Our Crowdfunding Groups
Thank you to everyone who made a gift to this project! While this round of weR Gold closed June 30, you may still support students with your gift by visiting the Rensselaer Giving website.
“I love EWB because of the sense that the work I'm doing matters. Our project teams always push through the challenges put before them and make sure our end solutions are effective and sustainable for our communities.”
What You're Supporting
Engineers Without Borders USA - RPI is an organization that supports community-driven development engineering programs both locally and internationally. EWB is dedicated to implementing sustainable engineering projects for communities in need. Your support will help us to fund the travel, material, and other costs associated with the implementation of these projects.
Local Project
For the Local Project, the chapter of Engineers Without Borders at Rensselaer is partnered with Capital Roots, an organization based in Troy, New York. Our chapter is working with one of the organization's 54 community gardens. When the project was adopted, the garden we are working with relied on the fire department to fill up barrels of water for community members to water their crops. To alleviate the stress on the fire department and help make the garden more sustainable, the local project team has designed a rainwater catchment system.
The Local Project is also working with Vasudha, RPI’s on-campus sustainability housing community, to build a shed that will enhance their garden outside Nason Hall. With this project, Vasudha aims to turn the garden into a community spot for the campus.
The purpose of the local project is to create a community garden. This would result in strengthening the community as a whole, creating social ties, and improving food security and mental health. With everything happening in the world, there is great importance as a community to be united.
To help improve the garden this semester the next step is to build a shed. This would help in producing storage and keep the garden more organized. The local project team has decided that the best way to build the shed would be using sustainable materials. This would better help the environment and decrease the cost of materials. The donated funds would be used to purchase the necessary material to build the shed. For the fall semester of 2022, the main goal is to find and purchase these materials. The spring of 2023 will be used to start building the shed.
Panamá Project
Our Panamá Project involves the installation of a photovoltaic system in the village of a small Ngöbe indigineous community in Isla Popa II, Bocas del Toro, Panamá. Through thorough assessments, we found that the places to install the systems where the most impact could be made were on the church and the local school of this community. In January 2019, we traveled to Isla Popa II, and installed half of the system on the school, providing power to it for the first time in over twenty years. Currently, we plan on traveling in early summer of 2023 to finish the installation of the full system on both the school and the church.
New International Project
We are plan to start a new project involving the improvement of a water distribution system for a small community. The exact community we will work with has not been decided, but the team is in the process of picking one out; however, the type and needs of each project are similar. The estimates provided by EWB USA range from $10-25,000, so fundraising is a focus of the club as a whole, and obviously very important for our specific project.
Although the project is still in its early phases, the team has a rough idea of the timeline of the project. An initial assessment trip is expected during the summer of 2023 for the team to collect data and further analyze the problems the community is facing. A second implementation trip will be done sometime in 2024 in order for the team to implement the selected design. So far only two trips are planned, however if the community and team decide that more trips are necessary to expand the project, then more trips are possible.
Working on projects with Engineers Without Borders gives RPI students the chance to broaden their horizons while applying engineering, writing, and collaboration skills to solve unique problems. On a global scale, Engineers Without Borders provides communities across the world with empowering tools to help reach their needs.
We need to raise $10,000 in order to provide our communities with electricity and clean, accessible drinking and crop water!
Who We Are
Engineers Without Borders-RPI is a non-profit club, and a chapter of the larger, national Engineers Without Borders organization. The mission of EWB is to support community-driven development programs worldwide through the design and implementation of sustainable engineering projects, while fostering responsible leadership.
