Student club fundraises for philanthropic effort
People walking past the Idaho Commons courtyard or the 6th Street Grid Wednesday were serenaded by fundraising engineers, who offered the chance to support a far-off village through a simple, sweet purchase.
While the University of Idaho chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) gets the majority of its funding from grants, the club members also have two annual fundraisers. They hold a gala in April and a Krispy Kreme fundraiser in March, where the group sells about 1,400 doughnuts.
On Wednesday, the club brought musical instruments in an attempt to attract more attention to raise money to help a Bolivian village called Carani get access to clean drinking water.
Daphne Jackson | Argonaut
Engineers Without Borders members Ben Clark (left) and Mike Jones play music in an attempt to attract customers to buy doughnuts for a fundraising effort Wednesday outside the Idaho Commons.
“We drive up to Spokane super early in the morning and get a bunch of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and then sell them for $1 a piece, or $10 for a box, to raise money to cover travel costs and food, and of course supplies and stuff for the actual building and implementation of things,” said Meg Licht, EWB member.
Licht has an undergraduate degree in biology and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in theater arts with plans to potentially change to a master’s degree in education. She said she is currently the only non-engineer member.
Mike Jones, president of EWB, said getting clean drinking water to Carani is going well so far, although the project isn’t far underway.
“We are saving money for our first assessment trip,” Jones said. “We did have some folks in the club visit the community last summer, just as kind of a preliminary visit, and they found that there are some water sources that are unprotected and somewhat contaminated.”
Jones said the preliminary findings were enough to formulate an objective for EWB.
“What the community would really like is to have that water distributed, so we’ll be working on a distribution system, hopefully some quality improvements,” he said.
Licht said the club formerly worked with a different village, Chiwirapi, but the project fell through because of political drama in the community. She said the club just recently received approval to start working with Carani from Engineers in Action, a Bolivian engineering organization EWB partners with.
“How the process works is, we don’t choose the community, the community chooses us,” Licht said.
Jones said he has been a member of EWB since the club was fairly new, and thinks there has been a change in how people view the organization over time.
Daphne Jackson | Argonaut
University of Idaho student Allison Fashing buys doughnuts from EWB member Meg Licht Wednesday morning outside the Idaho Commons.
“I’ve mostly done fundraising with the club, so I’m always asking people for money, and it was always a little suspicious,” he said. “People hadn’t heard of us, so that was difficult, but I feel like in the last year or so, it’s really started to change. People know who we are and what we’re doing, and they’re at least willing to hear what we have to say now — they don’t hurry past or brush us off their doorsteps.”
Jones said he joined EWB because he was interested in helping people and was thinking about a career in humanitarian engineering, as opposed to a corporate position.
“We have a lot of dedicated students,” he said “We’re helping people get their basic needs met, but also we’re becoming more globally-minded and responsible engineers, and I just think it’s valuable for us and the people that we’re working with as well.”
Daphne Jackson can be reached at [email protected]