5/5/09 Meeting Minutes

Kibwezi Kids - Preston Vineyard

This past Tuesday we held our latest team meeting at Buro Happold. Thanks Joe and Danielle for hosting again, lately you have become a second home for EWB-NY! The following is a list of topics we discussed:

- last week Charlie, Matt, & Dave held a conference call with a EWB-USA project manager to review our latest implementation submittal. we seemed to have a solid grasp on our project and were given high regards!
- today (5/7), two days after the team meeting, Dave presented our concepts for the library to the EWB-USA TAC committee and again was given high praise. next week an approval will be emailed to the team.
- on Thursday, May 14th, Mwikali's Gift will be holding a fundraiser to raise funds for the school and their mosquito bed net program. any Usalama team members interested in attending please email Dave, space is limited to three people.
- our library donors have an official name: Global Power of Literacy. they will also be holding a fundraiser on Thursday, May 28th. additional info at this time is unknown.
- the village had some big news last week: they have begun construction of a secondary school on the school property. apparently the students have performed quite well on their exams, and the district government took notice. it is fantastic news that the students are excelling, we are concerned that there is too much going on in the village, and it's capacity to handle such drastic changes has yet to be tested. for a community that lives their lives equivalent to rural farmers, these events may be beyond their abilities. the administrative infrastructure isn't in place to successfully handle more than one or two projects at once. we hope that while on site, we can better analyze the current conditions, and convincingly prioritize all.

- the remaining of the meeting was spent reviewing the library designs Sophia and Charlie have come up so far. (following posts will detail the different concepts) at this point in time, a site has not been confirmed for the library. during the GPL trip and the beginning days of the EWB-NY trip, siting and therefore the building design will be determined. Sophia and Charlie have done a great job adapting their designs to each site location. all design parameters are met while deftly meeting programmatic requirements while adding simple yet beautiful aesthetic qualities.

- lastly, our fundraiser with ASHRAE has been canceled due to some internal problems. in the future we hope to try and work with them again. Danielle will still be pushing for a project fundraiser, though not on our May 20th date.