Focus on Coordinating Various NPSS Humanitarian Programs

Until the start of this year, humanitarian projects and initiatives have been organized by volunteers who looked for the necessary funding from either operational surpluses or initiative funding. Many of these efforts have endured and grown over the years and, indeed, I think we in NPSS can be proud of our record here, especially the Smart Village initiative (smartvillage.ieee.org) that has had such a magnificent impact on so many people living in the developing world. In addition, I can think of several other NPSS-funded initiatives proposed and run by our members that have and will help lift up people in all parts of the world. These range from help for Navajos living in the far remote areas of the Navajo reservation to low-cost X-ray machines to advanced summer schools held in countries of Africa and Asia. This is a large number of humanitarian initiatives for a small IEEE Society and multiplying even some of this out across all of IEEE one can imagine that there is a lot going on.

Funding Challenges to Support SIGHT Groups

About seven years ago the Board formed the Humanitarian Activities Committee (HAC) to support small groups of IEEE volunteers who proposed and wanted to implement humanitarian projects with a cost currently up to $10k. The HAC provided training and a framework for these SIGHT groups around the world to help them initiate sustainable humanitarian projects that HAC would review and, if approved, fund. In this sense the initiatives also provided valuable training and experience for members. There are over 35,000 SIGHT members around the world.

In 2022, the IEEE President appointed an ad hoc committee to look at the issues of coordination, oversight and general promotion of all these activities. The result was to change the HAC to the Humanitarian Technologies Board (HTB at htb.ieee.org) with a much broader remit across all of IEEE. This Board has significant new challenges with which it is grappling.

The main one is knocking on the doors of all the running and planned humanitarian activities and announcing that these enthusiastic volunteers have a new master that they were perhaps unaware of. How is this to be done without impacting enthusiasm? One way is to offer a new source of funding, but that leads to the second issue: moving funding from local operational spending and initiative funding to funding directly from the IEEE Board, adding to the general IEEE overhead charge on package product revenue.

I think that all these projects will have to be looking to continue to develop their various funding sources, be it public donations, member donations or initiative funding. To this end I want to remind you about the NPSS Fund which allows us to fund these projects when the initiative funding expires after three years. IEEE, as a whole, is limited in transfers to the IEEE Foundation, where the NPSS Fund is held, to be no more than total outside donations. It is the old story, every bit helps and, of course, bigger bits help more. Please go to our website at ieee-npss.org and find the donate button on the home page.

Thank you.

Peter Clout, our Communications Committee Chair, is a member of the HTB 2023-2024, and can be reached by E-mail at [email protected].