Engineers With a Cause

It wasn’t surprising, then, that when Gutierrez arrived at UCLA in the fall of 2022 she decided to major in the mathematics of computation. She envisioned applying her number-crunching skills to a career in aerospace, creating software used to design aircraft and spacecraft, model flight dynamics and manage complex systems.

Those plans took an eye-opening vector in April 2023 when she attended a meeting of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), a student-led group that partners with underserved communities and local NGOs to build sustainable solutions that address basic human needs. Enlisting in a Uganda clean-water project, by then in its third year, Gutierrez began on the finance team and eventually became co–project manager. Thanks to her EWB experience, she now plans to work with an NGO after graduation. “I want to be involved,” she says, “in work that has a real-world impact.”

Founded in 2004, the Westwood club is one of 150 campus chapters across the country affiliated with Engineers Without Borders USA. The national organization, which operates country offices in Africa and Central and South America, reviews development projects, community organizations and NGO partners around the world for its student groups. Once an EWB-USA project is approved, mentors and a Registered Engineer in Charge (REIC) are assigned to provide technical and other support.

The UCLA chapter has worked on projects in nine countries, building a schoolhouse in Nicaragua, rainwater catchment tanks in Guatemala and a poultry farm in Nepal. Its teams have also designed biofactories in Colombia and wheelchair-accessible planters for a community garden in Ontario, California.

In the most recent chapter survey, taken during the 2024–25 academic year, half of the club’s 79 members were engineering majors; the rest came from 13 diverse disciplines, including astrophysics and neuroscience. Business economics majors work on financing and fundraising, political science majors help educate teams about the culture and politics of project sites, and computer science majors build websites. “Some campus clubs limit membership to certain majors,” Gutierrez says. “Engineers Without Borders is open to all who are willing to give their time.”

According to former club president Suraj Shah ’25, a mechanical engineering major who graduated in June, most UCLA organizations focus on developing personal skills, and EWB applies those skills to benefit communities around the world. “We are fortunate to be in a position to aid others,” Shah says. “This organization enables students to use their knowledge and talents to make a real difference in the world.”

Courtesy of Engineers Without Borders / Adobe Stock
Uganda was an opportunity, says one Bruin, “to spread the club’s impact across the world.”

UGANDA

Undaunted by the COVID-19 pandemic, in March 2021 the UCLA chapter committed to a clean-water project in the eastern Uganda farming village of Bukonko. “We had no water projects or African ones,” says Logan McDevitt ’22, who was the co–project manager at the time. “We decided to spread the club’s impact across the world.”

The students’ 40-page evaluation recommended a two-part plan. Phase I: Drill a hand pump well closer to the village center than existing wells and degraded surface-water supplies. Phase II: Upgrade the hand pump to a solar-powered unit that would send water to an elevated 60-ton tank. From there, gravity pressure would distribute water to five tap stands positioned throughout the village. The project’s original technical director, Lisa Thamiz ’23, asked EWB–USA’s East Africa Regional Office, in Kampala, for contractor recommendations. She then requested proposals from the regional firms, evaluated the responses and picked a winner: Kampala-based TGS Water.

Courtesy of Engineers Without Borders
Collecting water samples in Bukonko, Uganda

In the spring of 2022, McDevitt, Thamiz and three other club members flew to Uganda with project REIC Peter McNulty, an L.A.-based engineer, for a site assessment. For three days, the team checked out drilling sites identified by TGS’s hydrogeological survey, met community leaders and conducted household surveys to ensure locals were invested in the project’s success. A representative from the team’s local nonprofit partner, Light Up Hope Uganda, warned the students that some villagers were afraid to speak with them. “They thought we were missionaries, because that’s how outside help usually comes to them,” Thamiz recalls. “Being there in person really helped establish trust.”

Much of 2023 was spent writing reports and designing a borehole and water-distribution system. Then, in January 2024, TGS Water started drilling. Back in Westwood, the team anxiously awaited results. “Everybody was on pins and needles, including Logan and Lisa, who had graduated by then,” McNulty says. “WhatsApp kept everyone current.”

Word from Uganda reached the campus at 1 o’clock in the morning: TGS had struck water more than 200 feet down. A pump test later showed the borehole produced 64,400 gallons of clean water per day — “a real gusher,” McNulty says.

Light Up Hope Uganda sent the team videos of community members celebrating the good news. “They were thanking us individually,” Thamiz says. Adds McDevitt: “I’d started on the project three years earlier. Seeing people using the well was a real full-circle moment.”

