Sirona Cares

Sirona's Year in a Glance: 2013

As the year ends our team wishes to thank all of our donors and supporters.  It has been another amazing year for Sirona full of challenges and accomplishments.

• Our biofuel farmers are actively working to plant 30,000 seedlings thanks to our donors and assistance from Aid Still Required.
• Our solar program is ramping back up to full health after a retrofit of all of our equipment that took place during the summer and fall of 2013.  Customers are enjoying light in their homes and lives are improved by the removal of kerosene lanterns.
• Our impact is increasing dramatically, thousands of households are enjoying electricity and improved income thanks to Sirona's alternative energy programs.
• Strong partnerships with our solar and battery pack manufacturing partners have resulted in better products for our customers.
• Continued support from the IEEE has kept Sirona's equipment functining and allowed us to better service our customers.
• Hundreds of little girls received hand made dresses donated by women of the Episcopal Dioscese of Northern California.
• More than 1,000 children were fed through our loan program to Sirona's biofuel farmers.  Sirona donates funds to assist the farmers so that they may expand their garden areas, and those loans are repaid in food to the local schools.

Looking forward:

• This fall we began work on a UNEP grant to light 3100 additional homes in 2014-2015 thanks to funding from the Government of Norway.  The first of 30 "Depo Eneje" (Energy Stores) will open in January, 2014 and soon after we will deploy a new solar system on Ile à Vache, a small island in southern Haiti.
• We will bring our jatropha oil to market in the spring of 2014 and plant an additional 90,000 seedlings thanks to assistance from Aid Still Required.
• An impact study of our work will be performed in the spring of 2014, we look forward to publishing the results of that study.
• We are looking to expand our work in Haiti and beyond in the coming year.

Our work is possible only through the support of our donors, so from our team, thank you, and best wishes for a happy holiday season and a prosperous new year!

 

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Lets Light a Village!

Jatropha Program Coming to Fruitition

Sirona started fighting poverty with energy through a jatrohpa-based biofuel program.  Since 2009 we have been working with small farmer cooperatives starting nurseries to plant Jatropha shrubs.  The seeds from Jatropha plants are 40% oil that is so low in glycerine it can be filtered and used in a diesel engine.  The planting program has been hugely successful with over 1,000 farmers enrolled and over 300,000 trees planted to date. 

To close the loop we need to begin processing the oil and selling it, thereby creating the revenue stream to support future seed purchases from the farmers, etc. etc.  We will also be producing an alternative charcoal briquette from the residue left after seed pressing.  Funding for planting 120,000 trees and completion of the pressing-to-market loop was provided by Aid Still Required, a nonprofit that has been working in Haiti since the earthquake in 2010.  We are partnering with Haiti Communitere for support on briquette production and a location for oil production and training of our press Operator. Our farmers are ready to go and we are in discussions relating to in-country oil sales.  Sirona is already ranked as one of the largest producers of jatropha seed, so getting the oil from the seeds to the market is the natural next step.  We are very grateful for the support from Aid Still Required and Haiti Communitaire, and we are very excited as we look into 2014 and see a program that is completely economically self-sustaining that has positive economic and enviornmental impacts for rural Haiti.

Lets Light a Village!

Looking for a charitable holiday gift idea?  Sirona is collecting funds to build Unit 16, a solar powered generating station that recharges portable battery kits for homes for a village in Haiti.  It takes $25,000 to build and deploy a unit that serves 100 homes for ten years.  Homes pay for the service, about $6.25 per month (which is what they are currently paying for kerosene), so the equipment is maintained and will last for ten years. 

Through your gift, 100 homes will receive service from the solar unit, so the cost per family is $250 per home, or $25 per year.  Broken down further, the cost is only $2 per month per family, and if we look at a family of five we are bringing life-changing electricity for just over a penny a day per person.  Energy access is the cornerstone that creates an opportunity to break the grinding cycle of poverty.

The first Unit 16 donor, 9 year old Kian Aime, started this unit with a $200 donation he collected by foregoing birthday gifts in lieu of donations to Sirona.  Once we reach $25,000 we will deploy the unit and let every participating donor know about the village that received the unit with feedback from recipients in their words so you can see the difference that you have made for families who are currently living in darkness and breathing the noxious fumes of kerosene lanterns.

No gift is too small, every gift is tax deductible, and every light makes a huge difference in the villages where we work!  Should you wish to donate as a gift to a friend or family please let us know and we will send that individual a card telling them about our program and the value of their gift to people in need.  Thank you for considering Sirona!

Rural Electricity: Business Can Be Pleasure!

It has been a really busy few days in Haiti. We have traveled to several of our solar stations and had meetings with present Operators and future Operators who make a business of renting portable energy packs (in Haiti they are called Ti Soley for Little Sun). These packs provide light for homes and the ability to charge cell phones or run small devices like radios. The meetings went very well and we left the countryside encouraged by the customers we met along the way. As we were leaving school let out and the kids surrounded the car to say hello. It makes me so happy to know that many of these kids are now able to study by electric light instead of kerosene giving them a brighter today, and tomorrow. This is why we do what we do! Here is a shot from inside the car looking out... It makes me smile.

Successful STAR-TIDES Event in D.C.

The government was shut down all week but that did not slow traffic at the 7th Annual STAR-TIDES Demo at Ft. McNair in Washington D.C.  This event draws humanitarian organizations, businesses, military and academia all interested in the core question: how do we promote sustainable solutions in stressed (post war/post disaster/impoverished) communities worldwide?

The answers are many, and the technologies demonstrated at the TIDES event range from very high tech to the simple solar cooker and composting toilet.  The largest display?  The Sun Commander, an 8.6 kW mobile solar station by Day & Night Solar (pictured above).  Workshops during the week focused upon delivery of high tech solutions in low tech environments and Michelle Lacourciere, Director of Sirona Cares Foundation participated in leading the roundtable discussion.

