Moving Forward

As stated last week, March continues to be a busy month for Empower. The membership of the society has been delayed due to some difficulties in submission of the forms. However, we will be affiliated with ARC, UNSW’s student body, definitely by 2^nd of April 2008. All the members have been e-mailed an updated list of contacts as some of the members chose to leave due to their personal reasons

Dev & Shanil after the meeting

Our off campus grant request would be taken up in May by ARC and we would be informed about the decision in two weeks time after the meeting. As for our own fund raiser activity, it had to be postponed due to the non-booking of space and informing Facilities Management about our fund raiser on a short notice. However, all is not lost. We plan to have our fund raiser soon. Olivia and Johnson would be helping Leesa and Jessica to organize the fund raiser. In order to make the fund raiser a success, all members are requested to send their ideas to Leesa or Jessica. The date of the proposed fund raiser would be e-mailed soon and updated on the blog as well.

Dev, Johnson & Olivia (The Young Empowerers)

As for our project, Shanil is updating the proposal and it would be updated hopefully by the end of this week. The updated proposal will be used to approach Australian School of Business (ASB) and Sri-Lankan corporations for the purpose of funding. Dev has been given the task of approaching a few Multinationals to convince them to fund our project. The good news that we have been able to get commitment of small funding from a Sri – Linkan source. Leesa will be helping Dev in preparing a write up for sending it to companies. Shanil will be identifying more companies, as potential financers, in Sri – Lanka.

Empower will be represented on Dean’s Lunch next week by Shanil and Leesa. It would be a good opportunity for our society to interact with the Dean of Australian School of Business and discuss our project with him. The Lunch will be held at QUAD Room 2083 at 1 Pm on April 2^nd 2008. All members are encouraged to participate in order to make our society’s representation better.

The date for next week’s meeting will be e-mailed to all the members.

Haaris

Affiliation and the Road ahead

March has and will continue to be a busy month for the Empower Team.

We've passed a few critical milestones over the last week. We held our first Annual General Meeting (thanks to all those who came!) as a part of our affiliation requirement with ARC (UNSW's student body).

We handed in our application for an Off-Campus activity grant (Monday 17th) and our affiliation application (Wednesday 19th). We are currently awaiting word from ARC with regard to our affiliation and our progress with our grant application. Here's hoping!

A decision was made to split the strategic focus of the team's leadership; Leesa focusing primarily on fundraising and publicity while I will be focusing on the strategic details of the project itself. We are hoping that this will provide the effort with greater depth and focus.




We are hoping to set up an important meeting between the Energy Forum and UOM next week. The Energy Forum (EF) is currently recommending the village of Kirigalpotta in the Moneragala District (more towards the East of Sri Lanka). Asoka of EF has said that their coordinator has identified two pockets of communities, one with 10 families and the other with 11 that ought to suit our project.

Over the next two weeks I will be focusing on revising the details of our current project proposal and trying to get as much media (Photographs and Video) of the village site and the sentiments of the community. This sort of media will greatly boost our chances of obtaining funding.

Leesa and the rest of our team will be focusing primarily on sponsorship contacts and organizing fundraisers.

Keep posted..

Over and Out,
Shanil

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

Empowering

Empower’s meeting for this week was held on Sunday 27^th January 2008. The meeting was attended by Shanil, Muniba, Leesa and Haaris. The other members were unable to make it for the meeting. During the meeting, it was officially decided to join Arc UNSW i.e. register Empower as UNSW’s one of the new clubs. Haaris will be responsible for completing the process of registration. He will be having meeting with Sophie Harmington who oversees the registration of new societies with ARC, on Tuesday 29^th January 2008 to finalize the details and process of the registration. The registration would be completed by Friday 1^st February 2008.

During the meeting, Muniba was delegated a new task. She has been made responsible for developing an Engineering panel at UNSW. The panel would consist of postgraduate students and lecturers of the University. The panel will act as resource for consultation for UOM. The UOM will be providing the quote for the project within this week. The team would be formally confirming the village chosen by UOM over the next two weeks and the team structure of UOM would also be finalized.

Empowering Others To Achieve Success

On the sponsorship side, e-mails have been sent to KPMG, PWC, Caltex, Shell, BHP Billiton and Dilmah. Energy Australia has already excused itself since it doesn’t finance or support programs outside Australia. It is also expected that 50% of the funding will be met through Sri – Lankan sources so that the project's groundwork can be staretd. Shanil is looking into securing the financing from Sri – Lankan sources and in that regards, he will be contacting Uni – Lever and Dilmah in Sri – Lanka. He will also be updating the project brief and power point slides based on the details provided by UOM.

Meetings and More Meetings

Empower had two meetings in a row, one Admin meeting on Sunday and one sponsor meeting today (Monday). The admin meeting was attended by administrators of the project; Leesa, Shanil and Muniba in which the three discussed the project strategic direction. During the meeting it was decided to look into the University of Moratuwa’s (UOM) offer of undertaking the installation of project since they have consulted the volunteer undergraduate and postgraduate students who are willing to implement it. The most likely possibility is giving the go ahead to UOM. Energy Forum would no longer be in the picture because of their high quotes for the project.

At the moment, we are only waiting for an official quote for the project by UOM which is expected by this Wednesday. The name of the village will also be finalized by next week. On the financing part, the project brief has been e-mailed to various multinationals and Australian companies that include Procter and Gamble, BP, Energy Australia and Caltex. Some more companies would be added to the existing list.

Today’s meet up was more of a formal since three of the project members; Shanil, Leesa and Haaris had series of meetings with University Office bearers. The first meeting was with Associate Professor of Australian School of Business (ASB); Prem Ramburuth. During our meeting with her, we walked her through the project; she was very much fascinated by the idea and suggested us to affiliate the project with ARC, the university’s official student’s representative body. She also suggested some names within ASB to identify the sources of funding for the project. The next meeting was at Faculty of Built environment and we got some good leads over there. The leads would be explored further by Shanil.

The last meeting was at ARC with Sophie Harrington who oversees the registration of new societies with ARC. She provided us with all the necessary documentation for registering and also told us the benefits of becoming a part of it. After the meeting, it has been decided to initiate the process of membership with ARC but at the same time seek financing from companies as a private project. ARC won’t be able to offer anything before March which would delay the project. However, keeping in view the long term perspective, joining ARC would be beneficial for all the project members.