History
The organisation was founded in early 2008 from the merging of several student groups based at the University of Auckland and the University of Cantebury with similar goals of community development . The foundations of EWBNZ were laid in 2006 when a group of eight engineering students called PULSE, led by student Holly Corbett and engineer Craig Omundsen, undertook a water scheme design for World Vision in Vanuatu. The PULSE group then completed an assessment programme of village-managed water schemes in Samoa in 2007. These trips inspired another group to form in 2007 called CREW, led by student Haydn Luckman. Their work in Samoa included collaboration with the local community to install water tanks, and design and construct a new wharf. These two groups, based in Auckland, merged along with a group from the University of Canterbury, led by student Sofian Irsheid, to come under the name ”Engineers Without Borders New Zealand” (EWBNZ). “Engineers Without Borders” is a well recognised name that has been adopted by similar organisations in Australia (Engineers without Borders Australia), Canada (Engineers Without Borders Canada) and worldwide.
EWB NZ works to achieve its mission using a three pronged approach:
1.Projects - coordinating student and professional skills in the implementation of environmentally, culturally and economically sustainable projects.
2.Awareness - raising awareness about global development issues and the roles and responsibilities of engineers.
3.Education – encouraging far-reaching education on topics related to sustainable development, appropriate technology and poverty alleviation.
EWBNZ is an incorporated society and is a registered charitable trust. It has been granted provisional registration by NZAid to its KOHA-PICD funding scheme
Read more about this topic: Engineers Without Borders (New Zealand)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)