Project 2 - Vocational Training Centre for Women in Nghe An Province, Vietnam

New Day's 2nd Project - Vocational Training Centre for Women in Nghe An Province, Vietnam

At the meeting on 1 November 2007 New Day members unanimously voted to adopt it as our 2nd project - to be funded by the end of 2007. This grant will be made with assistance again from The Asia Foundation through their Hanoi office. Liza and Chris will be the project leaders along with anyone else who would like to contribute. Pauline Fong has volunteered to make either a site visit or a visit to TAF's office in Hanoi in December. Debra Tan will brief a friend of hers who is extensively involved in Vietnam, on this project and who could potentially also make a site visit before the end of the year. Pauline and Debra, I will forward more details of geography and logistics to you both shortly. If any of you are planning a trip to Vietnam in the near future and would like to assist with this project, please let me know.

Finances

We currently have HK$ 65,000 available. By the end of the year we should have the required US$ 8,600 for the Vietnam project.

Membership and fundraising

Our current membership stands at 33. All members have agreed to make an effort to introduce New Day to one new prospective member in the future. In addition, we will all find out what funding we may be able to access through our companies' corporate responsibility programs although we may need to build a greater track record before we can do this successfully. It is also important to note that all members agree that there is no need for frenzied growth and that we are all pleased with what New Day has achieved so far in its first 6 months!

Future Projects

All members will be on the look-out for projects for 2008.

Next Meeting

No date has been set for our next meeting. If one of you would like to volunteer to organize it, please let me know and we can finalise a date and venue. It will be in the first quarter of 2008. I think we will try to make it more of a meeting than a sit-down dinner (not that food will ever be dispensed with!) so that we can work through some issues we may have in smaller groups and really move forward on where we'd like to take New Day in 2008 and beyond.