Welcome, my blog starts with me leaving the corporate world after 30 years as an engineer and manager with stints at some of the largest consumer electronics companies - I've worked on or managed engineering teams that developed things such as laptop computers, workstations, gaming consoles, set-top boxes, hand's free controllers, and portable music players. Going forward, I am going to try not working in the traditional way for a corporation; and do some work for a non-profit among other things. I got interested in non-profit work while visiting Chinese factories and meeting many of the workers from the poor inland provinces. What they left behind are some third world living conditions that time has forgotten. With four of my colleagues, who also wanted to do something, we founded a non-profit 501c3, Village Childrens Fund (VCF) and built 3 small elementary schools in Guizhou Province, China. In 2011, we closed VCF and threw our support behind a larger and better resourced non-profit, Evergreen Education Foundation (EEF) www.evergreeneducation.org In joining Evergreen, we can reach far beyond what we were able to do with VCF. Even better, I'll be able to focus on using my engineering and management skills to do projects rather than general non-profit administration and fund raising.
Faith Chao, Evergreen’s Founder and President and a very enlightened and visionary woman, came up with this concept for what we are calling the Solar Lamp project. I'm developing a simple solar powered desk lamp and getting it manufactured in China; this will be shipped as a kit to schools in rural China where high school students will final assemble it as part of a classroom lesson (like a shop class). The student would take the completed lamp home to use in their typical off-the-grid home. There are some interesting vocational learning elements that will later be part of derivatives from the project.
This blog will take you with me on my journey as I set up and go through the development process and manufacturing infrastructure for the Solar Lamp Project.
Thanks,
Rodney
