Empowering Perspectives and Connections with Green Empowerment

General Project Information

Overview

Our collaborative project with Green Empowerment aims to spread awareness about the organization to Portland communities and gain local support. The proposed project consists of a video sharing stories and perspectives from people involved with Green Empowerment; beneficiaries, volunteers, and members of the board of directors. To complete the project, we would continue a partnership with Green Empowerment so that students at Lewis & Clark would play a primary role by being the ones who would conduct the interviews with each player in the organization, and would compose the videos for Green Empowerment. Our goals for the project were developed in accordance with the values which Green Empowerment cares deeply about. We aimed to incorporate partnership, engagement, capacity building, and impact expansion to the various elements in our project in order to maximize the connection and demonstrate our understanding of our potential partnership. To date, we have not been able to form an official partnership with Green Empowerment because of unforeseen circumstances regarding COVID-19. We are hoping this project will be carried out in the future when this partnership can be secured.

Partner

Goals

Build partnerships by sharing various perspectives on the work Green Empowerment (GE) does through the use of videos which would take a look into what each actor is responsible for. This would help build partnerships by informing potential partners about the work GE does in a transparent and inclusive way.
Encourage engagement through the creation of these videos, which will show the perspectives of the various actors in GE, ideally including the actors in the beneficiary communities.The ultimate outcome GE would get out of this is potential partner organizations from beneficiary communities becoming more trustful of GE, hopefully leading to the formation of further partnerships for GE.
Enable further capacity building by holding fundraising events, in which all proceeds raised go directly towards GE projects. By raising more money, beneficiary communities will be able to receive more funds to fulfil the tasks at hand to a greater capacity.
Facilitate impact expansion by educating people in the Portland area about the work GE does through holding informational events to ensure people have a clear idea of GE’s perspectives, hopefully resulting in people wanting to form a connection with them.

Status

Project Components

What (Issue) Who (People) How (Engagement) Cited References

What (Issue)

Access to affordable and reliable energy is a vital element for sustainable development. Access to electricity provides opportunities for economic building activities; such as industry, transportation, commerce, micro-enterprises, and agriculture (Dijk, 2010). In the off-grid and rural areas of developing countries, energy solutions have received an increasing amount of attention due to their contributions to reducing poverty. However, most of the rural population in many developing countries still has little or no access to modern energy technologies (Guta et.al, 2017).

As of 2012, 780 million people lack access to safe drinking water and 2.5 billion people lack access to proper sanitation. 14,000 people die everyday from illness related to these issues, including, but not limited to, malaria, parasites, and diarrhea (Salaam-Blyther, 2012). The World Health Organization believes that these numbers are underestimations due to insufficient data collection, and that these numbers will only increase as climate change is exacerbated.

Instilling renewable energy and water treatment projects in developing countries is a more complex issue than simply bringing money into communities to solve problems. Consistent collaboration is needed to place projects into communities for them to be long lasting and sustainable. Other factors, such as the need for skilled personnel for operation and maintenance, service networks, availability of spare parts, socio-economic integration and adaptive capacity of communities to transfer and develop technology appropriate to local needs and circumstances play a large role (Schäfer et. al, 2014).

The adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) embodies this ability to create change in humanity and our environment through collaboration, engagement, and proactive action. Consisting of a list of ambitious goals and targets, the SDGs address the key changes required in the global financial and economic system to bring about fundamental sustainability transformations. Countries, individuals, and organizations, such as Green Empowerment, who then implement the objectives and ambitions of the SDGs are working to solve problems through interdisciplinary and effective approaches.

So why does Green Empowerment focus on this issue and how do they choose whom to work with? Eleven percent of the world’s population lacks access to electricity and most of these people are living in rural, and remote locations. In order to reduce poverty and pollution and increase health, Green Empowerment partners with locals to provide renewable electricity and other clean energy. Providing access to electricity to these remote areas helps boost the local economies by promoting the creation of local industry and agriculture. By providing clean energy, specifically, Green Empowerment is helping reduce pollution related illnesses.

Green Empowerment has partner organizations in all of the countries they work with to help oversee their projects. Every project starts off as a formal request from a community member to one of the partners. This means that the needs of the communities are being identified by locals themselves and not by people working for Green Empowerment. Green Empowerment focuses on providing skills and training to create longevity within the projects long after Green Empowerment leaves the area. The local communities are involved with the renewable energy and clean water projects every step of the way.

Who (People)

To help carry out these projects, there are many stakeholders involved in this process. A stakeholder can be defined as “any group of people organised, who share a common interest or stake in a particular issue or system” (Luyet et. al, 2012). It is very important to identify key stakeholders in any type of project in case they may get overlooked, especially in the underrepresented communities. Additionally, each stakeholder plays a critical role in engagement and participation, a crucial part to achieve the efforts and goals of Green Empowerment. The volunteers, board of directors, beneficiary communities, and associate board each play a key role in these functions of the organization. However, one of the most important stakeholders are the various communities Green Empowerment works with overseas, known as the beneficiary communities. These communities are located in developing countries, mainly in Latin America and South East Asia. Green Empowerment recognizes the people in these communities as essential stakeholders in the success of the projects, as the community leaders receive training and leadership in implementing and sustaining the projects. The other stakeholders are necessary, however the beneficiary communities are ultimately those receiving the resources and maintaining them once the organization is no longer involved.

