In Which EWB Canada Temporarily Steals my Blog.

A small few of you may have been thinking "Gee, there's been slightly less internet-vitriol-spewing about news in the last few weeks. I wonder what happened to that girl who freaks out about Things Totally Happening."


She neglected to blog because she was working crazy-NGO-hours helping to run the largest international development conference in the history of Canada. And through sheer force of teamwork, will and caffeine, the 2011 Engineers Without Borders National Conference was modestly described as a fairly epic success. In the press, no less!


I've worked with EWB for a couple years now, in various capacities--they sent me overseas on a short-term placement in rural Ghana to help facilitate subsistence farming communities designing and implementing their own food security projects (specifically in the areas of getting them approved by other white people with purse strings in hand). I've also worked through EWB in high schools and with the public to try and connect Canadians to Africans, challenge the perception of "Africa" as the land of rape and lions, and engage people in activities like buying fair trade products that can help generate opportunity for the bottom billion.

I like EWB a lot, because they tend to encourage an engaged kind of self-criticism that makes it okay to publish a report of all the organization's f*ck-ups so we can stop putting our foot in it and start being effective.
And despite its cost and risk of being wanky, I really like the annual national conference--it gives EWB members across the country a chance to share best practices, troubleshoot their issues in creating impact, challenge their perceptions and approaches to poverty reduction/opportunity fostering, and experience a sense of community and motivation that volunteer organizations find really important when their members routinely work 20 hours a week for them for free.


Unfortunately, because I was on a small team of folks coordinating logistics like fiends the whole time, I missed all of the content of the conference. All of it. The rad-badical Owen Barder, people from the Gates Foundation and Google, Robert Chambers (who I saw jogging every morning and occasionally retrieved tea for, but never saw speak)--mere feet away, and still my headset, two cell phones and myriad responsibility halted my capacity to stretch my brain as a development worker.

Thankfully, my logistics co-agents thought of that, and taped practically everything.

Six Keynote Speech Videos from the 2011 EWB National Conference can be found HERE, compiled beautifully on vimeo. I recommend getting some fair trade tea in you, getting comfy, and getting critical.