Tonight’s meeting went a little less straight forward than planned, but we still accomplished a fair bit. Right off the bat, we had to start an hour late because Shane’s phone died on his drive home. When 9:30 came around, Shane’s phone still hadn’t been charged. Adrien and I kicked off covering the action items from the previous meeting (and those from the retreat, as Shane missed).

Notably from the action items this weekend, we now have an adviser’s RSS feed on our subscribe page that interested faculty members, etc. can receive updates with. In the past week and a half, both Shane and Adrien made trips to the Knight Library, Adrien to find grant databases and Shane to do research. During her trip, Adrien came across mention of a water project she is following up with at the moment. There might be peers we can learn from on campus. As another plus, Adrien heard back from her friend Laura who is an Environmental Engineer at Northwestern. Laura just completed a huge grant proposal she sent along to us to learn from.

The first significant discussion of the night revolved around our ODA Team Goals [Google Docs]. The idea behind this outline is to create a somewhat looser, more functional, and dynamic version of what is traditionally known as a component of bylaws. I’m hoping to write lengthier, more comprehensive posts on this strategy later, but the core of it is that we want to create positions within the team of cascading levels of responsibility. With Whitman Direct Action last year, we had team members drop off because they couldn’t necessarily complete all of what was expected of them.  By phrasing what we do in terms of “goals” instead of “responsibilities,” I feel that we will be able to better prioritize what is most important to be completed. We as a team, though, still have a lot of discussion to wade through in assessing what everyone’s goals might be.

This past weekend in San Francisco, I had a few stellar conversations with Alex Goodell of Students for Global Health (SGH). The coolest one, and most applicable for ODA, was in regards to how we might fundraise together.  Initially, I proposed we might combine manpower for an event and split the proceeds. Alex, in addition, mentioned that SGH could take on ODA project(s) as ones they would support directly, especially if they had a global health bent. Furthermore, ODA might be able to support non-fundraising projects SGH is interested in initiating. We look forward to including Alex in part or all of our next conference call.

The last sweet update I’ll mention at this point is my conversation with Wayne of Health Bridges International last Tuesday (i.e. over a week ago). I meant to post about our conversation earlier, but my notes ballooned to the point of never getting around to it. There were two significant developments that came of the meeting, though. First, Wayne is interested in what we are doing and in helping figure out how we might be able to incorporate medical relief to whatever we end up doing in San Pablo. This will progress as we connect further. The second really stellar connection we made is something I discovered this spring in India: organizations aren’t working together to the degree they should be, especially the local NGOs. From my notes, Wayne is helping facilitate a conference in January in Arequipa, Peru. His intent is to bring together all of the regional NGOs and have them meet each other because they aren’t connecting well enough to begin with. From this, our conversation progressed to how we can connect local NGOs with those that have similar projects. Once the connection is made, they can learn from each other. The idea I proposed, and I think Wayne took even more notes than I, was to have representatives send a couple of paragraphs each month on what progress they’ve made. These would then be consolidated into a newsletter that would be sent back out to the next group. I think this can be initiated easily, and we can scale up to a website in the future. We’re both definitely interested in seeing how this will develop, and how ODA might be able contribute.

• Agenda/Minutes - ODA - 20 August 2008 [Google Docs]

 

 ODA - 20 August 2008: Team Goals, Conversation with HBI, and Fundraising with SGH [78:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (13)

This past weekend Daniel, Shane, and I gathered for our first ODA retreat, which also was our first in-person meeting since the end of the school year. I honestly had no idea what we would talk about for the entire two days, but we managed to discuss ODA business most of that time and, in fact, could have benefited from more ODA discussion time at the end of our retreat.

I felt that we started our retreat off on a good note. We had a short meeting to get one another on the same page and review our past todos. The majority of our past todos list was completed, which allowed us to start off the retreat with a clean slate.

I think that ODA can learn a lot from the experiences that Daniel had with WDA. I very much appreciated the mini-presentation that Daniel gave about his work with WDA. He had talked to me before about his work with WDA, but I felt this time I got much more out of it, due to the fact that I am now more involved with ODA. I hope Daniel remembers both what worked and what did not work so that ODA can avoid some unnecessary blunders.

