Background on ASCF

INTRODUCTION:
In March 2005, Anoopa Sharma, the daughter of Anita and Dennis Sharma and sister of Uttama Sharma, died as a result of a car accident caused by a reckless driver. Anoopa, then a graduate student and Woodruff Scholar in the Epidemiology Department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, was passionate about international development, equal access to health care, and women’s issues in developing countries. During a trip to northern India with her father in April 2004, Anoopa was disturbed by the lack of opportunities for the female students at Amar Chand Kanya Inter College in the town of Atrauli. With eight hundred students but only eight state-sponsored teachers, the school is dependent on student fees and community support to meet its basic needs, yet most students do not have the financial resources to pay. The physical infrastructure of the school and many basic learning resources, such as books and a library, were either absent or in decay. Struck by these conditions, Anoopa decided she wanted to help the school. The ASCF aims to realize her dream.

ABOUT ANOOPA:
Anoopa was born on September 7, 1980 in Hollywood, Florida. In 1987, she moved with her family to Fairfax, Virginia. She later attended the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, VA. Anoopa graduated from Duke University in 2002 with a double major in computer science and biology. Anoopa spent the following year studying the transmission of tuberculosis at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Anoopa was a world traveler. As a child, she visited Honduras, Mexico, Greece, France, Egypt, Swaziland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and India. As an adult, she traveled in Kenya, Ghana, Gambia, Colombia, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Ireland, Scotland, and England. She planned to spend two months in Israel in the summer of 2005 and work in an Israeli epidemiology research facility, a plan she could not fulfill.

During her travels to developing countries, she focused on endemic poverty, public health, and women’s issues, and decided to address these issues as an epidemiologist. She spent 2004 conducting research and field studies on infectious diseases in Thailand and Bangladesh. In Thailand, she worked with the US Armed Forces Research Institute for Medical Sciences studying risk factors for the disease Leptospirosis. In Bangladesh, she worked with the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and interviewed villagers regarding the physical, financial, and social costs of the disease Visceral Leishmaniasis. In August 2004, Anoopa joined the Ph. D. program in Epidemiology at Emory University.

On Saturday, March 5, 2005, Anoopa went to the University of Alabama, in Birmingham, to attend a conference organized by Physicians for Human Rights. In the evening she was in the car accident that took her life and dreams away. This did not prevent her from giving life to others. Her parents donated her heart, liver, pancreas, and kidneys to strangers whose severe medical conditions depended on an organ transplant to dramatically improve the quality of their lives. This was televised in Atlanta's Fox News.

THE BEGINNING OF THE ASCF:
During Anoopa’s memorial service, her father committed to helping the girls’ school in Atrauli, India to turn Anoopa’s dreams into a reality. The Sharmas established the Anoopa Sharma Memorial Fund at the Lafayette Federal Credit Union as a direct result. So far approximately $10,000 dollars have been raised from friends and family.


HOW TO DONATE TO THE PROJECT:
In November 2005, Anoopa’s parents filed papers with the IRS to establish the Anoopa Sharma Children’s Foundation (ASCF), a not-for-profit organization, so people can make US tax-deductible contributions (Tax ID# 20-3759640). The purpose of this foundation is to support the school project in Atrauli and then possibly undertake other projects, in the future, with other childrens’ schools. Donations can be mailed to: Anoopa Sharma Childrens’ Foundation, Act # 255785000; Lafayette Federal Credit Union, 3535 University Blvd. West, Kensington, MD 20895.


PURPOSE:
ASCF's goal is to improve the quality of education at the Amar Chand Kanya Inter College in Atrauli, Uttar Pradesh, India, a girls’ school in North India. Atrauli is a small town with a population of about 200,000. ASCF has financed the construction of a computer room, lecture hall, and library at this school as well as the procurement of books, computers, and furniture for the library and computer room.

The Amar Chand Kanya Inter (ACKI) College is a girls-only college located in Atrauli, approximately 200 km east of New Delhi. Atrauli is a small town with a population of about 200,000, in the state of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India. It has only one girls’ school-college with roughly eight hundred students and eight state-employed teachers. It runs from grade 1 to 12. The State Government finances teachers’ salaries and very limited recurrent costs. The rest of the recurrent and other costs must be financed from the students’ fees. Since ninety percent of the students come from poor families, fee collection is insufficient to meet the growing demands of a continuously increasing population of students. The school has been lagging further and further behind in the quality of education and modernization of its curriculum due to lack of a library, a computer center, and sufficient classrooms.

Most students at the remote ACKI College have not seen a library and have never used computers. The provision of a computer room will enable the students to become computer literate and learn basic word processing, spreadsheet, and other skills that will assist them in obtaining jobs after graduation. The education of women has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to lift a population out of poverty.

To date we have invested $27,000 ($10,000 from the Anoopa Sharma Children’s Foundation (ASCF) and $17,000 from the Sharma family's own funds) towards the successful construction of a large hall with divisions which will house a computer room, library and a lecture hall.

In December 2007 the Sharma family visited the school and participated in the inauguration of the building. Everyone was very pleased with the progress on the project. They met with the School Manager, School Principal, and Director of a non-profit organization, Samaj Seva Samiti, through which funds have been transferred to support the school.