Moving Along

Greetings Readers,

The last week was spent focusing on our registration with ARC, the student union in UNSW, as well as sending out briefs.

Registration with ARC ought to be complete by mid-March latest. The team will then be eligible for various grants that we hope will fund a significant portion of the project. Empower will have an AGM on the 10th of March. While it is essential that existing members are present, those interested in joining are most welcome. I will post up the exact meeting details when I get them.




Another piece of exciting news on the financial front is that the Founder of Simple Wisdom (a Sri Lankan NGO), Mr. Florian Palzinsky (My former boss), is willing to contribute between $1000 -$2000 to our cause. He made no promises but he told me that he'd look into gaining more support for our initiative.

This is a valuable contribution though we need to spend even more time trying to strive for a minimum of 50% of the project cost before we can give our partners in Sri Lanka the go-ahead.

On the administration front, Leesa and myself are trying to structure out the interactions between the Energy Forum and the University of Moratuwa team.

Spread the Word

Thanks to Imtiaz of Ozlanka, Empower has been able to secure an article on the website. Ozlanka is a popular website portal for Sri Lankan news and events. With approximately 1.5 million hits per month, an article on the website could provide the project with valuable publicity and encourage donations and financial sponsorship.


The article is already online and can be read at - http://www.ozlanka.com/feb08/empower.htm

Shanil

Funding

The main focus over the last few weeks has been on securing financial support in order to initiate village confirmation and installation of the digesters. This has been very challenging due to the technical nature of the project itself and the fact that it is overseas.

We have currently pursued five main avenues for funding:

1) UNSW - Through the Business Faculty and the Student Union (ARC)
2) Corporates in Australia - e.g. BP, Caltex, Unilever
3) Corporates in Sri Lanka - e.g. John Keells Holdings, Dialog G.S.M.
4) Aid Organisations and Foundations - e.g. UN Orgs, Oxfam, The Red Cross.
5) The Sri Lankan Business -Chairty Community - e.g. Lak Saviya, OzLanka

All these avenues have been pursued to some extent but as a team we need to put a lot more effort into spreading the word about our project and generating enthusiasm that could fuel potential sponsorship. This is a vital element that we need to focus on as the entire project's progression.

Our meeting with Jane Westbrook and Prof. Chris Adam of the Australian School of Business (UNSW) left Leesa and myself rather disappointed. The outcome being that the University did not have financial allocations for such projects and had liability + risk concerns as they had not encountered a student initiative of this nature before. They advised us to pursue registration with the student union and gave us some assurance that they would assist informally with the sponsorship process.


We had admittedly placed a lot of reliance on the Australian School of Business (UNSW) providing us some financial support. We are still hopeful that the student union registration (ARC) will give us access to some grant funds that can fuel the start of the project. Despite this setback, I personally feel that a stronger, direct effort to directly contact people through all the listed avenues will bear some fruit, even if a delay in project commencement seems inevitable.

I am personally looking into funding by the Sri Lankan Community in Australia and Sri Lankan Corporates. Mr. Ben Roche, formerly part of the Faculty of the Built Environment Outreach Programme , was able to give us some useful advise with regard to direction and some useful not-for profit foundations for us to approach.

Here's hoping the team's efforts will be rewarded soon.

Shanil