This has been a big year for us and we hope we can branch out to even more people; spreading news about what our charity aims to do, how we can help others get involved and increasing our outreach work. Out-going Vice President Anastasia Pywell tells us more.
Our society is part of a whole collective of branches established all over the UK. This has been a big year for us and we hope we can branch out to even more people; spreading news about what our charity aims to do and how we can help others get involved.
This year we wanted to get even more involved in outreach, driving more students to become STEM Ambassadors and encourage young people to share our love of engineering and science. We now have 15+ new people STEM trained; a great number! We’ve organised and taken part in 6 outreach workshops at various schools within the Birmingham area; allowing many of our members to volunteer and help spread the awareness of Engineers Without Borders in the local community.
Our weekly Monday meetings have now become big planning sessions for our outreach activities where we raise awareness of our causes, practise our presentations and come up with new ideas and activities for young people to get involved with. Our presentations encourage students to consider problems with water or electricity supply and how these are not equally accessible in all parts of the world. We then introduce our members to ways engineering can help solve these problems, and how solutions must be tailored to the individual environments they find themselves in. We also encourage members to engage in hands on activities so they can explore the process of designing their own water filters or wind turbines. These workshops can then be put into practice when the students take part in our outreach activities. Furthermore we have started discussion the recently announced UN Development Goals, why these are important and the impact they will have on our planet.
We have continued with our ever-successful charitable efforts and raised over £200 in total to help aid the national Engineers Without Borders organisation and the development projects it undertakes. This was done through the annual Pear Jam at the Indie Lounge in the autumn term which saw numerous artists and musicians perform for us throughout the night. It was a very fun and exciting night and we aim to do more of these evenings in the coming years.
Throughout the year we wanted to engage with more people from industry and students who had taken years in industry. We managed to get people from several different companies to come and talk to us and share their wide range of opinions about their jobs. These speakers included alumni, current students and staff; Seb Gibson (Unilever), John Redwood (Synthomer), Adam Cullen (Severn Trent Water), Rubby Wokocha and Kelly Lo (Siemens employee and representative), and Jon Wood (Outreach and BBC Science Presenter) to name a few. Through this new initiative we have increased our contact base and are starting to build relationships with a great range of companies. If you’d like to get involved with EWB: Birmingham please do get in touch, we’d love to hear from you! We’re always looking to make new connections and grow our network.
We hope to develop the society even further and do much more with it in future years; growing the Engineers Without Borders Birmingham Branch and becoming more connecting with our neighbouring and surrounding branches. One of our committee members travelled to the EWB UK Branch in London and conversed about the charity’s aims and objectives, and the future of local branch operations. This interaction enabled a more concrete relationship to be established with surrounding branches which will be passed on to our successive committee to build a collaborative network of other Midlands strands.
Our current committee; Rachel Lynch (President), Anastasia Pywell (Vice President), Ethan Knight (Secretary), Tom Miskin (Treasurer), Charlotte Warnes and Danielle Workman (Outreach Coordinators), and Beth Pearson (Publicity Coordinator) have all worked incredibly hard to keep the society going, offer new opportunities and the best possible experience for our members. We’re now handing over the reins to the new committee of Hannah Cammish (President), Arvani Johal (Vice President), Raya Sadar (Secretary), Francesca Mckendrick (Treasurer), Jack Malcomson (Outreach Coordinator), and Ellie Farrar (Publicity Coordinator). We are very excited to see what this committee can do and look forward to seeing and hearing about their plans!
If you’ve been impressed by our year so far please nominate us for an EPS Societies’ Award!
Anastasia Pywell
Vice President 2017/18
