Fall Meetings Begin: Record Attendance!

Huge Crowd for the 1st Fall Meeting

Meetings have started up for fall quarter and our hard recruit during recruitment has definitely paid off.  Our 1st meeting was a lot of fun, but also really productive.  We had a bridge building competition using only newspaper and tape.  Even with limited time, some groups were able to manage holding up things as heavy as a laptop.  New members and returners alike also got updates on all the projects.  (Burere's design is completed and submitted to EWB-USA for review-stay tuned for more on that)  We also got an unveiling of the new EWB T-shirt design for the 2010-2011 school year(also, look for a more detailed blog post with pictures of the design).  At the end of the meeting, all the members split up into committees and began planning for the new year.

Mark Talking about the Education Committee at the 2nd Meeting

Even more exciting was probably the second meeting, which had just as many, if not more people come to it, even without Welcome Week advertisements, a fun game, or even the promise of free food.  At our 2nd meeting, Mark Schutte explained the progress of the Education Committee, the new committee that was formed this year which will take on new initiatives and reimagine those previously performed by our Health and Culture committees.  With an expanded group size, and a great start to the quarter, it's looking to be a great year for EWB!

Recruiting New Members (New Pics)

We're in high gear recruiting new members as new freshman come to UC for the first time and everybody else returns for fall classes.  We've been hanging posters and tabling at various events.  All in all, we've added over 100 new people to our email list.  Now we're just frantically making last minute preparations for our 1st meeting of the quarter, this Thursday.

If you want to see first hand some of the stuff we've been up to, we added some new photos.
Click here to view our photos from this quarter

Blog Redesigned

As you might notice after a few glances, our blog has undergone a pretty radical redesign.  The black background and narrow post column has been replaced by a textured background with photos on either side of a full width post area.  Since we changed so much of the design, we're also renaming it: from now on, the EWB blog is titled BLUEPRINTS.

Apart from the obvious engineering connotations, we chose the name because like blueprints, this blog is a peek at future ideas and plans that haven't yet come to fruition.  They're designs that still may change or switch with time, but serve as the definitive source of current information on our projects.

As always, you can check all of our latest blog posts on BLUEPRINTS at http://ewbucin.blogspot.com

EWB Speaks at Global Health Conference

Cincinnati Children's had a conference on Global Health and EWB was invited to speak on building community partnerships.  In our talk, we focused on a series of steps to building a solid partnership based on our experience.  They are...

• Make a Good First Impression: know the culture and get to know the people
• Identifying Stakeholders: start meeting the people in the community with influence
• Establishing Roles: create roles like a community contact or decision making committee
• Setting Partnership Terms: agree on areas like funding and community contribution
• Reinforce Roles: train people for their roles and show the rest of the community who the role-members are
• Maintaining Communication: even between trips, keep a steady flow of communication
• Revision and Reaction: constantly evaluate and tweak decisions based on how things are going.

At the Cincinnati Children's Global Health Conference

Latest Burere School Design

Our Burere team has been hard at work over this summer, finishing up the school design for this Winter's implementation.

Here are the latest drawings of the school.  It's a four-room school-house with each room intended for one grade level.

The walls will be concrete columns and confined masonry in-between.  The roof with be wood and corrugated metal sheeting.  The foundation will be constructed while our team is there this December!