September 10, 2004

Evergreen native leads poverty conference at Stanford University

Engineers for a Sustainable World host second national gathering

By Sheila Sanchez
Staff Writer

At just 25 years old, Evergreen native Regina Clewlow is the executive director of Engineers for a Sustainable World, a non-profit organization that she founded.

In many of the world’s developing countries, extremely poor families live on less than $1 a day in dusty shantytowns with makeshift bathrooms, without water and electricity, suffering from malnutrition, disease and high child mortality rates. Ten percent of the world’s population uses 90 percent of the world’s resources.

Moved by such daunting realities, Evergreen native Regina Clewlow and a friend at Cornell University formed the non-profit organization, Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW), at the beginning of 2002 to reduce poverty and improve global sustainability.

Solutions for a Shrinking Planet
The organization will be hosting its second national conference Sept. 30 to Oct. 2 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, under the theme, “Solutions for a Shrinking Planet.” Internationally renowned experts on engineering-based development will gather at the conference so that product designers, community leaders and social entrepreneurs may explore sub-topics in detail.

Through workshops, participants will learn about creating partnerships, assessing community needs and constraints, designing appropriate technologies and implementing solutions in a locally sustainable manner.

William McDonough, pioneer green architect and TIME magazine’s Hero for the Planet; Jeffrey Sachs, a United Nations Special Advisor on the Millennium Development Goals; and Barbara Waugh, co-founder of Hewlett Packard’s World eInclusion initiative, will deliver the conference’s keynote addresses.

Presentations on projects, sharing lessons learned in the field and nightly film selections will facilitate discussion, knowledge transfer and networking. Finally, a conference expo will showcase potential project partners while also highlighting employment opportunities for socially conscious engineers and entrepreneurs.

1500 members
The ESW has more than 1500 professionals and students as members, many willing to travel overseas, and sometimes spending three months in third-world countries to improve the lives of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Through domestic and international development work, education and public outreach, the organization sends engineers to developing nations to build water distribution systems, install electricity and provide basic services often taken for granted in the West.

“We have a lot of engineers who are interested in this issue. They want to help and want to make a positive contribution to society,” Clewlow said. The 25-year-old social justice advocate added that the organization has become so popular, that it’s unable to keep up with engineers’ requests to be sent overseas to work on poverty issues.

Clewlow, who serves as executive director of the organization, traveled to the Dominican Republic in 2002 to set up several projects and assess needs. Volunteer engineers have been sent to Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

The organization also helps engineering student volunteers receive academic credit for their work on projects while they live in developing countries. Volunteers are encouraged to pay for their trips to the foreign countries, while at the same time getting scholarships from their academic institutions. Others raise funds to pay for their trips by getting sponsors who donate money for their cause.

Sustainability projects

Robin Liu, a mechanical engineer with a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a master’s degree from UC-Berkeley, just returned from a three-month volunteer project in Senegal where she worked to reduce the cost of solar ovens. She also helped to install a rainwater collection system for a local ecovillage.

A team of Cornell University students working with an organization in Honduras to design gravity-fed water supply systems as part of their class is an example of ESW’s work. Mechanical engineer Robin Liu, who studied at the University of California at Berkeley and spent her summer in Senegal improving the design of solar ovens is another.

The Senegalese have traditionally used wood fires for cooking, which leads to physical and mental ailments, most notably blindness. Using solar ovens reduces such problems and is highly feasible in the Senegalese climate, which has intense solar radiation most months of the year.

This ESW project seeks to make solar ovens affordable to people across Senegal. Liu is helping forge and maintain partnerships between local non-governmental organizations, businesses and universities to reduce the cost of the ovens and use locally available materials.

She reported many successes in her experiences with TransTech, a local business. A solar oven design composed solely of recycled plastic has been created and preliminary drawings have been made to jump-start the material gathering for molds.

BinBin Jiang, who will be a senior at Stanford this fall, is concurrently working on a water quality assessment project in Andhra Pradesh, India. The local Musi River is contaminated by waste, which inhibits successful farming. Jiang is working through ESW to assess contamination levels and the effects that such waste has on the livelihood of farmers.

In China, Victor Yu and Dennis Wu, students of UC Berkeley, along with John Chen of Stanford, are seeking to strengthen the micro-finance sector of China through computer and technology training.

“We always work with local organizations because one of the things we’re very concerned about is sustainability,” said Clewlow. “We want to make sure than when our volunteers leave, the water pumps don’t break, that people know how to use the solar ovens that we’ve helped them design.”

“Our engineers are involved in the hands-on stuff, in actually building things in these countries. They get their hands dirty. They’re also really involved in the design. They get down in the dirt and dig ditches, but they are also sitting behind computers working with Honduran engineers helping them to improve the design of their systems,” she added.

Engineers are teamed with needy countries when international organizations contact ESW to work with them on different projects. The organization also has a number of members who are former Peace Corps volunteers or who are from different countries, helping to identify organizations and projects to focus on.

ESW is funded through seed money it received to survive the first two years and is now looking for donors, accepting individual contributions from professional engineers and other agencies. It’s also doing fundraising through the upcoming conference.

Advocate for the poor
Clewlow, who attended Chaboya Middle School and graduated from Silver Creek High School in 1997, credits the organization’s birth to India-born Krishna Athreya, director of minority and women’s programs in engineering at Cornell University.

In the last decade, Athreya has led several programs and initiatives promoting equity and access to education and scientific literacy, targeting under served populations. She is a proponent of leadership through service.

Dale Meck, who began his master’s degree at Stanford this fall, designed gravity-fed water distribution systems in Honduras as a volunteer for Engineers for a Sustainable World.

“She was instrumental in co-founding the organization with me. She helped me build our board of directors. She helped send our first volunteers overseas. She’s very involved,” said Clewlow.

Clewlow is modest about her accomplishments. While in high school, she was involved in student government. During her sophomore year, she helped found the Amnesty International student chapter. Clewlow served as its president for two years, working on letter-writing campaigns to help free prisoners of conscience. Amnesty International takes action focused on preventing abuses of human rights and promoting freedom of conscience and expression.

She was also the student representative on the East Side Union High School District board of trustees.

Clewlow moved on to Cornell University as a Cornell National Scholar because of her leadership, service and academic accomplishments, receiving scholarships from the Society of Women Engineers and a couple of scholarships from the district.

She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering, specializing in planning and development, from Cornell. She has six years of volunteer management and training experience and has led several initiatives at Cornell to integrate services provided by administration and student organizations.

Clewlow said she and Athreya christened the organization Engineers for a Sustainable World because the majority of their members are engineers, but the organization also has many social justice and international development advocates.

“One of the things that we try to do as engineers for a sustainable world is not just to go overseas and try to improve the quality of life abroad, but to find ways that we as Americans can reduce our energy consumption and live in a more sustainable way so that the rest of the world can access these resources as well,” Clewlow said, adding that her parents’ influence played a major role in her concern for social justice issues.

“We’re very proud of Regina. She’s always been smart and tried her best in everything. We encouraged her early on to get involved in leadership to contribute to our community,” said Clewlow’s mother, Priska Clewlow, who is a registered nurse.

An immigrant from South Korea, Priska always tried to teach her two children to do their best and get involved in causes to better the world and make a difference. She was not surprised that her daughter started ESW, given her involvement in forming the Amnesty International student chapter at Silver Creek.

Students, Bay Area engineers and social justice advocates are encouraged to register for the conference by logging onto http://esw.stanford.edu/conf04. The deadline to register is Sept. 17. Registration fees range from $50 to $200.

For more information on Clewlow’s organization, log onto www.esustainableworld.org.