Engineers Without Borders

Board meeting 3/4/09

March 6, 2009 at 2:38 pm | In Meeting Minutes | Comments Off

1. Banquet:

• Brad, Carl and Katie are starting work on the banquet for next year. It will most likely be held at the MU or CH2M Hill. They will make coordinating positions to help distribute work.
• Kevin: could we hold it at the Evergreen air museum in McMinnville? Somewhere closer to Portland?
• This would make finding volunteers much more difficult, maybe it could be held on a Saturday? In the interest of revenues we still need to consider this. Even if it is more expensive and difficult to organize we could probably get a lot more people come and still raise more money.
• We also need to make sure the general membership is aware of the banquet and can invite people.
• We could also just do it in Portland (an 80 minutes from here instead of 60).

2. Project team debt:

• Grant funds might be required to only go towards the project and won’t be able to pay back general club. Either we need to diversify or find another means of finding the money
• Kelly: Portland pros did fundraiser in Portland. They showed “Flow” at local theater, we could do something similar in Corvallis. If we publicize throughout city this might be successful.

3. Donation letters

• Brad is asking for people to proof read the donation request letter. He will send it out by spring break.
• Also, a lot of grants don’t like non-solicited applications, could we write letters to them?
• Kevin: they probably wont respond. Nationals might be able to do this for us.

4. International conference

• We have four people travelling. There is $1400 in funding from the COE, 500 from EWB USA, and 150 from the MU for grad student conference travel. Will only use 1120 of the 1400, as it was intended for five people.
• Evan motioned to contribute $500 for travel expenses, Rob seconded,
• All for and 4 abstain, motion passes.

5. New projects

• There are 6 potential projects
• March 31^st is the deadline for new projects, otherwise we can’t adopt for rest of the year. Nationals wants to focus more on quality than quantity. Also economy is a factor in this policy
• Will select the project next week at a special general meeting
• Tonight, the purpose of the presentation is to let the board to know what’s going on, and find major issues with any of the projects.
• We’re looking for something relatively simple and short term
• Detailed information on each project is attached at the end of this page

1. Orissa, india

• They want help with design of community/wastewater disposal. We would only assume 1/3 of the responsibility for fundraising (which would be $75000, not $25000 as is listed in the slide). We’re not sure if we’d be responsible for house funding. They probably already have a working design if they have put in 200 houses, may not be much of a design project.

2. Lela, Kenya

• They already have a community board for water problems and also want to water tree saplings for erosion control/fuel for cooking. They would plant 1000+ trees per year. Trees might lower water table, however. Cost is very dependent on depth of wells.

3. Maseno, Kenya

• It could actually be 10-100 thousand for well, not 2-15 as shown below. They have previously used cisterns to store runoff/rainfall/groundwater.

4. Lumwana West, Zambia

• Very poor. Travel is restricted to August/September due to disease. There is a Portland based effort to supply funding for womens’ education. The last phase would be to provide money for college education. Lots of support. There might be little more than construction to do there.
• Kevin: such a serious disease risk is too great of a liability for us to take on. We should do more research about disease risk in Zambia compared to other places

5. Mattru Jong, Sierra Leone

• They speak English.

-English is spoken in all of the African countries under consideration.

-We will not consider the India (too big of a scale) and Maseno (not sure about sustainability, too deep of a well) projects.

-There is also one more project that has not presented on tonight

Indian reservation projects:

• We have not made much progress in getting in touch with them
• If there is a reservation that doesn’t have decent power/water, that would be a much more straightforward project. However, there would also more bureaucracy and stricter building codes.

The board will meet 30 min before next week on Wednesday to discuss these projects before voting.