[Blind-international-students] meeting minutes from august 22

[hina altaf]

hi,
The meeting minutes for this meeting are as  follows:
people in attendance, hina, imran, anmol, philip, jan, rachna, bruce
and Zully JF a representative from causes for change.
We had introductions and every one told their names, degree and where
they are in United states  and are originally from and what they are
doing at present.
then we talked about what this group's goals are:
we discussed that this group will represent blind internationals here
in US and other under developed countries and that it is not
restricted to only students but anyone who is blind international is
welcome to the list and this  group will work as a support group for
them to network and we will help them with resources to succeed. as
imran said  the  philosophy is "to arm the blind internationals with
resources" rachna said she will bring the director of blind core to
the list. we had a representative from causes for change.
we also discussed what blind world union is doing and if we can
benefit from this organization.
it was discussed of how we would like to advertise this group and
philip pointed out that we did send emails to various universities
last year but since university disability departments  might think us
as a political or advocacy  group and might not forward our mails to
their students and that we need to make it a social networking group.
Zully JF recommended  that we should   contact to various embassies
councelats of different countries and imran also said we should
contact imigration office. they might have some way of knowing if any
blind international is coming but due to confidentiality reasons they
might not disclose to us their information  but might pass on our
information to blind internationals.

also we discussed if we  would like to work under some organization
and the decission was taken that for right now we will remain under
nfb and leave it as it is because since  nfb is active in promoting
braille and advocacy, that might be helpful for us.
we also discussed to make our web site or some web page for our group
 eventually. we are also going to record our meetings for next time.
also at the end we discussed that everyone is going to send me their
contact information so we could compile a list and we decided to send
that off list for security reasons. the list will only be given to the
board members.
we voted to have meetings biweekly and if we see any problem with that
in the future we might change to monthly. but in order to have the
group up and running and to get more members, we decided to have
meetings biweekly on sundays at 2 pm at central time and  if anyone
from another country would like to join we will try to accomodate if
we can.
our next meeting will be on september 5th central time at 2 pm and
calling information is:
218-936-2100
and access coad is 1111