Monthly Archive for October, 2008

Using The Point to raise project funds?

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Daniel Bachhuber
on 24 October 2008
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The Point is an old idea with a new twist. It’s a website which allows you to establish a “cause” (or reason you’re raising money) and solicit funding for it. The new twist is that, instead of immediately donating, the audience pledges their money towards the project. Once the pledge jar gets to the requested amount, then credit cards are charged. If not enough people rally around the project by the due date, then no funds are raised.

I think this approach has an interesting psychological advantage. There’s no cost to commit to an idea, and you’ll only donate if enough people think the project proposal is a good idea. It’s a bit like a 30 day money back guarantee.

Furthermore, if we can market it well, I think this could be a really effective way to fund certain physical components of a project (the solar panels, for instance). We give as much information as we can about the project, and the funders know exactly where their money is going.

The best example I’ve found is the “Pansenor Water & Electricity Project.” We can do it even better!

We’re off to a start

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Anna Garwood
on 21 October 2008
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The water project is off to a good start. We just heard that the Christadelphian Meal A Day Fund of the Americas will be supporting a water project in Suro Aniguo with a $15,000 grant for the rehabilitation of the exisiting water distribution system, sand filters for households that the potable water system doesn’t reach, and community work to sustainably manage the water resource. In the next 2 months, we’ll be undertaking the socioeconomic and technical surveys in this and several other communities in the district of Tumbaden with the goal of launching a larger project to address the critical water needs in this area. Check out my post on the Green Empowerment blog for more about the area.

FLOW: For The Love Of Water at the Bijou this Friday

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Daniel Bachhuber
on 20 October 2008
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Arguably the most amazing film I’ve seen this year, “FLOW: For The Love Of Water” is playing at the Bijou Cinema in Eugene this Friday at 7:30 PM.

Granted, it isn’t the most uplifting film in the world, but it’s a must-see. Even if you’ve seen it before (hint, Shane), I would highly encourage you to come see it again. It is so many adjectives I’m lacking right now, and might just convince you to get involved with ODA.

What I learned: the October technical workshop

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Daniel Bachhuber
on 19 October 2008
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As Shane mentioned earlier, he and I spent the whole weekend at a Green Empowerment workshop covering solar, solar water pumps, wind turbines, and a few other topics related to energy development in the developing world. It was about 20 hours of total immersion in how to scope, install, and maintain appropriate technology. Not entirely what I was expecting, but cool nonetheless.

For me, the most beneficial component to the workshop was the hands-on experience in assessing, say, water demands of a village and determining how many watts the solar panels had to provide to the pump in order to meet the demand. Whereas I don’t claim to be an expert in this arena, I feel comfortable in saying I would be a good assistant to this part of the project in the field. It’s also sweet that we now have notebooks full of slides and equations to reference back to. I think Shane and I could definitely put together a whiz-bang session for the fall retreat.

On the other hand, I think I had hoped the workshop would cover more of the cultural/social/political issues you can run into (although these are largely dependent on the country you work in). There’s quirks that come up in every project, and I would’ve loved to hear a roundtable of different scenarios Green Empowerment has had to address. I would’ve also liked to cover project design more in depth, but I suppose that’s why this was a technical workshop and not a learn everything workshop.

Overall, though, it was a great weekend spent learning about how to implement solar and wind installations.

Reflections: Green Empowerment Technical Training

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Shane Lofgren
on 19 October 2008
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This weekend, I spent most of my days at a technical training, put on by Green Empowerment at PSU. The training was divided up into 3 sections: 6-9 PM on Friday, 9-5 PM on Saturday, and 9-5 PM on Sunday. Most of the time was spent in a classroom where we learned about specifics of solar and wind electricity generation and using these things to pump water. Four times throughout the sessions, we would break from a classroom format for hands on time, where we got to work with and assemble the systems we were learning about.

For this reflection, I will start with the things I didn’t like, and then end with the things I did like. For me, having not been in a class setting in awhile, the 8 hour blocks on Saturday and Sunday were difficult for me at times. I would have preferred a different division of time (perhaps a session across multiple weekends). Also, I felt like the teaching sessions got bogged down in details at times. Finally, I wish that we could have spent more time talking about interacting with the people we’re helping–something that both Michel and Jason agreed occupied 90% of time spent when working on a project (be it electrification, water pumping, or otherwise). However, given that this was a technical training session, I was not too bothered by the technical focus.

