New Management Committees in the Collective

Dear Readers,

Some news from the Badu Collective.

The members of the Badu Collective set up different committees every year to look after each and every aspect of our day to day functioning i.e. health, kitchen, education, entertainment etc. These committees are formed through meetings and elections by all the adult members of the collective.

We have just formed new committees this year. There are a few major changes from the management structure that we had before. Instead of 5 committees which included Kitchen, Agriculture, Finance, Children and Entertainment in the past years, the Kitchen and Agriculture committees have now been combined for seamless functioning, and a new committee to manage overall functioning of all the committees known as the “Scrutiny” Committee has been formed.

Now the details:

Kitchen & Agriculture Committee

The Kitchen and Agriculture committee is responsible for management of the agricultural farm and the collective kitchen in Badu. Their responsibilities apart from managing what is grown on the farm and  the finances of the farm and kitchen also include planning menus and ensuring smooth functioning of the kitchen while sufficiently satisfying our collective appetites with excellent food for birthday, festivals and other special occasions. Badu collective’s kitchen is largely dependent on our farm and with the idea that both the departments should run in parallel, we have clubbed these two departments in a single committee.

Present members:  Swapan Ganguly, Provat Chakraborty, Niranjan Sardar, Sutirtha Bagchi, Jashoda Sahoo, and Kalidasi Sardar.

Gola for storage of paddy produced in the farm

Children Committee

Presently, we have ten children in our collective family, all of whom are students. So, some of our senior members have taken the responsibility to look after the education of the children and seeing that all the needs of the children are met. The children committee is allocated with a fixed and appropriate budget which they spend for our education and other necessities.

Present members: Swapan Haldar, Amita Sinha and Bela Adak.

Riya  practicing for her Music lessons

Entertainment Committee

Throughout the year we maintain a cheerful and colorful life in our collective family. We celebrate more or less all Bengali festivals (and some non-Bengali festivals) without religious discrimination. We also save some money every month to make a yearly holiday trip. We celebrate many other occasions like birthdays, marriage anniversary etc. All these aspects of entertainment and recreation of our family is looked after by the Entertainment Committee.

Present members: Anuradha Talwar, Namita Gayen , and Uttam Gayen

Bhai Phota 2013

Bhai Phota 2013

Finance Committee

This committee, as the name suggests, manages the Collective fund and gives accounts every month to all the adult members of the Collective. It also gives money to each of the other committees for their work every month on the basis of a commonly agreed upon budget.There is no such committee for finance like the others. Generally, Harekrishna Sahoo very carefully looks after all the financial accounts of the Badu Collective.

“Scrutiny” Committee

As mentioned earlier, this new committee formed this year will mainly scrutinize the functioning and expenses of all committees and provide overall management.

Present members: Molina Pramanik, and Astabala Maity,