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!

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

Yesterday, I went in to Green Empowerment for a few hours to look though a rare, yet informative handbook. Participatory Rural Appraisal and Planning (PRAP), although I don’t remember whether that is the exact title, is a “methodology which helps to identify community problems and to plan solutions with the active participation of community members.” It focuses on the strategies of “participation, empowerment, and solidarity” to “strengthen the management capacities of community organizations and other development organizations.” The approach allows for rapid:

• description and analysis of the community and it’s context
• identification of problems and potential solutions
• project design and programming of activities for project implementation

In short, it’s a way of identifying the issues in a community, and determining some ways to overcome them, by a series of community workshops. Contrary to what I thought before, it’s not a method of surveying in the traditional sense. You can achieve some of the same results, but it’s largely a group-based method of collecting data.

Several advantages in PRAP I found to be interesting:

• Use of visual techniques: rural communities participate more effectively when they use visual techniques for gathering, analyzing, and presenting information. PRAP focuses heavily on getting the community to produce charts and diagrams in order to better understand their issues. A 21st century twist might be to get little Flip recorders and have the kids document the issues in the village!
• Participatory community analysis, identifying problems and potential solutions together
• Allows for the formulation of realistic proposals which can be presented to donors for financing. These proposals can be perceived to be more realistic because they’ve been developed by the community, not just development workers.
• Similarly, development workers have less of a tendency to design projects from their desks, lending to the potential for greater success.
• PRAP creates programs that are based on first hand information that is coming from the village or town.
• The material from a PRAP (including maps, diagrams, matrices, and sketches) can constitute a kind of living “encyclopedia for the community, development organizations, and donors. I think geo-tagging information could fit here too.

Of course, there are interesting disadvantages as well:

• False expectations of progress can be made. Community members sometimes think “after PRAP comes the money.”
• Some of the information obtained can be incorrect.
•  PRAP has largely been applied on the community level; there is very little experience in applying the methodology at the regional, provincial, or watershed levels.
• Sometimes the community isn’t interested in PRAP.

A typical PRAP lasts about 3 full days. They are usually initiated by either the community asking a development organization, an organization initiating the PRAP because of past studies and/or knowledge, or a joint decision between the community and the organization based on mutual needs. A preliminary visit to establish contact with the community and leaders is critical to establish clarity and transparency.

Going through the workbook also provided a list of things I think we want to learn, either through PRAP or surveying:

• Name of the community, parish, district, and province
• Number of inhabitants and families (including men, women, and children)
• Language(s) of the community
• Existing services (i.e. health, post office, schools, church, and large businesses)
• Migration patterns
• Ethnic and religious groups
• Means of communication available in the community (radio reception or transmitters? TV? internet? cell reception?)
• Community works
• Local crafts?
• Division of labor within the family
• What community work does everyone work on together, and how do they decide on splitting these up?
• Identify the areas with specific problems (soil erosion, lack of water, etc.). It might be interesting to do this by having the PRAP group build a mock of the town in a pile of dirt and video recording the process
• Learn about past NGO projects and whether they’ve “succeeded or failed”
• Trend analysis of harvests, population of the community, deforestation, quality of life, etc.

Of course, the research also left me with a few questions unanswered:

• Do we do a household survey in conjunction with PRAP, or does PRAP usually take the place of a survey?
• If we do a PRAP, are there farmers with past experience that can facilitate the program?
• Hypothetically, would it be beneficial to do PRAP before or after a household survey? I think PRAP could be an easier way to collect general community information than the method we’ve defined before.