Dear friends
In our September newsletter, we mentioned about our Fundraising effort through Impact Guru. We are delighted to share that we raised nearly Rs. 300000 during the week of Oct 2-8 (Daan Utsav). Thanks to everyone who donated or at least had good wishes for us, during this campaign. There is still more exciting news - during this week there was a friendly competition between 20 select NGOs. And in this competition - QMed got the maximum number of donors and the second highest amount collected! As a result we got a bonus of $400 for the maximum donors and a bonus of $250 for the second highest amount. This bonus was given by GlobalGiving, USA , which partnered with Impact Guru for sponsoring this prize. (After the Daan Utsav event ended, we were permitted to continue our campaign till the 6th of November, and we have raised about Rs. 3,17,000 till now)
We will be using the funds raised on Impact Guru to train and mentor 100 PG students with the literature search and reference management for their theses.
The other very exciting event of October was that we had a collaborative workshop with The Union. This was a two day event - one day for PubMed and one day for a Reference Management software. We conducted the workshop on PubMed and Faculty from The Union conducted the second day's sessions. All of us guided and mentored four participants each, both during the sessions and then later when the 20 participants had a fairly tough assignment to complete and submit a couple of weeks later. This has been a landmark event and an excellent collaboration too. Special thanks to Dr Ajay Kumar and his colleagues at The Union, India.
I have to share with mixed feelings that our Program Associate Ms Lakshmi Padmnabhan has left our services at the end of October. To quote her feelings - she has promised that she will always have QMed in her heart. We wish her the very best for her future.
Vasumathi Sriganesh