Things I liked: While I said that I felt that sometimes the session got bogged down in too many details, for the most part I appreciated the in-depth approach to teaching us about the technical side of such a project. The book of slides they gave us will serve as a good reminder of all of the lessons we learned, and I look forward to having it when I design and implement a project. I also very much enjoyed the hands-on sessions, where I got to work with a voltmeter, solar-panels, a wind-turbine, and ask informed people all of the questions that came to me, both practical and theoretical. I’m glad that I got to do this electrical work now in a friendly, no-pressure environment full of people who know what’s up, because it’d be a lot harder (and potentially very costly) to have to pick this stuff up in the field. Finally, I enjoyed the chance to meet and spend time with a wide variety of intelligent, pleasant, and motivated people. Almost everyone there had a project they were working on. I got to chat with them and exchange ideas. I just regret that I didn’t get anyone’s contact information, because I feel that there were a lot of potential partners there.

In conclusion, though the format was hard on me, the experience was definitely positive. I’m glad I have the skills and knowledge that I do now, and I feel that they will be very helpful to me in the future.

Now’s the time to get involved with ODA

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Daniel Bachhuber
on 17 October 2008
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Join Oregon Direct Action, and work with students at the University of Oregon to promote basic needs sustainably in Peru and elsewhere.

Currently, we’re looking for several bright, passionate students on campus interested in helping to provide safe and reliable water access to communities in San Pablo, Cajamarca, Peru. You’ll get to learn all about project research, design, implementation, and follow up (think needs assessments, appropriate water technology, and Participatory Rural Appraisal). Our team, at the moment just three people, has room for people to help with Operations, Finance, Communications/PR, and as many Associates as we can manage.

There’s a community kick-off meeting on Wednesday, the 22nd of October at 7 pm in the Knight Collaboration Center (room 122 of the Knight Library). If you are a student at the University of Oregon, please contact us or RSVP on Facebook to give us a heads up on the number of people showing up. We’ve got to make sure there are enough snacks for everyone.

Also, we’re looking for professors and professionals alike to serve on our Board of Advisers for the fall term. The advisers will meet with the ODA team once per month tentatively on the third Wednesday to discuss project developments, give feedback on project and funding ideas, and help improve organizational strategy. Additionally, we hope the advisers will become more intimately engaged with our projects, as everything we do is easy to follow along with on our website.

The applicants will be voted in by the team after the first joint meeting this month on the 29th of October. Positions will be term by term, although applicants are more than welcome to serve indefinitely. Please contact us if this sounds like an awesome fit for you.

2008 Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition

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Daniel Bachhuber
on 15 October 2008
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Hail Mary it was. After dropping the ball for the last two weeks, Shane and I worked hard this morning to get our application in for the 2008 Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition. Overall, I think it turned out quite well, especially in terms of summarizing our project and how we’re going to involve both the communities in San Pablo and the University of Oregon. It’s weak, in my opinion, near the end, as we discuss just how we’re planning on funding this project and what our inspiration for it was. I’ll be interested to hear what reaction we get (and hopefully it was submitted correctly. I emailed it in early because the server was down and then did the online form about 40 minutes after 3 pm).

Getting more people, advertising, and the Sustainability Conference

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Daniel Bachhuber
on 14 October 2008
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Shane and I had a super quick and efficient conference call this evening that unfortunately didn’t get recorded because of a technical error. I’ll do my best to summarize what we covered.

First, we’re following a new format for our conference calls. Instead of running through all of our action items, and breaking the discussion down section by section, we’ll instead propose topics on the new agenda throughout the week. Come meeting time, we’ll assign time lengths to the topics and address them one by one. Ideally, our calls will be a little bit more interesting and less monotonous in this format.

We talked about the Green Empowerment workshop this weekend which both Shane and I are attending. Both of us will take copious notes so that we can teach as much as we can to new members at our fall retreat on the first weekend of November. Along these lines, Shane and I will be working together for a full day on Monday to catch up on research and other ODA stuff we’ve dropped the ball on.

Tomorrow, and Thursday, also mark two very busy days for the ODA team. We’ve decided that we would still like to apply to the Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition. The due date is tomorrow at 3 PM Pacific, however, which means we’re going to have to work quickly. I will also be prepping the materials we’ll publish on Thursday, email to list servs, and push around Facebook in order to draw interest to our first community meeting and first advisers meeting. Specifically, we’ll be looking for someone to take on Operations, Finance, Tech, and as many associates as we can handle. We’ve got a neat trick up our sleeve for promotion, too.

