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This is my third semester as a member of Aguaclara student project team and the second as a member of Outreach group. The semester started with new members, a new group leader and a task to make the project sustainable commerically commercially as well as increase the project's awareness among student community on-campus and outside. At the beginning of the semester outreach team was sub-divided into two different groups (Fundraising and Public relations) and because of my experience with fundraising fund raising in the past I joined the sub-group with an individual responsibility of prepare a constitution for Aguaclara student project team and register the group with the Office of student affairs in Cornell when the mortatorium moratorium ends. Throughout the Spring 2009 Semester I have helped to isolate potential grants including the Inter American Agency, applied for and received the National Science Foundation's grant to the Engineering Sustainability conference in Pittsburgh, submitted a summary for the Bio-engineering poster expo at Cornell and researched and compiled a list of Microfinance organizations based in Honduras. I worked with Jake to write and fine tune (through class discussion we both conducted) the constitution for Aguaclara student project team. I also helped Joe with the sample budget and other documents required to submit the grant by the Inter American Foundation.
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The semester began with getting to know the new members of the outreach group and familarizing familiarizing myself with the new organizational structure of the group. During the very first meeting we decided that it would be a idea to sub-divide the group into Public Relations and FundraisingFund raising, with close working relationship with one and the other. Because of my prior experience writing grants I chose to join the Fund raising group along with Joe and Jake. As a new member to AguaClara the first few weeks were spent gaining an understanding of how AguaClara worked and what the Outreach team was charged with.
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During the course of the semester I helped Joe with the sample budget for the IAG grant and connected him with Chris the plant operator. I also connected couple of the team members with Nadine Porter for printing the posters.
In the second half of the semester: I got the contacts of people representating representing Honduras at Inter American Foundation. Monroe had a conversation with the person in-charge and decided that since Aguaclara's research is not eligible for the IAF Grant and since APP has already worked with IAF to get around $500,000 USD, it should continue applying for funding the projects. I also spoke to Julia Love at resource foundation and connected John and Tamar to her to further the application process. John sent her a proposal, Julia's was very responsive to our request and the application currently under review. In April, I attended the Engineering Sustainability Conference in Pittsburgh where I participated in the poster presentation session. The response to our project was very positive, I distributed the new brouchures to participants (a representative of Sustainable Pittsburgh was very interested in the project and possible uses of Aguaclara technology in US).
Apart from this I found two new Cornell based funding sources for project participants. The first one:
- Bartels Fund is administrered administered by Besty East, the dean of Engineering School. The fund provides upto $1000 for students to do research or get a practical engineering experience working. This could be potential source for students interested in conducting additional research in Honduras and students travelling traveling to Honduras in January.
- *HILC (Holland International Living Center)* in North campus also provides funding (upto $1000 per project) for projects which have a cross cultural and international educational experience component to them. This could be a potential source of funding to offset some of January trip costs
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