Forums, Conferences, and Symposiums galore

What an adventure this second semester will for I-ImpactNow! Here's the rundown of some of our bigger commitments that we will be (or are thinking about) participating in between March and May of 2011:


The Nobel Peace Prize Forum

Luther College, the team's home turf, is hosting the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Forum this year from March 4-5. Sponsored by five midwestern colleges founded by Norwegian immigrants, students from Augburg, St. Olaf, Augustana, Concordia, and Luther College will be attending. The purpose of the Peace Prize Forum is to give recognition to international peace efforts and to offer opportunities for Nobel Peace Prize laureates, diplomats, scholars, and the general public to share dialogue about the dynamics of peacemaking and the underlying causes of conflict and war.

....And I-ImpactNow will be there! Kiflu, William, Ezra, and I (Kristin's in Peru...and yes, we miss her a lot) will be hosting a workshop on Saturday at 1pm. It's titled "Students Collaborating on Irrigation to Fight Hunger in Ethiopia," and here's the description:


As a college sophomore, Kiflu Tesfaye received grant money to implement an ambitious project he devised for a community in his native Ethiopia.  The project, “Collaborating on Irrigation to Fight Hunger” has positively impacted 20 rural families through the creation of a farmers' cooperative, the installation of an irrigation system, the planting of seasonal crops that now command better prices in the market, and the construction of a barn to store the cooperative's crops and tools.  Inspired by project's success, Tesfaye and a group of other students have formed a non-profit organization, I-ImpactNow.  Their mission is to harness innovative ideas and collaborative efforts across the breadth and width of communities in order to create a more sustainable way of life that fosters self-empowerment and alleviates the cycle of poverty.  This workshop will explore how a modest idea paired with student energy can lead to something much bigger.

This is going to be fun.

Clinton Global Initiative University

From April 1-3, the team will be in San Diego, CA at UC San Diego for CGIU. Kiflu was accepted to this conference last year, but he didn't manage to attend for various reasons. Now that we're larger, stronger, and more organized, it's about time we go and show them what we've got. At the conference, we'll be attending workshops and absorbing all the information we can from other growing non-profits, what they are doing correctly, the mistakes they've made, etc. In this large pool of similar-minded folks, we'll also be able to share experiences of our own project with everybody else. This should be a very valuable learning opportunity for the group.

Luther College Student Research Symposium

This isn't confirmed yet, but we're definitely thinking about applying to this. The Student Research Symposium is hosted every year at Luther. In their own words:

"The Student Research Symposium is a full-day event held each spring to celebrate the vibrant intellectual life and learning at Luther.  Students share their research and creative work with fellow students, faculty, staff, alumni/ae, parents, and the broader community. This year’s Research Symposium will be held on Friday, May 6.  Classes are suspended for the day, to allow all community members to participate.  The Symposium will highlight the best fruits of the scholarship, research, and creative activity of students from disciplines across the college..."

Another valuable outlet for us to share our experience with the world, inspire budding world-changers, and spread our cause!

Selling old SPO Boxes

The SPO Door project has been I-ImpactNow's latest - and wildly successful - fundraising effort. This project allowed us to sell old Student Postal Office Box doors to alumni as mementos and keepsakes and for us to contribute profits towards I-ImpactNow's $35,000 goal. Let me run you through how the project began, how we maintain operations of our very own "mini-business" within the organization, and how rapidly it is allowing us to reach our goal!

Step 1: Getting the SPO Box doors

Last year, the Luther College Development Office offered a student group a unique gift for their on-campus humanitarian efforts: Student Postal Office Box doors which had been retired nine years ago. These doors have locks on the front of them, and you can unlock them if you input the correct combination. Not having capitalized on the offering, I-ImpactNow jumped on the opportunity this year and it has shown to be a valuable effort worth the work invested.

What we started off with was a freakin' huge box of SPO Box doors. Huge. There must have been at least 800 doors in there. After hours of tedious and painstaking work (seriously, these metal doors can hurt your hands), we managed to separate many of doors by which range of hundreds they were in. Since Alumni Weekend was fast approaching, we had to move quickly, and we only finished a fraction of them for the weekend. But afterwards, we completed most of them and now have SPO Box doors 1-600. 

So, now that we've got them all neatly organized and matched with the correct codes (phew), what was next? Making them available for purchase through the internet, of course.

Step 2: Selling them online

Kiflu and our very, very, very helpful webmaster for I-ImpactNow.org, Ahmed Alkhalili, worked on achieving this goal. Ahmed is a wiz when it comes to developing on the web (he is the webmaster for the popular Kephart's Music Center in Decorah) and he helped link our 501(c)(3) organizational bank account to our PayPal account, allowing people to make purchases over the internet and for their capital to be directly deposited to I-ImpactNow's bank account. A perfectly seamless operation. 

