Class History
Against the praxis mentioned above, more than 30 people, 19 organizations from various parts from India gathered in Pune in May 2007 for listing the actions required in order to see a people led social protection emerging out of the various community based health insurance schemes. This event catalyzed the first corner stone of a national platform to coordinate resources existing all over the country towards the support of concrete social health insurance projects. Scaling up together became the motto of the group. This event was facilitated by GTZ with active support from the ILO.
Subsequently an online survey was conducted amongst the people who had attended to bring out their views on such cooperation. Thereafter as the second step, contributing organizations met in Delhi in June of 2007 facilitated by GTZ again, to design the ways such a platform will work- based on the responses received through the online survey. This working meeting gathered 22 decision makers and came out with decisions and guidelines regarding the structure, membership, legal status of such a platform including names for such an association.
The outcome of this workshop was to formalize the intention to join and cooperate in this direction through a letter of intent to be signed by these non profit organizations willing to join or associate.
Once this letter of intent was collected the stage was set to formalize this initiative based on the output from the Delhi workshop. A major initiative began with finalizing of names for such an association and collection of necessary documents and names for registering along with a study for the appropriate form of registration. After a two month long dialogue and discussion (mostly online) the Sec 25 Public Non profit Company was chosen as the format of legal registration.
The name accepted by the Registrar of Companies among six names submitted is Communities-Led Association for Social Security and the registration formalities relating to Memorandum of Association, bye-laws etc are in process.
An initial- temporary, promoter (heads of member organization) have provided their names and documents for the purpose of registration and on completion - elections will be held to create the board of directors of CLASS.
As the registration was put in process, the founding members met in Mumbai on Nov15th¿07 to chalk out the priorities and further activities of CLASS. The discussion led to the point that every member was a leader in CLASS and is invited to take lead on issues it feels important. The output of the meeting brought that within the social security paradigm CLASS should focus from the areas of strength of the members and since many of them have expertise on health insurance so within Social security, health would be the priority areas for CLASS members. Within activities, the priority areas were decided: