NEXT MEETING WEDNESDAY JULY 29

Our next meeting will be held on July 29 at 7pm at the Fremont Neighborhood Service Center. I will provide directions again for the meeting place when it gets closer to the date.

Tentative agenda is as follows:

Health Assessment Overview - Caroline, travel team (25 min)
Pumping Alternatives Analysis - Erin and team (20 min)
Irrigation Alternatives Analysis - Erich and Lolly and team (20 min)
Water Resources Alternatives Analysis - Kari and team (20 min)
Bridge Feasibility study - Paul (15 min)
Finances/fundraising - Ashley (10 min)

Those times of course are adjustable if you don't need that much time. Let me know where I can help those of you who are working on the alternatives analysis. Also - if you are interested in helping on one of the teams and don't have the contact of the team lead, let me know and I will hook you up with the proper email information.

Things are really starting to ramp up so please try to take part in one of the sub-projects!

Thanks,

Ashley

Meeting Place confirmed

We are good to go to meet at the Fremont Neighborhood Service Center. Street parking is pretty much all that will be available.

http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/nsc/fremont.htm

Here is the website that also has a map. See you all at 7pm on Wednesday!

Thanks,

Ashley

Meeting Agenda for June 24th

Hello all,

We will tentatively be meeting at the Fremont Neighborhood Service Center (908 N. 34th Seattle, WA 98103) at 7pm. I have not received full confirmation from the center. If the place changes, I will let you know asap.

We are going to be doing a little team maintenance as well as launching our project design sequences for this meeting. There is much to do and plenty of work to go around. Please come having read the post assessment report and with an idea of how you wish to contribute to the project!

Here is the agenda:

Project team roles and definitions
Fulfilling new project roles
Timeline for design process
Research topics and assignments
Expected progress for next month's meeting

Thanks and I hope to see you all there!

Ashley

Who wants to help??!!

Hello all,

I have been getting a lot of requests for information from everyone that was unable to make it to the meeting last Tuesday. I know you all are anxious to get started on this new information that we have gathered from our trip, so I thought I would give you all an opportunity to get started. If you are interested in any of the following projects and helping to research possible materials and costs associated with the implementation of them, please LEAVE A COMMENT IN THIS POST. That way, I can keep all of these requests in the same area.

So the projects we need to research, besides the irrigation and pumping project, are:
1. Cable stay/suspension pedestrian bridges
2. Rainwater catchments for houses, rainwater storage as an add to the irrigation project, and other rainwater conservation efforts
3. Water filtering for potable water - either at the source where there is a springbox and storage container, or at each individual casa
4. Organic farming techniques, terracing, other efficient farming practices including water efficiency, storage of crops, etc.
5. Coffee processing stations including depulping and sweetwater processing.

These are just ideas that we have gotten from Agros and the community of what might be some appropriate projects for El Eden. If you are interested in researching one of these projects, please let me know in the comments, and I will make sure that we get you what information we have on the subject.

Also, I need to know which date works best for people to come to the next meeting. The two that I have chosen are Thursday June 18th or Wednesday June 24th. I plan to have the post assessment report up on the EWB-PSPP website in the next week or so. I will send out an email when I post it so that you can all download it and read it before the next meeting. It is very important that you read the report before the meeting so that we don't spend too much time re-explaining the trip. Juan is also working on translating the health assessment and when he is finished, I will also be posting that information on the website.

At this next meeting, we will be discussing the results of the health assessment and what they mean for our project, as well as assigning new tasks, regrouping on the irrigation project, and talking about fundraising. Please come prepared!

So again, please COMMENT HERE ON THE BLOG if you have a preference in meeting date, and if you are interested in helping out with some of the research on the other project possibilities.

Thanks so much and looking forward to meeting with you all again in June!

Thanks,

Ashley

Team Meeting Agenda for 5/19/09

Hi all,

We will be meeting at Kari's house in Fremont on Tuesday for our meeting. Her address is 3635 Fremont Ave, Unit 206. There are two visitor's spots and then parking along Fremont Avenue.

Here is the agenda for our meeting! This will be an important meeting to make if you can because it will be full of information from our recent assessment trip.

Agenda:

Ashley/Erin/Kari
- Present slide show while explaining how the data taking process of the trip went
- Give thoughts on working with Agros/community of El Eden

All
-Questions/comments!

Ashley
Next Steps:
-Talk about priorities for our next trip and the possible dates.
-Talk about the new groups that will need to be formed in our team
-Next meeting time/place


Now here are a few pictures to keep you excited!


Some Preschool kids at San Jose spying on us


Some homes at El Eden


A few community members at the spring in El Eden


Francis, the woman at the community who made our meals while we stayed there, and her daughter Ashley.


Chiles!


Doing some water testing


Community members gathering for our meeting


The ZM76 pump as installed at San Jose


The Agros Nicaragua team, Jessica (our translator) and the EWB-PSPP team

NEXT MEETING TUESDAY MAY 19

I have decided to push back the meeting for a little while. We need to pull together our notes and such before we have a meeting on the assessment trip. Since I didn't really receive any input on days that people preferred, we are going to go ahead with Tuesday May 19. We will not necessarily meet every two weeks anymore, but will likely have more discussions over the blog and emails and have a reporting meeting at least once a month. We will go over that scheduling a bit at the May 19th meeting.

Just an FYI, this meeting will likely be a little longer than normal (no more than 2 hours), but should be very informative for those of you itching to find out what happened on our trip.

Look forward to seeing some videos and pictures, hearing about the community and Agros Nicaragua and the opportunities we think we will have with them, learning about some fundraisers that we are thinking about putting on, and helping to develop other sub groups and committees for the project.

I will post an agenda sometime next week.

Hands on Irrigation Opportunity!

Hey Everyone,
I wanted to let everyone know that the Interbay P-Patch is going to be doing some renovations to its drip irrigation system this year and there is the opportunity for people from our team to gain some hands on construction experience as well as provide valuable support to a great local organization. For the proposed work I have taken the lead on putting together designs, material list, and cost estimates, but I would be very grateful to have the help of some of our engineers with the actual construction work.

In two weeks we will be replacing one of the drip systems for a part of the P-Patch that grows vegetable solely to be donated to the local foodbank. The current irrigation system is a tangle of above ground lines that typically break during the freeze-thaw cycle of the winter and need constant repair and replacement. My proposal is to put the majority of this system underground, and install several above ground facets to connect to removable drip lines. The entire scope involves about 20 feet of 1” PVC pipe being put underground, the assembly of the facet risers, and the trenching and backfilling of the lines.

Although it’s a much smaller scale system than the El Eden improvements, the materials, and construction techniques will be very similar and this could be an invaluable experience for the members of the team who will be participating in the implementation portion of the trip as well as being involved in the design. I have arranged with the P-Patch to begin construction on Saturday May 9th, and if you can to help out or be involved in any way, please let me know.

I think an early start, would be good. Let’s plan on meeting at 9 am.

the P-Patch is located on 15th Ave W, just south of the Interbay Golf Course. The address is:2501 15th Ave West.

Here’s some nice background information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbay_P-Patch
http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/ppatch/locations/11.htm

See you all there!


Erich Ellis