Salud del Sol » Social Entrepreneurship

Solar Restaurant Construction in Sabana Grande

Anna — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:30:29 +0000

The Solar Women of Totogalpa are well on their way to creating a Solar Campus in their community of Sabana Grande de Totogalpa Nicaragua. First constructing a community center that acts as a hosting site for activities, a workshop for solar cooker construction and an office for Grupo Fenix on-site staff members. The next step in their entrepreneurial endeavors is building a Solar Restaurant where the women will be able to sell some of the delicious meals made from the solar cookers. This past May, Robert Esposito of Community 3P had a chance to visit the community and take part in the incredible construction efforts for creating 7,000 bricks to make the solar restaurant a reality! Below is an excerpt from his blog:

This restaurant required seven thousand of these bricks and after about an hour and a half we had moved just over one-hundred. As I shuttled the bricks from one pile to another, sweat pouring off me and my hands feeling quite raw, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of awe for the women who built that first centre. Adobe construction is one of the most physically demanding building projects, and The Solar Women of Totogalpa, small in stature but giants in determination, had worked to achieve a vision that even caught the attention of the United Nations, who declared the partnership with Groupo Fenix and their joint achievement as one of the most inspirational in the world.

Read the rest of Robert’s blog entry here: http://blog3p.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/the-solar-women-of-totogalpa-pt-2/

International Development Night @ MIT

Anna — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:16:14 +0000

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to represent Salud del Sol at International Development Night at MIT Museum (ID Night), a precursor to the International Development Conference held at Harvard Kennedy School. ID Night was an opportunity for different organizations from the MIT and Harvard community to showcase their projects of International Development, Salud del Sol was partnered with Innovations in International Health. Conference participants, students and community members stopped by our poster to learn about the solar autoclave research, business model of Salud del Sol and Las Mujeres Solares, and to offer their insight. It was energizing to hear the interest of others, and also to bring their suggestions back to the Salud del Sol team for further thought.

I also had a chance to talk with a few of the other organizations at the event, including Amy Quin, from One Earth Designs, an innovative organization focused on developing culturally appropriate sources of alternative energy. At the International Development night, Amy was presenting a parabolic cooker being developed for villages in western China.

GlobalGiving Project Challenge

Anna — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:27:29 +0000

Earlier this month, Lori Hanna had the opportunity to attend the Global Engagement Summit at Northwestern University on behalf of Salud del Sol, Inc. As you can tell from reading her blog postings, it was an incredible experience, full of personal and organizational growth and an inspiration for us to continue the work of Salud del Sol!

An exciting outcome of the Global Engagement Summit is the GlobalGiving Project Challenge. Sponsored by the GlobalGiving Foundation, the Project Challenge competition gives students two weeks to try to raise at least $4,000 from 50 donors. Organizations that reach $4,000 are allowed to keep their projects on the site to continue to raise funds. The top three projects also receive bonuses totaling $6,000. The Project Challenge is held from April 17 – May 8.

Salud del Sol is incredibly excited and honor to be participating in the GlobalGiving project challenge! The funds raised from this endeavor will support the field research of the solar autoclave this summer in Sabana Grande, Nicaragua. The field team this summer has an incredible opportunity to prototype and test the system design from that the UD Design Clinic team has developed. The research plans for this summer also include, capacity building classes for Las Mujeres Solares on the research and testing of the solar autoclave, as well as classes in marketing and entrepreneurship. Also, once testing has proven the solar autoclave design successful, we will be enlisting the support of local doctors from Nicaragua to begin clinical testing of the solar autoclave to guarantee pathogens are eliminated from the instruments, ensuring complete sterilization.

Please visit our GlobalGiving project page to learn more about how you can support the solar autoclave research this summer!

Social Entrepreneurship in 2009

Lori — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 19:42:15 +0000

I recently came across this excellent overview prediction about social entrepreneurship in 2009 at change.org. Most importantly, the author, Nathaniel Whittemore, predicts that social entrepreneurship will play an ever-increasing role in social change. The article highlights seven predicted trends for 2009: a partner in the White House, green innovation, blended value investing, online action platforms, mobile technology, measuring social impact, and globally-engaged education. We in Salud del Sol have witnessed some of these trends, such as the popularity of green innovation in the generous reception of the solar autoclave project into the engineering design course. We have also seen the increasing importance of globally-engaged education, with the growth and success of the ETHOS program, as well as in our attendance and interactions with other universities at the recent Colloquium on International Engineering Education in Rhode Island. The entire emphasis of the weekend was exploring ways to educate engineering students for the global workplace. The workshops focused on partnerships in exchange programs, internships, and international projects.

I found one trend particularly enlightening: measuring social impact. Here, the author discusses the many forces that are pushing non-profits to provide more proof of impact than mere anecdotal stories, such as forces from new blended-value investors who seek good economic, social, and environmental investments; forces from the people that programs are supposed to help; and pressure from the economic crisis and its effects on endowments and other grantors. Third party consulting has taken off as a way for organizations to measure their social impact in ways that compare them to other organizations. The author also predicts that some organizations will find new ways to hear the voices of the organizations’ beneficiaries, such as by using mobile technology.

Measuring our success is something that Salud del Sol is in the midst of figuring out. We have some of the women’s stories here on our website, complete with pictures and even video. The interviews have confirmed the intensity of the needs we hope to help meet: an environmentally sustainable way to sterilize medical instruments in the small local clinics, employment and empowerment for the local community, and a boost to the Nicaraguan economy. But now, how do we measure the progress toward these goals? Fortunately, accountability is built into our business plan, especially with frequent immersion through the ETHOS program, which is continuing again this year. But besides self-accountability, we are currently searching for ways to measure our social impact. Any ideas?

- Lori