Sierra Leone trip

Our trip dates are official. We will be in Sierra Leone beginning on January 22nd. The in-country itinerary is also well underway.

Sierra Leone Assessment trip

The project coordination teams are working hard on the details of our first trip to Sierra Leone.  Right now, we are putting effort into making sure that when our team hits the ground, they can do a great job assessing the needs of the community and determining what the details of our project will be.

3SA HVAC Mapping Workdays

To Date we have completed 3 HVAC Mapping workdays at Third Street Alliance, we have mapped most of the boiler room, the Pool room (and roof) all the locker rooms and SACC room. This means the basement area is almost complete. Thanks to all the helpers!

First meeting of the EWB technical team for Centennial Secondary School in Sierra Leone. Focused on planning for an Assessment trip in Jan/Feb 2010. Brainstorming, questions list, objectives, prework, initial travel team discussion. The full scope of this program is enormous -- we have a great deal to do in the coming years. In 2010 we will make the first steps toward bringing clean water to the CSS school community.

10,000 feet

If you’d like to visit the Centennial Secondary School virtually via Google Earth or Map, use coordinates latitude 7.6132, longitude -12.1829. This will land you on the roof of the Chapel in the center of the school campus. The Jong River is immediately to the west of the CSS campus, and the town center of Mattru Jong is about 1 km to the south.

That is the 10,000 ft view. To learn much more about Centennial Secondary School at ground level, be sure to come to our chapter meeting on Tuesday, Sep 22, 6PM at Lutron to meet the Reverend Joseph Abu, an alumnus of the Centennial Secondary School and the US President of the Centennial Old Student Association (CeOSA).

Ready to Map

A group of us got together last night to prepare for our first mapping day at Third St. Alliance.  We have a plan of action, a list of supplies, and a better idea of who we'll need.  As soon as we can work out a date with the Ricks, we will head over and start tracing their systems.

International project approved!!

Got word from national this morning...they approved our Sierra Leone program application! This is really fabulous news. More info will be coming soon, but in the meantime please reply to the email you should have received about your technical skills and travel availability. Thanks!

International Project Selection Discussion - 8/19

Very exciting! We finally have some international projects to discuss with the chapter. If you are a current member, you should have received an email with the logistics. Please come put in your two cents. See you wednesday!

Third Street Alliance-Scanning of all plans Complete!

A BIG THANK YOU goes out to Sean Dooley, Ryan Walters, Charlie Myers and Rick Thomas for all their assistance in digitizing all of 3SA’s available building, HVAC and Electrical plans on a Saturday morning.

These digital files will be a great resource both for EWB-LVP’s 3SA project team, as well as to 3SA as permanent digital archive of their existing plans. We successfully completed scanning all 77 plans.

Special thanks to Sean for bagels and donuts and also to his company, Keystone Consulting Engineers, Inc. who graciously allowed us to use its facilities and scanning equipment. Another special thanks to Charlie Myers who has offered to plot paper plan sets using resources at his company, Rettew Associates, Inc.

I will make extra copies of the CD’s containing the digitized plans as well as 11x17 copies of the plans as needed. 3SA adn EWB-LVP will each end up with one electronic set and a full hard copy set of all plans.

Note: Several have offered to volunteer for mapping work dates-THANK YOU!. As soon as I get a chance to review the plans and work with the Technical Assessment team, we will make plans for Mapping out the systems and will I contact you then! Coming Soon!

Int'l project selection process moving forward

The project selection team is making good headway, having decided to focus on open projects as posted on the EWB-national site. We are currently actively considering four projects, one in each of the following countries: Kenya, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Ghana. We will be contacting the NGOs or sponsoring organizations over the next two weeks to gather additional information about those projects.

A book to read...

I'd just like to recommend "Three Cups of Tea" by Mortenson and Relin for those interested in a little extra reading. In addition to being an intriguing story about the creation of schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it relates many of the challenges involved with international development projects.

Sean, Herb, Lauren and Sara Page met today at lunch to discuss current status of the 3SA project and the international project search. The 3SA project is moving along with current focus on the scanning of the HVAC drawings. Sara Page expects that there will be multiple projects started in the next few months. The international search team has narrowed their focus to about four projects on the EWB site, all in Africa. The are meeting biweekly to evaluate and further narrow the options. We may call a chapter meeting before the end of the summer, depending on progress of the search team.

Herb

Last EWB-LVP chapter meeting (for now)

This past Wednesday we had our last EWB-LVP chapter meeting before our summer hiatus. We had a fun BBQ and got a chance to learn about some water filtration systems! Our guest speaker could be a potential source of in-country contacts for our international project, so it was great to hear from him!

We will start our monthly chapter meetings back up in September, but we will be having work days at Third Street Alliance (3SA) in the meantime - information on that will be sent through our e-mail distribution list. There will also be updated posts on this blog for the progress made at 3SA...if you'd like to help out with our partnering project, send me an e mail!

