Meeting Minutes: CBA Meeting Q1 2025-26

⚠️ Disclaimer

As a community grows, it is important for the community to push back on ideas which oppose the core interests of the community. These push-backs can be gentle, but are important to preserve the ideas on which the community is built. Also, it is important to create space for ALL voices to be heard.

How did we land up here

A brief history of how Children’s Book For All started through a personal journey of grief was talked about.
This was followed by the CBA community generously talking about the value which Children’s Book for All added in their lives.

Here is a verbatim notes for some things which the community expressed

holding space
softness
alignment to their core values of love and kindness which creates magic
sense of community
readings happening at a consistent frequency
connection
wanting to be heard
adequate stimulation on a weekend
hearing other point of views
sense of purpose - which is a motivation toward other goals in life
mindful reading
simplest book leading to profound discussion
homeostasis
love, tenderness within the group
repair in relationships
honest sharing and holding
showing up for every reading
exploring self and expression
differing perspectives
acceptance and holding
opening up space for all to share
grounding
relationships in CBA becoming sandbox for relationships in the world

Agenda of this Meeting

☐ Previous Meeting Updates
☐ Some Questions (for which we have probable answers but need a wider perspective)
☐ Direction Ahead
☐ Collective action

Past Meeting Updates

✅ Website

A functional website of CBA was launched. Though far from perfect, it eliminates the need for creating separate forms for each reading and adds some credibility to new people looking for more information about CBA, their upcoming and past readings on the website.

✅ Documentation of the Readings

All the documentaion from the previous readinds starting from 23 Feb 2025 were done with the help of community members

🟡 Write a children’s book together

The community got together to write a tactile book on ‘Love’ - this was the best example of what the team could do collectively. We would want the project to get to the stage of publication.
There is more need for such projects in the community which require collective action.

😐 Our Stories

The idea for ‘Our Stories’ was to inspire other people through our origin stories of starting to read and cherish Children’s Picture books and children’s literature. However, only a few people from the community have shared the origin stories and the request is for more people in the community to share these stories.

✅ Ledger

The finanacials are being shared with the community members every month starting from April 2025 The idea is to keep all the net contribution from the community in a separate checking account till the community decides a plan on how to utilise this. Only necessary expenses and expenses for books are for which they will be utilised at the moment.

The contributions before April 2025 are not tracked and cleanly recorded. We are setting it off against the collection of 400+ books which the CBA library acquired in the past year.

🟡 Reading with adolescents

Only one reading with an adolescent group was done in the past quarter but we identify this group as someone who will most benefit from the cba style reading. The one reading which was done with adolescents at Srijan School received rave feedback from the students. There is a need to identify and formulate a plan to reach more adolescent groups in the coming year.

Problems and some solutions to reaching out to these adolescent groups were discussed - but the general consensus was that this could be an area where more work and energy needs to be put up.

🟡 Reading with teachers

As with adolescents, there was only one reading done with teacher group - and we received great feedback from the teachers and several requests to come back.

There is a need to identify how to do these CBA sessions with teachers where they are received as support - rather than another training or work.

❌ CBA Retreat

No work on planning was done on this aspect. Fingers crossed for the coming year.

❌ Youtube Reading in groups

No work was done on this as well. We also need to understand the intention and the energy in the group for this.

Some Questions

(for which we have some probable answers but need a wider perspective)

• Is there a need to set up CBA as a separate entity?
• What is CBA’s mission?
• Who will benefit the most from CBA?
• What are the different Models of operation?
• What are the values(non-negotiable) by which we will stand by?
• What are the systems we can keep creating at CBA to uphold these values?
• How do we enable more collective decision making and action in the community?

Separate Entity?

The proposal was to create separate entity when there are tax implications on the contributions We can onsider registering when the monthly revenue is around 1.5-2 L

Other pros and cons of registering not registering as a separate entity could not be discussed like:

Does registering as a separate entity open doors for working with governments, csr funding etc.
Is it too soon to register?
What sort of entity should be registered to reflect that it is a community driven initiative? Should it be a Trust, Section 8 non-profit or something else

Due to time constrains, we decided to put several other questions on a Google Doc/Sheet/Form and ask the community to contribute their inputs there.

CBA’s Mission

CBA’s mission needs to be articulated from the community perspective

Here is a link where you can add your inputs.

Target Audience

Adolescents and teachers are two groups we have identified as groups who will benefit most from the community readings by CBA.

Are there any other groups which the community identifies as someone who can benefity from CBA readings?

Please add your inputs here

Models of Operation

One of the important ideas that was discussed as a model was ‘sustainability of the community’.
This can be only done if we keep sustainability at the core of the operations.

There are 2 existing models of operation at present:

Online Readings (pay-what-you-want model)
Workshops in schools and colleges

One of the new models which we are looking to experiment with was discussed.

We discussed launching support groups (starting with support groups for happiness and grief) rooted in children’s books and sound psychological frameworks.

A 6-month long or 12-month long support group with 12 sessions was proposed.
Some people expressed concern on seeking ‘payment’ for grief support group.

There is more ground work, discussions and experiments that need to be done on the nature of the support systems.

You can add your inputs towards the different models of operation you have in mind here.

CBA Value Systems

As the comminity grows, there is a need to strengthen and preserve the core values which helped it gain momentum - else they can get dilluted, compromised or hijacked

It is important to articulate those core values which the community stands for.

You can add your inputs towards the core CBA values here.

Other Systems

It is important to build certain systems in the community that promote accountability, transparency, enabling collective participation & action, accessibility to a wider segment of the society etc.

In absence of these systems, a community’s or an organisation’s work starts shifting towards short-term incentives rather than long-term goals.

This is going to be an ongoing conversation. The community can add their inputs towards these here