I very much enjoyed Shane’s lecture about the Theory of Change; he did a fabulous job. Before this, I had only guesses as to what knowledge Shane would bestow on us concerning the Theory of Change. The ideas discussed in the lecture should definitely stay in the front of our minds as we maneuver through our project and make goals for ourselves. Also, I thought that the podcast Daniel suggested we listen to, “Is Aid to Africa Doing More Harm Than Good?,” nicely paralleled Shane’s lecture.

Thank you Daniel and Shane for the technology lesson. I think I learned a decent amount for the time that we had. I have been reading through my Google Reader multiple times a day! It is so much more efficient to have the news come to you… hopefully now I will be more up to date on current events. I am still a little bit unclear about the wiki, but I am sure once I have to do something with it, I will be fine. I am excited to say that this blog is my first ever self-published blog! (and I am sure that it will not be the last)

My favorite part of this retreat was getting to know Daniel and Shane better. I enjoyed listening to their philosophizing. The Fountainhead was mentioned so often that I now feel the need to read it and see what all of the hype was about. In all, I thought the retreat was quite productive. For our future retreat, I hope that we can also have the time to include more outdoor activities, like hiking or Frisbee.

On the UO Sustainability list serv this week, Emmalyn Garrett of the Center for the Advancement of Sustainable Living forwarded an email from Steve Mital, Sustainability Director at the University of Oregon.  His email outlines a Sustainability Conference, tentatively scheduled for October 23rd and 24th, 2008, and requests ideas for its components:

We need your help designing a one-day leadership development conference for college students in the Oregon University System who are interested in making their campuses more sustainable. What are your needs?  What should the day’s agenda be? What kinds of workshops should we develop?  Who should we ask to come and speak?

In the spirit of opening discussion on the event, I thought I might blog my ideas.

To start off, I think it could be quite powerful to put all the documents related to planning online and editable by the community in a wiki-like format. I know there are numbers of students passionate about sustainability on campus; connecting digitally would be a manageable way of allowing everyone to get involved. This PBWiki for the 2008 Netsquared Conference is one example we could follow.

Secondly, with Oregon Direct Action in mind, it would be useful to us to have an international component to the conference. I’m not exactly sure what this would be at the moment, but one thing we’re seriously trying to consider is connecting the international development we would like to do with initiatives at home. For instance, if our project for this year were decentralised wind energy, it might be useful to build and maintain a wind turbine in Eugene as a part of the beta testing. We’ll have a better idea of what exactly we will be doing internationally in the next month, after we’ve decided on which project(s) we’re going forward with.

Having sustainability non-profits from the community at the conference, in terms of networking, would be an added bonus.

The last idea I have is one that’s been floating around in my head for a while.  Last fall, in working with the WDA team, I thought there might be potential benefits in developing a sustainability policy for the organization.  Sure, WDA is an organization all about promoting “economically and environmentally sustainable community development,” but what does that mean if the organization itself isn’t sustainable?  Unfortunately, I don’t have many definitive answers on what this means at the moment.  In specific terms, a sustainable organization or student club could be one that minimizes its use of paper by advertising online, instead of using flyers, and either buys renewable energy or offsets transportation by carbon credits.  This type of discussion, and the possible drawing up of a charter, might be relevant at the conference.

What do you think?

Oregon Direct Action (ODA or, spoken aloud, Yoda) will a non-profit, open-source, and student-run organization from the University of Oregon dedicated to helping marginalized people by promoting economically, environmentally, and culturally sustainable community development. Lofty mission statement for a student organization, eh? We like to think big.

Currently, we’re looking into project ideas involving microfinance, decentralised power, education, and/or water and sanitation possibly in the countries of Peru, Haiti, India, or Mongolia. The feasibility assessments we do in the next few weeks will largely determine the scope and direction of this year’s project.

Shout out to the peeps at Whitman Direct Action for the super model for a student organization.

I thought it only fitting that we use the default Wordpress post to launch the online presence of Oregon Direct Action. It is a super easy way to run a website.