Chat with National about int'l project

Erika, John and I just talked to Rosemary Powers at EWB National. We were mainly trying to get some guidance about how to evaluate the 'open' projects posted on the website. We learned that the applications get posted/pulled on a monthly basis and that applications that are not selected by chapters get reviewed after 8 months. In terms of getting more detail about the projects that are posted, we were instructed to contact national once we've selected a small number of projects in which we are interested. They will then give us the contact information for the groups submitting those projects. In most cases, the scope, funding, and cultural dynamics are not well defined in these applications, so it would be up to us to focus in on those issues.

We specifically asked about Kenya, since there are a number of projects listed there and we know that it is currently under a travel advisory. Rosemary said that EWB projects are ongoing in Kenya and that she would give us the contact info of some folks on the ground who could give us more details/background.

In terms of projects that we identify independently from national, they will be looking at the following (at a minimum) as they decide whether to grant the application:
- who will take ownership after the project is complete?
- will the entire community benefit?
- what is the specific scope?
- does it fit EWB mission and vision?
- what other NGOs are there?
- are we pushing this on the community or are they asking for it?
- does the chapter have the skills/fundraising to achieve success?

We talked about some other topics but I think these were the most important.

International Project Movement

FYI to everyone - John, Lauren and I have a conference call meeting with our EWB regional rep on Monday June 8th. We plan to discuss some international project choices and get some advice. This will definitely help us take a step in the right direction and we want to have EWB-USA involved ASAP!

Stay tuned for an update from that meeting!

Blog blah blah

We rolled out the this blog site in April as a means to informally share information within the chapter. The idea is for our members to post current news, provide timely information to others in the chapter, and, in particular to invite comments, questions, discussion, ideas. So how are we doing? ...Well, first the good news: 1) we haven't had any major bandwidth problems; 2) a few members have embraced the idea, particularly writing on our Third St Alliance project; 3) we have left room for improvement.

For me, this blog thing is a rather alien concept. I learned to type on a manual Underwood typewriter (no, I don't still use it), so the idea of stream-of-thought communication with the other 1,500,000,000 folks online is not entirely natural. Hey, wouldn't it be great if someone wrote up the Dummy's guide to using the EWB-LVP Blog site? -- Already done by the "Our Geeks are Better than their Geeks" Communications Committee!!! Go to ewb-lehighvalley.org, hit the "MEMBERS ONLY" button on the lower left menu -- this takes you to our share site, then navigate to Communications/Blog Docs (that's how I get there). Or, here are the direct links:
How to Blog
Blog Collaboration Norms
If you are not an EWB-LVP member, there is one simple, additional step -- JOIN!
-John

Tech Assessment Team meeting

Tonight the Technical Assessment Team met to discuss where we think we can make the most impact at Third St. Alliance.  We have a list of projects that we are ready to start with.  As soon as we run them by the Ricks and Judy to figure out where to start we should have our first workday.

Expanding our options

After some discussion with EWB National, we decided to pursue the Third St. Alliance program as a partnership project.  While this limits in what capacity we can work with them, this allows us to expand the scope of the types of projects we can work with them on.  We are no longer limited to "green needs" but can help them address any and all of their needs.

We went through the list from the brainstorm session we had with the Third St. Alliance staff and identified many ways in which we will be able to contribute to their mission.

Next, the technical assessment team will examine the list and provide their input.

PA Energy Efficiency

Check out this website for an initiative in PA to make homes more energy efficient. http://www.pahomeenergy.com/homePerformance/index.html . If you go to the page of service providers and read through the pdf download (bottom of page) there is at least one firm in Coopersburg that is listed and perhaps others in the area. Might be worth trying to recruit these folks...

Meeting with Third St. Staff

Last Wednesday, several representatives from the Cultural Assessment, Technical Assessment, and National Liaison teams met with the Third St. Alliance staff (financial, program directors, maintenance, etc).  We had a chance to establish guidelines for our relationship, get many of our questions answered, and answer some questions that they had for us.  We got a good feel for what projects they're interested in.

The Communications Committee met today and decided on a list of Labeling Guidelines to follow when posting on this blog. Below is the list of labels to use. Additional labels can be created as needed.

o Communication committee – Communications
o Fundraising committee – Fundraising
o Membership Committee – Membership
o Project Subcommittee – Project
o Community Outreach – Outreach
o University Relations – University
o 3rd Street Alliance Project – 3SA
o 3rd Street Alliance Project, National Liaison Team – 3SA Liaison
o 3rd Street Alliance Project, Cultural Team – 3SA Cultural
o 3rd Street Alliance Project, Technical Team – 3SA Technical

National Liaison Team Meeting

Sara Page hosted Erika and me at her home last night at we started to edit the application to EWB national for the 3rd Street Alliance Program to be submitted to EWB national. We took away some questions for our regional EWB representative and questions for the 3rd Street Alliance. The draft document is posted on the share site.

http://sites.google.com/a/ewb-lehighvalleyteam.org/portal/Home/project-coordination-1/local-project/501-NewProgramApplicationThirdStAlliance.doc?attredirects=0