Early afternoon yesterday, Shane and I were afforded the opportunity to connect with Anna of Green Empowerment who is currently in Cajamarca. We had a whole list of questions to ask, so it proved to be a useful time to connect. From the call, there were a few major points I want to pass along. The audio recording is worth listening to as well.

First, Soluciones Practicas will hopefully be hiring a sociologist in the next week to implement the survey we sent a couple weeks back. This sociologist, and a technical surveyor, will draw data from several communities in San Pablo, including information about the previous water systems and specifics on how/why those previous water systems didn’t work out so well.

We also talked about funding this project/these projects because there are at least a few communities which could be the recipient of support, although Suro Antiguo would likely be the first. Grants are certainly one revenue source we are looking at, and we have a few potential leads. We’re also interested in potentially connecting with a local Rotary chapter because the San Pablo project could be right up that alley. One experiment, however, I think we can jump on right off the bat is using The Point to raise funds for a specific component of the project (for instance, hiring the sociologist). Yesterday, I came across a pitch titled, “Save NewsPageDesigner.com.” In less than 24 hours, and using the power of the internet to find a niche audience, they were able to raise $2,500 to save the website. I think there are two distinct components to the campaign’s success:

1. The “ask” was for a concrete goal. I feel as though non-profit fundraising is commonly for a large, nebulous amount of money. By breaking the “ask” down into specifics (hiring a sociologist, paying for a water tank, etc.), I feel donors might be more willing to support
2. You commit to donate, but aren’t charged until everyone in the community agrees that it’s a good idea.

For us to experiment with The Point, however, I think we need to: identify what specifically we want to raise money for, have a plan for marketing the fundraising effort, and set metrics for defining success with the experiment. The cool thing, though, is that we can experiment with this right away.

On the call, we also spoke briefly about Green Empowerment offering an “internship” to ODA members over summer 2009 for those that want to travel to Peru. Anna is receptive to the idea, but we need to better understand what specifically we need from GE to make that happen.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

• 14 October 2008 - Meeting notes - Oregon Direct Action [Google Doc]

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.

Another Tuesday night, another meeting. Or conference call, rather. Shane and Adrien joined me for our weekly meeting tonight and we were quite on the ball with the agenda. Unfortunately, Kevin is no longer with us either. We’re going to canvas hard for people to fill Tech, Finance, and PR.

Well, we’re on the ball moving through the agenda at least. With all of the business going on in the past week, almost half of our action items ended up in varying stages of completion. Of the things we did accomplish, reading and meeting with people were at the top of the list. We’re slow on working on our fundraising, specifically working on the Youth Venture Social Entrepreneur grant application and combing through the grant databases, but that will ideally pick up after this weekend. Personally, I still need to read Diagnostico, which I plan on making a priority for the next couple of days.

The next month will be a month of a number of meetings for ODA. As I reported last week, I met with Bethany of the PPPM program who offered a number of creative ideas for us to seek the support of the community, and get them involved. On Friday, Shane, Adrien, and I also met with Megan of Allen Hall Advertising (AHA). We’re interested in collaborating with AHA to extend word of what we’re doing and, from the conversation, it sounds like they are too. Of the ideas we came up with thus far, these are the things they could help with:

• Art installations of appropriate technology sculptures (including a Biosand filter, solar panels, a micro hydro setup, and/or a wind turbine)
• Bringing FLOW: For the Love of Water to campus in November as a fundraiser
• A lecture series in the month of January or February

Along all of these lines, we’re going to step up efforts to people aware online. Join the ODA Facebook Group, yo!

Also of importance from the meeting are a few things. First, the feeling Shane got from reading through the aquifer recharge and reforestation research was that the two are somewhat contradictory. I’ll let him clarify in a later post, but the understanding I have is that the more trees are in the ground, the less likely water is to percolate through and recharge the groundwater. I think this might be an extreme situation, though, as no trees at all means increased runoff and soil erosion. It’s all about finding the proper balance. Moving forward, he’s going to continue reading through EWB reports, and Adrien and I will continue working on the needs assessment. We’ve recently (i.e. today) received updated information from Anna that is very promising.

• 30 September 2008 - Meeting notes - ODA [Google Doc]

 

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Yesterday, I had a pretty sweet meeting with Bethany Johnson of the PPPM program at the University of Oregon. PPPM stands for Planning, Public Policy, and Management; I think the passionate students from the program would be a constructive addition to our projects. From the meeting, we identified a few ways for us to move forward. My brain is quite scattered at the moment, but I’ll run through them the best I can.

First, Bethany is really stoked about what we’re doing, and is interested in talking about ways Oregon Direct Action can be a program that is supported by PPPM. Originally, her idea was to advertise ODA as an internship opportunity for students in the program. I’d like to get the dedicated students more involved than a one term internship, though, so we’ll explore what a closer relationship might mean. Bethany was also a source of wonderful ideas, as a couple of years ago she tried taking students to Mexico on a service learning project. She suggested talking to both Bob Choquette, who teaches strategic planning and a grant writing class, and Nico Larco, who leads Design Bridge (a potential sister organization). I’ve recorded their information in our contact database. We should talk about how we want to approach them on Sunday.

Lastly, Bethany thinks we should definitely connect with the Study Abroad program. If we can get credit for the work we do, but have to pay for those credits, it might be possible to recycle the monies we have to pay back into the project. Clever, huh?

That’s what I’ve got from the meeting. I definitely did more talking than note taking. Thanks to Jason at Green Empowerment for the lead! Looking forward to seeing where this heads