Bhore Foundation president Mr. Shiva Maharaj makes a generous donation of $30,000 to support the Last Mile Connectivity Foundation Inc.
Without internet access people are cut off from anything that does not occur in their village. Additionally weak internet connectivity is a significant barrier to introducing higher quality of education in remote villages in India. Solving the connectivity issue will provide opportunities for asynchronous learning, easy accessibility to information, and higher education quality at an affordable cost.
We would like to repeat the successful pattern of establishing internet connectivity at Adharshila at other similarly disadvantaged educational institutions in India. We have developed a network of close and trusted advisors in India that research and identify such institutions for us to engage with. The location that we have targeted for assistance in 2016 is the Rajat Jubliee School in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, in the very remote Sunderbans district. We too have learned that the approach to getting connectivity for each of these schools could very well be unique in each instance, and that we need to proceed is a very deliberate manner to identify the telecommunications partner(s) to be used for each institution and have to verify conclusively that such connectivity can be set up successfully before committing funds to that project.
The Bhore Foundation has very generously extended funding support to us for the second year in a row, allocating $30,000 for 2015-16 to be used as continuation of the network connectivity efforts we started then, initially with the Adharshila school. Our experiences in 2014-15 with the Adharshila school’s connectivity efforts have led us to the conclusion that we can provide the best stewardship for, and maximum transparency into, the use of funds received from the Bhore Foundation – and indeed other sponsors, when we have them – by establishing a Not For Profit organization incorporated in the US that will be used solely to manage the administration and distribution of funds to the selected schools as and when we have established the set of partnerships and vendors that can provision the network connectivity to those schools. We have already submitted the Articles of Incorporation of this entity, to be called The Last Mile Connectivity Foundation Inc., to the office of the Secretary of State of Illinois, and we hope to have confirmation on its establishment in the next few weeks. The Foundation will operate in the US as a 501(c)3 charitable foundation. In anticipation of filing with the IRS for this 501(c)3 status, we have included in the Articles of Incorporation the following text as the objectives of the Foundation:
“The Last Mile Connectivity Foundation Inc. is formed as a charitable organization that will raise and receive contributions for the purposes of establishing last-mile internet network connectivity and providing charitable assistance to educational and other charitable organizations that cater to the educational needs of underprivileged peoples in developing countries such as, but not limited to, India”
This language has been crafted to comply with IRS Publication 557 guidelines about the formation and application for Tax-Exempt status institutions with the IRS.
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