Engineers Without Borders

Board Meeting 2/18/09

February 21, 2009 at 11:08 pm | In Meeting Minutes | Comments Off

International conference:

• Brad wrote a request to the COE for 1400 in funding for 5 people to go
• Registration is now $200 for students compared to 50 last year.
• We will spend 1/5 of COE funding per person if less than 5 go, regardless of if they have gone to conference before.
• EWB will also pay 100-200 towards travel for each person

PR

• Carl will be taking over PR for the El Salvador project and is asking for ideas/events to attend.
• Should we put ads in Oregonian for the banquet/other? Would EWB pay?
• This might fall on deaf ears. It would be better to get a hold of somebody to write a story for the paper about one of our trips.

Banquet

• Kevin: We could hold the banquet at the Evergreen aeronautics museum in McMinnville. With lots of Portland advertising this could be beneficial for us. We will look into this for next year.

Pizza:

• We will try to buy from Dominos or another cheaper pizza place for the next meeting to save money. If the reaction is positive we will continue this.

Project fundraising:

• We are currently working on the IAF grant which should be done this week.
• The P3 grant is shelved until the deadline comes up again
• We have also started work on the Renaissance grant
• We need to find someone to head up the banquet person, Brad doesn’t have time.
• People who became involved in fundraising last term have disappeared.
• We could also look into corporate donation matching from companies like HP.

Inconsistent membership

• We have had trouble retaining members. There is a surge in the fall, but over time and after travelers are selected attendance drops off.
• There is only so much room for work in the El Salvador project
• People don’t feel like there’s much for them to do, a few really involved people do all the work and that’s all there is.
• We need local project for fall to push new members into.
• This is a cheaper way to involve people, though building in the US can also be more expensive and we have to be a lot more careful about building to legal codes.
• Most new projects in the Western Hemisphere need someone with a structural PE now.
• Indian reservations might be a good place to look for projects.
• We may have to seek out and apply for local projects, nationals will not have a list of them.
• We have to do local projects with nationals approval
• We should also make sure to spread out in class presentations so we don’t flood ourselves with new people
• Our two goals are to improve quality of life in developing countries and to better students here. Without a large functional group it’s hard to better students.
• Right now there’s a lull in attendance and events, so this is a good time to figure out our structure for the next year to improve member retention.
• We have to actually meet and get to know people to involve them. They might be too busy to contribute constantly, so unless involved members personally know them, it will be hard to retain them over time.
• We need a rotating list of positions to constantly fill. If somebody is too busy one term, they need to be able to draw from a large group of people to find a replacement.
• The board needs to manage work, not do it all themselves. When a few core people take on all the work, not only is it overwhelming for them, but it makes it feel like new members have little or nothing to do.
• All of this can be theme for next board meeting