Is there more to ROTA than just the projects?

In sociology class we study a variety of topics by scanning through the chapters. I found the recent class to be the most interesting class from the previous classes. I say this because I learned something new and interesting that never captured my attention. We spoke about Organizations in terms of Formal and Informal organizations. The discussion looked at Voluntary organizations and Utilitarian organizations.  ROTA is an organization that best defines theses two kinds of organizations according to Sociology. 

“Towards Education for all…Today, Tomorrow, Forever” is there priority mission statement. I am currently a non-paid worker for ROTA (Reach Out to Asia) and this experience gives me a valid explanation of judging the type of Organization it is in our society. The organization has a hierarchy of employees where some are paid to run the organization, while most do voluntary projects to create awareness of the illiterate people who are less fortunate or hard working laborers to get proper education. My job in ROTA is to educate eighteen cleaning staff members of Education City twice a week. These workers are mostly recruited from Sri lank and possess low skills in communicating with their colleagues or people in charge of them in English. They fail to understand certain vocabulary that is very important in order for them to do allocated tasks.

Therefore, I am an individual who gives 2 hours of her time to help these workers learn a few English words, so that their bosses and employers have an easier time communicating with them. ROTA is also a utilitarian organization. A utilitarian organization indicates that the organization has a specific goal/ purpose and implies that some members get paid for running the few aspects of ROTA and is usually a matter of individual choice. I can strongly say this organization is not a Coercive organization. The aim of ROTA is to increase access to educationalfacilities in a crisis situation. The chairperson H.E Sheikha Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani and a few other Board members provide guidance and direction for the charity.

Since the organization is a utilitarian organization, this means they are Bureaucratic. A bureaucratic organization indicates that an organization has forms for everything, a lot of paper work, policies, procedures, and deadlines. This organization incorporates all of those attributes in order for an individual to be a non-paid employee, or part of a quick volunteer project. The organization strictly believes in their aim and ways to achieve that aim. The organization has to be bureaucratic because they are dealing with a large number of people of different knowledge skills and areas. They have to deal with the volunteers and the people who need the voluntary assistance. They have to try and get people to sponsor their notion and they work forward with that support and funding’s. Qtel and Vodafone are so far the most spoken about sponsors for the projects of ROTA.












ROTA is a non-profit organization, and thus there is a limit of trust and liability issues that have to be kept under control and supervised regularly. These benefits of having rules is a functional point of view, a positive way to see an outcome in every bureaucratic organization. There is an achievement, which is education that is given and received by a range of individuals.

Although, if there is too much bureaucracy pushed towards the organization, there tends to be negative issues with the organization called Social conflicts. The social conflict in ROTA is that there might be some Asian countries who do not get the privilege to receive the same sort of education everywhere. 

One reason to this is that they might not have enough students or people to do the voluntary work of teaching in those specific regions. Or, they might only get a visit of help once a year that has the possibility to hold an event of teaching. The picture of the Map above shows the different regions that ROTA has visited to help educate more illiterate individuals.

In Doha Qatar itself it becomes a social conflict because many Indian schools barely receive information about ROTA trips abroad or several local projects because the organization only picks people who have a certain amount of skills or study in Education City. Education City most of the time tries to get university or Qatar Academy students to participate in these projects, in order to build their Community and Service skills and approaches. The picture below is of a Carnegie Mellon University student teaching the cleaning staff of his University. As a teacher myself, I have noticed that there are no teachers from The College of the North Atlantic or Qatar University. The next picture identifies how serious ROTA takes their educational services because it shows the training sessions that occurred for all the upcoming teachers in Education City.

Visit this link to watch how Education city demonstrates enthusiasm for Reach out to Asia: http://www.youtube.com/user/reachouttoasiatv?ob=0&feature=results_main

“Make a Difference and take Action” says ROTA.