But after selling them, we have to ship them, too. So here comes the final step of the process.

Step 3: Shipping them out

Now, shipping them out sounds like the easiest step in this entire process. After all, we've managed to attract the attention of our customers and sell them the door already, right? Well, it's not really as simple as it seems. That's a lesson we've learned not only for this initiative, but for others, as well!

When we're ready to send our customers their SPO Box doors, we must gather quite a few elements of their order before even touching the boxes. We must purchase envelopes of variable sizes, determine which customers have expressed preference over a certain number, print off invoices, print off our "Thank You" slips (which we include in the packaging), print off the addresses that we'll post on the package, and print off another copy of the addresses to check off one by one in order to make sure we haven't forgot any. This step is managed largely by our good friend and colleague Wonde Habtamu, and I make sure that everything is being correctly documented and maintained so that we can backtrack to problem points if they occur. It's another task for which there is little room for error and a lot of ways things can go wrong. 

This Friday, we completed our first shipment of boxes where we shipped a total of 22 boxes to 13 different customers. Considering that the operation has only been online for about a month, this is excellent for us! And if you wish to purchase one, don't forget that you can have your very own Luther College SPO Box door by visiting I-ImpactNow.org's SPO Page and buying one!

The I-ImpactNow Team

I-ImpactNow runs on a small and dedicated group of students. Each of us hail from remarkably diverse walks of life, and the variety of skills we possess are responsible for the organization’s swift ascent. Let’s explore the team that makes I-ImpactNow possible.


Abhra Biswas

I'm Abhra, and I'm the Communications guy. I'm maintaining the blog and I revise some of the grant proposals we write up. I also author many of the circulatories that float around campus, like the one that professors will be receiving in order to strengthen our network. The thank you notes for donors and folks who purchase our SPO boxes are also created by me. Writing is my passion, and I love love love words, so it was kind of natural for me to pick up this role for the organization! I'm majoring in Political Science and Philosophy and hope to enroll at law school after my time here at Luther (it's going so faaaast!!).


Kristin Westby

Kristin Westby is our Public Relations coordinator. Those awesome videos that you see on your Facebook newsfeed about I-ImpactNow? Kristin managed the production and editing processes of all of them. She also assumes a secretarial role for the organization, as she is always taking very precise notes during conversations among the group. Kristin's heading to Peru for the remainder of the semester, so I-ImpactNow's going to be losing a very valuable asset for the rest of this year. Thankfully, when she's back next year, Kristin and I will be able to manage our own I-ImpactNow chapter at Luther to continue raising money for future projects. Kristin's majoring in Spanish and minoring in Secondary Education.


William Montoya

Will's our Human Resources manager. A phenomenal activist, this people person is the definition of "public servant." William exercises his social networking skills to help the organization expand its reach, and his efforts have proved very helpful to the mission. In addition to helping I-ImpactNow entrench itself in the minds of people all over the globe, Will is also the President of Luther College's Student Senate. Again, Will is someone devoted to the services of the people and someone that can't forget meeting. He is majoring in Political Science and minoring in Communication studies.


Ezra Mengistu

Ezra was one of the chief pioneers during I-ImpactNow's first irrigation project in Ethiopia, "Collaborating on Irrigation to Fight Hunger." In other words, he was absolutely essential to the success of our first project (when it consisted of only two people), and this achievement has lent itself significantly to the growth of the organization. Ezra's studying towards his Masters of Business Administration at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, so we don't really get to see him as often as we would like. However, the team will all be united at the Clinton Globial Initiative University Conference in San Diego, CA this March!


Kiflu Arega Tesfaye

Kiflu is the architect of I-ImpactNow. During his sophomore at Luther College, Kiflu wanted to help his homeland. He wanted a better future for his brothers and sisters in Ethiopia. He wanted to impact. So, in collaboration with Ezra Mengistu, the two pioneered "Collaborating on Irrigation to Fight Hunger," a project which would develop an irrigation-based farmer's cooperative in Ethiopia. After months and months of arduous grant-writing and publicity efforts, the project proved a resounding success. Two years later, Kiflu decided to take his vision and expand it to a new team dynamic to impact on an even greater level. 
Thus, I-ImpactNow was born. 




I-ImpactNow has been making some very significant advances at breakneck speed, and I'll be blogging about them in the coming days. We'll be reaching our goal of $35,000 in no time at all, it really is impressive how quickly some programs can snowball. Stay tuned - you won't be disappointed!