Engineers Without Borders hosts second 5K

The Tufts chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) hosted a 5K run and walk last Sunday, April 19 around the Medford/Somerville campus to raise awareness about the organization and to raise funds for the group's projects, according to junior Mary O’Kane, one of EWB's fundraising chairs. EWB, an international interdisciplinary organization, seeks to take engineering outside of the classroom at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels to implement projects around the world.

"We do all of our own fundraising, so it’s one of our main goals," O'Kane said. "We use TCU [Tufts Community Union] funding for prototyping our projects, but we have fundraised all of our travel through grants. Last year Matt [Walter] and I raised close to $13,000 in grants.”

The Tufts chapter of Engineers Without Borders currently has two ongoing projects: one in Uganda and one in El Salvador. A third is tentatively planned in the Dominican Republic.

Sophomore Emma Inhorn, a member of EWB, said that the Uganda project involved creating a water pump system for a village in Shilongo. 

"They get their water from a borehole, and our project was to improve timing so that they could get their water faster and improve access," she said.

Senior Matt Walter, also an EWB fundraising chair, explained that the project in El Salvador is similarly aimed at improving access to water.

“We implemented water tanks to improve both quantity and quality of water in the entire community [that we were working in]," he said. "Unfortunately, we had to put our project on hold after the implementation part due to political tensions."

Three to five students travel to the site for each project, Walter said. The trip can be one of three kinds: an initial assessment trip, an implementation trip or a monitoring trip, he added.

"The assessment trip comes first to assess the situation and talk to the local community," Walter said. "That’s between two to three weeks. After we design a project back at Tufts, the implementation trip [takes] roughly three weeks to implement the program. Then, we have a monitoring trip a year later to assess the change.”

Although this was only EWB's second 5K, O’Kane emphasized that the organization reaches out to the community and tries to get their name out on campus in many other ways.

“We participate in Community Activity Day (sic), Read by the River and Kids Day, as well as have representatives at all the engineering events," she said.

Inhorn said that Engineers Without Borders hopes to attract more non-engineering students to bring different perspectives to their projects.

"One of the things we want to make known is that ... we have a lot of non-engineering majors, and we want more non-engineers involved because of the different ways in which they contribute," she said. "We don’t only have the technical students, but we need the cultural, political and health aspects as well.”