Our Impact - Internationally!

Although much of our service is close to home, we are involved in a few projects with far-reaching impact. Imagine the impact you can have!
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International Project Alliance (IPA)
 
The International Project Alliance (IPA) is a large collaborative group of Rotary clubs, organizations and individuals in Northwest Washington State, who made a long-term commitment to helping the people of the Copán Ruinas region of western Honduras. Founded in 2014, the IPA projects cover most areas of international aid, including education, health, food and agriculture, water and sanitation, construction, and economic development. We support the indigenous Mayan people in 38 mountain villages. We have gone from 0 students to approximately 1700 children enjoying primary school programs, plus an additional 520 secondary school students, and now 20+ college students are part of our Adopt-a-Dream scholarship program.
African Ruggedized Education System (ARES)
 
Many schools in Africa are too rural to be served by reliable electricity and the internet - critical components for competing in the world today. Our Club’s very own Mark Knittel, with his extensive background in technology including 20 years with IBM, learned about the problems with unreliable power, power surges, dust, heat and theft and was determined to find a better way to provide a computer enhanced education model. Mark created a small server that would be rugged enough to deal with the elements and could be recharged. That prototype (the ARES system) was used in the first Kenya test project in 2015. The ARES program as it exists today provides an information-rich hub that provided laptops can tap into which enables teachers to teach lessons and curriculum from online resources.
 
ARES has educational resources from pre-school to post-grad, including thousands of video tutorials and books, the entire Khan Academy curriculum, STEM resources, over 300 TED Talks and the massive educational Wikipedia library.  ARES also has agricultural guides and medical reference material to serve as a resource for the entire community. Students access ARES through basic, inexpensive laptops, such as Chromebooks, as well as through existing school computer labs, tablets, smartphones and any other wireless device.  Learn more: www.afretech.org/ares.html   
Uganda Water and Adopt-a-Village Project
 
In the last several years the Rotary Club of Bellingham has partnered with the Rotary Club of Bweyogerere Namboole  (outside Kampala, Uganda) to provide a new water system for several remote villages in eastern Uganda, followed by a complete program to improve health and living conditions in the community.
Deliverables included:
  1. Provision of clean drinking water
  2. Hygiene and sanitation facilities
  3. Education related to health impacts and importance of clean drinking water, hygiene and sanitation
  4. Provision of energy-saving stoves to eliminate in-home air pollution
  5. Construction of three Eco System toilets
  6. Distribution of reusable sanitary pads to community women and school children
  7. Education and follow up support to ensure the project’s sustainability. 
 
The beneficiaries of these deliverables included the village of Buffujja and six adjacent communities, for a total of about 6,000 people. The success and great impact of this project attracted many other villagers from as far as 10 km to access safe water from the three new clean-water stations in the area.
You can read more about the project here.