EWB National Conference

"How can we evolve and create with experience being in the way of imagination?" - George Roter

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I'm back in Vancouver for a few days after having spent the last week in Toronto for the EWB National Conference.

EWB has been created 10 years ago by a few engineers, who just graduated and wanted to do something better with their knowledge and passion. They were young and inspired, they were naive and full of opinions, they thought they could create an organization to help changing the world. Well, they did it. They started it and now it's ten years later and they keep expanding and doing positive changes across Canada and Africa. They had something that not enough people have, they had a vision, a lot of balls and the courage to act.

Now EWB is way bigger than those few guys. It's a national office in Toronto with 15 full time employees, university chapters, professional chapters and some people working in Africa. Their work focuses on behaviour changes, leadership and global engineering. The chapters are mainly active locally, in their own community. For exemple, my Vancouver Professional Chapter worked on making Vancouver a Fair Trade city, they are organizing "Bridging the Gap", a yearly conference in Vancouver. They coordonate and participate in the "Run to End Poverty" event to raise money. I haven't been extremely involved with my chapter since I had a lot of preparation to do on my own, but I got a chance to meet about 30 active members last week in Toronto. I must say that I got inspired and I'm glad to say that I know and collaborate with people like those.

I'm glad I went to the conference. I learnt about the vision and mission of EWB, but I also learnt about  so many other subjects: social enterprise, behaviour changes, why does aid matters and how can we fail forwards, distributed leadership, the impact of China in Africa, policies restraining international development, governance, advocacy... WOW. On top of it all, I had the chance to meet most of my team members, the people I'll be working with in Malawi. It was great hearing them discussed the different issues they are facing, their roles and the different projects they are working on.

With that being said, I'm more prompt than ever to embark my adventure in Malawi. I'm inspired, motivated and extremelly glad to have been selected to work with such amazing people...only a few weeks to go.

Here is a link to an article posted in the star regarding the conference and EWB mission. It's quite interesting:

Canadian Engineers Test Problem Solving Skills in Africa