Last, but not least, the ODA website will be receiving content upgrades shortly intended to give people a better idea of just what the heck we’re doing.

Summer recap meeting with Katie Lynch

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Daniel Bachhuber
on 1 October 2008
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Earlier this morning, I was fortunate to sit down with Katie Lynch of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Oregon to discuss what ODA did over the summer and where we are at now. After that, we moved on to discussing several different questions I had:

How do we best involve the community with our projects? One path forward is develop a core team, and then use that core team to crowdsource tasks to the community. I think this is highly feasible, and in tune with the open source concept, but we definitely need to fill out the positions of Finance, PR, and Tech first.

When should we schedule a meeting with our potential advisers? The game plan is to schedule this for the third or fourth week of October. Katie thinks is a really good idea, by the way. In the interim, we need to do a couple of things. One, we should identify what organization structure goals we have for ODA (do we want to be a student group, a non-profit, or a program of another non-profit?). I think this will evolve over time but, as I get to later, being just a student group doesn’t have the advantages we think it does. Two, we really need to establish the specifics of what we want these advisers to help with. A “job description,” per se, that lays out the number of hours per term we would expect them to contribute, when we would meet, and what type of support we want, among other things. Ideally, we’ll have a solid draft of this before we begin to solicit potential advisers.

Can use ENVS as our fiscal sponsor? Boy, this was a fun question. I learned quite a bit. Apparently, unlike I had thought before, the University is not a 501(c)3. For a number of grants, we need to have 501(c)3 status specifically. Katie will look into whether ENVS can provide this for us, but it might not be the best option because there is a significant overhead cost. She suggested we talk to Green Empowerment and/or the Institute for Culture and Ecology as to whether they can provide fiscal sponsorship. It sure would be sweet to have someone in charge of finances to look into this for us.

Where should we look for more people to get involved? I think we’ll plan on marketing ourselves to the Sustainability Coalition on campus, but Katie suggested we also connect with the UO Business School and Jcomm. Both are good ideas, we should advertise out when the team goals are a bit further along. We’re also welcome to put flyers up around ENVS when we get to that point.

What do you know about Meyer Sustainability Grant? Katie is 90% sure this is a grant for projects on campus, and mentioned that Steve Mital definitely the contact person for this. Considering MAPLE Microfinance was launched by a grant from this fund, I think we still should look into it.

All in all, it was a wonderfully productive 45 minutes, and I look forward to working closely with Katie in the near future.

Water survey in Incatambo

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Anna Garwood
on 1 October 2008
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Incatambo is also sometimes spelled Ingatambo or Inkatambo.

It is possible that the highland lagoons could serve as a potable water source with pipes flowing to many communities, although this would be a major infrastructure of 10s of km of pipes. For the time being it probably makes sense to focus more on small-scale distributed options.

20 households (HH) and the primary school get water from a piped system with an enclosed spring box. The remaining 50 drink from untreated surface water. 2-3 HH capture a few springs and channel them into a pond. Water is then delivered in pipes from the pond to the households. Most people drink from ‘puqueos’ (shallow surface water holes) or ‘quebradas’ (streams or gullies). Some people boil the water because a health promoter told them that the surface water is dirty.

Community groups include: Programa Juntos, Comedor Popular, Ronda Campesina, Asociacion de Productores and now the Frente de Defensa de las Lagonas.

There is a milk cooling plant (gas-fired) that the teacher rents to Nestle. Each morning 4 milk trucks deposit the fresh milk into the plant. Milk production is basically the only income of the community (80 cents of a sol per liter, each cow produces 5-10liters per day). There is no public transportation other than getting a ride on the milk truck. 

Electricity options

Strangly, there is a TV tower in this village without electricity. The tower does not work because they don’t have gas for the generator.

There is a river 3-7km away, apparently 4 times the size of the other river in Regalado (where ITDG is installing a micro-hydro). Gilberto from ITDG will visit the site to see if there is potential and if it is feasible to power the town at this distance. Otherwise, wind power seems like a good option. ITDG-GE are currently applying to a foundation for a 500w wind turbine for the secondary school.