In my admiration for engineers, I've loosely followed the Engineers Without Borders team at Valparaiso University and participated in a couple of their fundraisers. Every year they host a pancake breakfast, but my favorite fundraiser was a table they had set up in the student union for a week with pictures of a few local male figures with and without mustaches. You can vote for whether you preferred someone with or without it by putting however much change or cash you wanted to into the respective voting cups, and for each one, the guy would have to keep a mustache or keep it off for the following month. Sadly, the two I voted for wound up not being very popular, but I still like the idea for a fun and easy fundraiser. That also prompted me to look more into the organization.
Engineers Without Borders is an international organization which functions just as it sounds like: they provide engineering projects where they are needed. They're broken down into chapters throughout different countries, but for simplicity's sake, I'm only introducing the EWB-USA. They are further broken down into over 250 chapters, 180 of which are university chapters. Here is a basic introduction from their web page which sums it up nicely:
Dubbed the “Blueprint Brigade,” by Time Magazine, EWB-USA grew from little more than a handful of members in 2002 to over 12,000 today. EWB-USA has over 350 projects in over 45 developing countries around the world including water, renewable energy, sanitation and more. These projects are completed in partnership with local communities and NGOs.
Sounds nice and broad... and hard to fathom quite the breadth of their reach. Never fear, for you can still have control over where your $10 gift will go! If there is a certain region of the world, or certain kind of need, or even a certain school that you feel particularly tied to, you can easily navigate their donor page to select schools or projects, and then read reports on those projects, including a break down of the costs, the background, the need and the response, as well as follow-up information on the project. Some of the projects already in progress also have photos! While most of the projects I checked out did provide this information, many of them do not provide much information. Realistically, this may be because those projects are still in their early stages. Keep this mind when choosing a project.
Can't decide? I'm with you there. You can also choose to give to a general Project Grant Fund, or by giving directly to the EWB-USA to cover technical review, project management, travel support and administrative costs. Gifts made to any part of the organization, however, are matched 100% by the board of directors and corporate advocates until their $150,000 fund is depleted, with the matched part that they contribute going straight to the general fund.
What is matching?
Matching is when one party agrees to match another party's contributions by some set amount. In this case, if you give $10, the board of directors will give $10 to match your gift dollar-for-dollar, thus making it a $20 gift (their contribution is specific to the organization as opposed to a specific project, though your contribution will still go wherever you want it). Quite often, large corporations or philanthropists will offer matching up to a certain amount collected from individuals or until a certain date. This is done to stir up more support from the average people like you and me, so that's a good opportunity to take advantage of if you're not sure when to give.
Some employers also match their employee's eligible charitable giving, depending on their policy. For instance, on a 50% or fifty-cents-to-the-dollar policy, an employee could give a $10 gift, and the company will match by half that, $5, so that is automatically a $15 gift. If matching is available for something you'd like to support, take advantage of it!
Payment procedures:
Go to the donation page.
You can select where you'd like to give from there. If you're searching for your school or local chapter they should be easy to find by state, and they should have information posted about their projects. If you'd like to search by project, you can first search by country, and then there will be a list of projects to click on to find out more about.
Each one of those pages will take you to a page to pay with a credit card and enter your information so that you can receive your receipt (you'll need that later to get a tax deduction!). You can also give in honor of someone else or contribute stock, donate by shopping with online retailer partners, or give through the mail or include them in your will. More information is about each of these options is easy to find on their donor page.
With that all having been said, those of you outside of the US can find out more about them at their international page: http://www.ewb-international.org/
Finally, this organization is not affiliated with Doctors Without Borders. EWB builds hospitals and supplies clean water and power and sanitation services to them, but doesn't operate them.
