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Garma
Garam More |
Heritage |
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Asian - American Heritage - Punjabis in Canada, a chronology. . 1999
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DONOR'S GRANT TO BENEFIT GIRLS' EDUCATION
IN INDIA SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Silicon Valley entrepreneur Kanwal Rekhi has made a $1 million donation for this year and has pledged to donate $1 million dollars for each of the next four years to the Santa Clara, Calif. -based Foundation for Excellence, a nonprofit organization that assists disadvantaged students in India. Rekhi, whose family fled Pakistan and settled in Kanpur after Partition, told India-West Jan. 21 that he has imposed only one condition for his bequest, in the form of stock and worth $5 million over five years. "I want the focus to be on education of girls. That's how you can leverage education for the whole family," said Rekhi, the current president of The IndUS Entrepreneur. "If you educate a boy, you have educated a person. If you educate a girl, you educate a family down the road." FFE was founded in 1994 by private venture capitalist and entrepreneur Prabhu Goel and his wife, Poonam. Goel was the founder of Gateway Design Automation, which was acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 1989 for about $80 million. Until Rekhi's contribution, the Goels have been the "only source of funding" for the foundation, FFE president Venktesh Shukla told India-West. "We have never done any fundraisers and are all volunteers," he said, adding that all funds contributed by the Goels have gone entirely to students, in contrast to the situation at some other nonprofit groups where fundraising and administrative costs eat up as much as 70 percent of donations. Shukla, the founder and chief executive officer of Everypath, a company in the business of developing solutions for wireless access to the Internet, said that FFE has awarded about 1,800 scholarships totaling about $800,000. The Goels have agreed to donate up to $10 million, which is being made available "as soon as we need the money," Shukla said. Rekhi's gift, by contrast, "will allow us to scale up," he said. "The sheer magnitude of this donation enables the foundation to think differently about the scope of its activities," he said. "So far we had been content to grow the number of scholarships awarded by the usual 100-200 percent every year. We considered ourselves successful in our mission as we scaled up to grant more than 1,000 scholarships last year to deserving students in India," he said. "The availability of this much money up front challenges us to expand our program much more aggressively. We welcome this challenge." Shukla said that the group will seek to establish an administrative office in Mumbai and possibly set up "regional offices" where volunters can be recruited. The India offices would then handle the paperwork and initial screening process of applicants, with the final awards being made by the Santa Clara-based parent group. "We will also invest more in information technology and in developing a system to minimize the exchanging of pieces of paper between here and India," he said. One thing that will remain the same is the focus on changing the future for talented and needy students in India. Many of the FFE recipients are now in Indian medical and engineering schools. "As a businessman," said Goel, "I wanted to do something that had leverage. These students who complete degrees in medicine or engineering have a bigger impact on the environment from which they came than if they only completed high school." Added Rekhi, "I wanted to do something to educate the poorest who don't have a chance to go to college without assistance and I wanted to support the foundation because there is a lot of volunteer support from the parents in the community." Rekhi, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, received his master's in engineering from Michigan Technology University. He co-founded Excelan, which made add-on boards to connect desktop computers into local area networks. The company merged in 1989 with Novell, where Rekhi served as executive vice president and chief technology officer until he became a major venture capital investor, board member and mentor for start-up companies including Exodus Communications, CyberMedia, Xpede and many others. For more information contact: Foundation For Excellence, 3065 Democracy Way, Santa Clara, CA 95054, tel: (408) 748-1771. http://www.ffe.org/
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