Yearly Dollar

Time : 3:45 p.m., Sunday, May 28
Venue : 4-145, MIT

The idea

We in Columbus have been toying with a (possibly) new fund-raising idea, and are looking for feedback ideas towards developing it. We have been calling is India's Yearly Dollar. The basic idea is to establish a system by which any Indian (or person of other nationality) donates one dollar per year towards the developmental efforts in India.

The idea has basically been inspired by the sheer enormity of the number of Indians in this country. The belief is that if we can plan and coordinate this well enough, we can reach out really wide and raise quite a large amount of money. And if we make this a proper annual event, we can look at this plan as a regular income to AID.

A possible idea for implementation of this idea is as follows: We pick a day (probably Aug 15) and call it India's Dollar Day (or any better name). We set up collection centers across the country, and have people donate the one dollar in any of these centers. These centers could be set up in all cities that have AID chapters, or other reliable contacts.

We discussed this idea in CSH on 4/21 and here are some observations and plans:

• Assuming that all 24 chapters participate, we have presence in 24 cities. We could extend this in some way if we find one.
• We set up collection centers in all Indian establishments in the city (grocery stores, restaurants, temples...).
• Instead of just doing this on one day, we could set that day as the day we go and take our collection boxes back, but we could set these up some time in advance, possibly 2 weeks, so that people have more access to the program.
• We could work with Regional Associations, Sangams and Mandals to get to all the member of such organizations.
• We could tie up with some chain like Wal-mart or something, and set up our collection centers in all of their locations (we have not worked out any logistics for this).
• We could work with other organizations like ASHA, etc. to have better reach.

Our initial feeling towards this idea as a chapter as a whole is pretty enthusiastic. We are going to continue discussion during our CSH on 4/28. We believe that the success of this plan rests in AID working this as a whole organization, rather than one individual chapter doing it. So we are now working on concretising the plan to provide as much logistics detail as we can. We are also looking for any basic flaws with the plan that anybody sees.

Have questions on this session? Please contact Nigamanth Sridhar.