Sirona provides a rural electrification solution.  Our community-based solar station is designed to provide affordable basic electricity to 100 homes at a time.  Because our system is deployed simply (in the bed of a pickup truck), designed for rugged environments, affordable, and placed in a village within the context of a sustainable business model our display gained a lot of attention at this STAR TIDES event, and we look forward to next week's demo at the Pentagon.  If this demonstration interests you please keep an eye out for next year's public event which will be held in early October at Fort McNair.

Sirona Gearing up for STAR-TIDES Field Demos

 

Lighting kit at STAR TIDES demo 2012

October is an excitng month for Sirona because we participate in two STAR TIDES field demonstrations in Washington DC.  STAR-TIDES is a Department of Defense funded program that stands for "Sharing To Accelerate Research-Transformative Innovation for Development and Emergency Support".  The program promotes sustainable support to stressed populations – post-war, post-disaster, or impoverished, in foreign or domestic contexts, for short-term or long-term periods.   This year the first demonstration is at Ft. McNair from Oct. 1-4 and is open to the public, the second is at the Pentagon from Oct. 6-9.

 

 

We enjoy participating in these demonstrations because many solutions are required for stressed populations and integrated approaches to assist these communities are required.  For participants like Sirona it is a unique opportunity to network with groups who provide other pieces of the puzzle.  We use 1.5 kW solar charging stations to provide basic electricity to homes at the same price as kerosene, others provide shelter solutions, clean water solutions, mapping technologies, etc.  The two STAR-TIDES demos allow us to network and rely upon one anther going forward to better assist the populations we serve... and to find new opportunities to improve upon and expand our services to new populations.

Rarely does the non-profit or NGO world mix with the military and foreign policy makers.  Add in the relief agencies like FEMA and Red Cross and the interested public (including a field trip of middle-schoolers) and the STAR-TIDES event becomes very interesting and, well, as I started the post, becomes something we look forward to each year.  If you are in Washington I would love to meet you at STAR-TIDES!

 

 

Pentagon Demo Participants, 2012

 

 

 

Advocacy Work: Pretty Girls in Pretty Dresses

Sirona has been helping the Episcopal women of the Northern California Arch Dioscese get dresses to  little girls in Haiti for several years now.  Nearly 600 dresses have been made by these Episcopal women and deliverd to Sirona to Haiti for distribution.  Due to our strong networks throughout rural Haiti it is not difficult for us to deliver the dresses. 

The advocacy work we do generally takes the form of connecting resources to children in communities we work with.  For us, this work is joyful.  It fills us up, and cheers us up when the other work gets hard.  Advocacy projects don't feel like work... they feel like sharing an afternoon with a bunch of very happy little girls.  After that we always remember who we really are working for, and we are motivated to take back on the other issues and charge forward again.

IEEE Retrofit Progress

Portable battery kits, or "Ti Soley" kits bring affordable electricity into the homes of Sirona's customers to replace kerosene.  The program has been very successful and resulted in long waiting lists in rural Haiti.  Unfortunately the first people to use equipment are also the first to find its flaws.  The kits are designed with a low voltage disconnect (LVD) that protects the battery from being fully depleted to extend the life of batteries.  Unfortunately there was a flaw in the original LVD so we brought hundreds of kits back to Port au Prince for a retrofit run by the IEEE.  A newly designed LVD was put into the kits, all kits were repaired to perfect working order, and now they are being redeployed to our solar charging stations.

The retrofit was a massive endeavor.  Collecting kits, storing them, transporting them to the retrofit facility, and man hours required to test and retrofit every kit.  Sirona owes a great deal of thanks to many people who helped with this project.  We are especially grateful to the IEEE for seeing the retrofit through.  Sirona's Operators have patiently waited for repairs and are excited to see their inventories rising again.  This was a setback, but Sirona is ramping back up and preparing to quadruple the number of homes we serve within 18 months.  

Costly Break from Blogging

Sirona has been very busy with the energy work we do in Haiti.  The summer brought a lot of travel and our team accomplished a great deal.  The blog has definitely suffered as time between entries grew.  So much has happened that we need to catch up and show our supporters that we are making great progress.

As it turns out, if you take a break from blogging you receive (in our case) over 3,000 spam comments advertising everything anyone could possibly imagine.  It took hours to cull those out and it was a great punishment for failing to blog often enough.

We're back online, and we will be keeping you up to date on all of our work.

Thank you for hanging in with us!

Michelle Lacourciere

Sirona's Jatropha Project Creates Clean Fuel and Feeds Children

Sirona has over 1,000 farmers enrolled in our Jatropha Program.  These farmers receive free jatropha saplings to plant (2 meters x 2 meters) in and amongst their crops.  Jatropha seeds are harvested from the trees and they are then crushed to extract an oil that, once filtered, is a drop-in replacement for diesel fuel.  A by-product of crushing process is a seedcake that can be pressed into briquettes that burn cleaner than traditional charcoal.  The value of a jatropha tree keeps it safe and in the ground, and every tree planted helps Haiti's deforestation issue.

Our farmers sometimes need assistance to expand the amount of land under production.  Sirona makes "loans" of $50 to 10 farmers per year that are selected by community leaders.  These farmers are then able to extend their land and grow more food.  Rather than repay Sirona in cash, the community oversees repayment of the loan in food to the local school and/or community center.  Pictured above and b elow are happy children enjoying the food provided by local jatropha farmers. 

Sirona has worked with and supported farmers since we started working in Haiti.  We have also endeavored to feed children.  This successful program accomplishes both and we are proud to have completed the third year of loans to our farmers.

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