A Framework to Implement Stakeholder Participation in Environmental Projects describes the process of stakeholder identification, which begins with brainstorming a list of possible stakeholders then passing on the list to one of the previously listed stakeholders. This is called the snowball technique and is balanced by using multiple entry points” (Luyet et. al, 2012). Stakeholder characterization’s role in the process is to identify the strengths or benefits each stakeholder will bring to the project. Stakeholders are also allowed varying degrees of involvement:

Information: explanation of the project to the stakeholders
Consultation: collection of stakeholder suggestions
Collaboration: consider their input when making decisions to do with the project
Co-decision: cooperation with stakeholders towards an agreement for solution and implementation
Empowerment: delegation of decision-making over project development and implementation to the stakeholders (Luyet et. al, 2012).

The involvement for these projects are a collaboration with the communities to ensure long-term economic and environmental sustainability. Green Empowerment envisions an equitable world where everyone has access to clean water, renewable energy, and a healthy environment to live in.

How (Engagement)

We plan to integrate the who and what in a way that can spread the word about Green Empowerment by shedding light on what each actor of Green Empowerment does and sharing their input on the issues they are handling. What we envision to carry this plan through is a project of multiple components.

For the video component of the project, we would like to interview at least one actor in each sector of Green Empowerment. We would initiate this by forming a partnership with Green Empowerment. Students at Lewis & Clark would play a primary role in the project by being the ones who would conduct the interviews with each player in the organization , and would compose the videos for Green Empowerment. This component of the project would allow for potential partners to take an inside look at not only the mission of Green Empowerment, but the individuals that work within it, calling more attention to the organization, setting an impression that they give everybody equal importance, incorporating what we learned about the dialogical how. Ideally, Lewis & Clark students will be able to travel to beneficiary countries to interview actors in those countries as well, but we understand that can be difficult, logistically speaking.

The informational and fundraising component of the project will be a more community-building component, as we’d be working on holding informational and fundraising events to spread the word about Green Empowerment through educating on the main issues that they address (sustainable development through the use of micro-hydroelectricity and solar power energy) and demonstrating different perspectives within the organization itself through the videos. Fundraising events will hopefully be held through multiple ways. Some possibilities would be creating entertaining events for the community, similar to a field day, in which we can raise money for Green Empowerment. These events will hopefully also allow us to create additional partnerships for Green Empowerment.

Cited References

Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. 2015 .”Public Opinion and the Environment: The Nine Types of Americans.” Link.
Broockman, David, and Joshua Kalla. “Durably Reducing Transphobia: A Field Experiment on Door-to-Door Canvassing.” Science. American Association for the Advancement of Science. April 8, 2016. Link.
Dijk, Annemarije L. Kooijman-Van, and Joy Clancy. 2010. “Impacts of Electricity Access to Rural Enterprises in Bolivia, Tanzania and Vietnam.” Energy for Sustainable Development 14, no. 1: 14–21. Link.
Guta, D.D., Jara, J., Adhikari, N.P., Chen, Q., Gaur, V., Mirzabaev, A. Assessment of the Successes and Failures of Decentralized Energy Solutions and Implications for the Water–Energy–Food Security Nexus: Case Studies from Developing Countries. 01 June 2017, Vol.6.
Hawkins, Stephen, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon. 2018. “The Hidden Tribes of America.” More in Common.Accessed April 13, 2020. Link.
Luyet, Vincent, Rodolphe Schaefer, Marc B. Parlange, and Alexandre Buttler. 2012. “A Framework to Implement Stakeholder Participation in Environmental Projects.” Journal of Environmental Management.111: 213-219. Link.
Salaam-Blyther, Tiaji. n.d. 2012. “Global Access to Clean Drinking Water and Sanitation: U.S. and International Programs,” 40.
Schäfer A.I., Li S., Voigt A., Richards B.S. Renewable energy powered membrane technology: Energy buffering control system for improved resilience to periodic fluctuations of solar irradiance. Renewable Energy, Volume 149, 2020.

Project Progress

Input Received Assessment Outcomes Next steps

Input Received

Green Empowerment (April, 2020)

Don’t focus on attracting volunteers, as their service learning program has ended.
“Fundraising and Friendraising” efforts are most valuable.
Green Empowerment has an interesting history and start that we could share through our video project.
Due to COVID-19 they are no longer traveling to the field , so beneficiary input is not an option at the moment.

ENVS-295 Peers (April 2020)

Identify the “who” of the project more clearly. Who exactly is this project aimed at?

Assessment

As a group, we plan to assess this project to determine the extent to which it achieves our goals by asking for feedback from our collaborative organization, Green Empowerment. One way of assessing this project could be through the amount/number of donations Green Empowerment received a couple months to a year after fundraising events for this collaborative project have been held. As listed above in the goals section of this post, a few of our goals are to spread awareness about Green Empowerment to Portland communities and gain support both monetarily as well as community support. Specifically, building partnerships with organizations that relate with Green Empowerment’s mission and the stories shared through our video project.These goals could be assessed through sending a short survey to community members who had been involved in some way with Green Empowerment and asking them to answer how they heard/became involved with Green Empowerment.

This summative approach was decided on because it provides a realistic way of measuring the effectiveness of our project. Based on this approach, the summative insights we have obtained so far are from the Program Coordinator at Green Empowerment, Daniel Schollaert. Our group mentioned a few of the goals we had in mind for the project and he thought they aligned with the goals Green Empowerment has set for themselves in the past. He agrees that fundraising and spreading awareness about Green Empowerment to surrounding Portland communities is important and is obtainable through a collaboration between Lewis and Clark students and Green Empowerment.

Outcomes

Next steps

General Project Information

Partner organization: Green Empowerment

Project Components

Project Progress

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