splendid job in organizing the Spring Fundraising Event:

On April 17th 2010, a cool balmy evening in bucolic Lafayette, California, about 120 supporters and well-wishers of Foundation for Freedom gathered at the beautiful home of Dr. Brenda Reilly for a gala fundraising event.

The halls and rooms were decorated with poster displays of individual schools and with artwork by the students. The guests browsed the displays, asked questions and shared suggestions as they sipped their drinks and munched the appetizers.

Presentations followed with an overview of the projects, individual reports of schools in Niger and Bangladesh, and culminating with a speech on our mission and journey so far.

A delectable Indian dinner followed, accompanied by live music. The event ended with the medical residents dancing to the tunes of the beautiful music of Geecheeblue.

Thanks to the overwhelming generosity of friends of the Foundation we raised over $43,000. Read more

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.