As for Phase II, Gutierrez and the six other club leaders consulted regularly over the summer with McNulty and the EWB-USA’s Kampala office, finalizing calculations and preparing drawings for the pre-implementation report. The goal is to complete the project this academic year.

Courtesy of Engineers Without Borders / Adobe Stock
Nepal offered the chance to support and build a bold, new — and potentially life-changing — school.

NEPAL

For generations, human traffickers have targeted poor indigenous villages like Ramati in central Nepal, tempting girls and their impoverished families with tales of well-paying city jobs and a better life. Anjali Tamang was one such girl: In 1996, when she was 12 years old, Tamang was trafficked to Kolkata, India, where she spent 12 years in forced labor.

With the help of Florida-based Her Future Coalition (HFC), Anjali escaped, pursued her education and returned to her village as an author and antitrafficking activist. There, she established the Freedom and Hope Nepal nonprofit and, in 2021, opened the Freedom School to break the cycles of trafficking and child marriage. To sustain the school and community, Anjali came up with a bold plan: An industrial-scale poultry farm that would provide food security for the school and community and income for survivors of trafficking and women working in the school.

Courtesy of Engineers Without Borders
Bruin engineers went to work to bring Anjali’s vision of a 1,000-square-foot chicken coop to life.

In the fall term of 2023, Engineering a Better World, a campus club affiliated with EWB UCLA, signed on to the project and began brainstorming Anjali’s concept of a 1,000-square-foot chicken coop with roosting bars, nesting boxes and other poultry amenities.

The team’s fundraising in early 2024 bagged $10,000. “The fall term was the big tech quarter,” says Alisha Bhat, a bioengineering major who is the incoming co–project manager with Aditi Patlola, a civil engineering major. The group split into three CAD teams and submitted designs to Anjali and HFC. After multiple reviews and modifications, the team finalized the design in late 2024, and construction of the farm began in January 2025. Winter and spring fundraising met the team’s goal of $25,000. Meanwhile, the students were receiving regular updates from Anjali on the progress of construction.

A few months later, Bhat, Patlola and four other students traveled to Nepal for a site inspection — and pitched in with drywalling and cleanup as the project rounded to completion. “Ramati is a beautiful, welcoming community,” Patlola says. “We participated in the town’s activities and watched kids paint a mural on the school’s wall.”

The coop’s feathered tenants began arriving this summer. Eventually, the coop will house some 400 chickens — enough, perhaps, to sustain Anjali’s audacious dream.

ONTARIO, CALIFORNIA

An hour east of the UCLA campus, some 400,000 residents of the Inland Empire live in a food desert — a region defined as presenting limited access to food that is plentiful, affordable and nutritious. In 2011, the grassroots nonprofit Huerta del Valle (“Orchard of the Valley”) responded to the need by establishing a network of gardens and farms in and around the city of Ontario to provide healthy, organic food to the community.

Disabled gardeners faced difficulties participating, so HdV founder Maria Alonso reached out to the nonprofit Community Engineering Corps, which partnered with EWB UCLA. The goal was to design and build 10 ADA-compliant, wheelchair-accessible raised garden beds — nine for adults, one for a child — flanking the entrance to HdV’s flagship 10-acre site.

Enlisting in a Uganda clean-water project, Julia Gutierrez eventually became its project manager. She now plans to work for an NGO post-graduation. “I want to be involved in work that has a real world-impact,” she says.

In fall 2024, co–project managers Valeria Sanchez Garcia and Ryan Booher — both civil engineering majors from the Inland Empire — made multiple site visits with their team and advisors. They walked the grounds, took measurements, met community members and learned more about Alonso’s vision for local urban farms.

Back on campus, the students used AutoCAD and Onshape to generate concepts for wooden, U-shaped planters high enough to accommodate wheelchairs. By January 2025, their advisors, from the Los Angeles–based firm Structural Focus, had reviewed and approved the configuration and specifications. The design bounced back and forth between the campus and Ontario until Alonso signed off.

At the time, Structural Focus was working on a renovation project at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. One of the advisors got the green light from Sony for the students to haul away the high-quality lumber being ripped out as a timely, in-kind donation. It was recycling at its finest.

This spring, a team of 12 students began cutting the rescued wood and creating an assembly process in the Samueli Makerspace in Boelter Hall. Prep work on the three-piece planters was completed by the end of the academic year, and an instruction manual is currently being written that will enable HdV volunteers to assemble the raised beds on-site. “I come from this area, and I never knew about Huerta del Valle,” Sanchez Garcia says. “I really enjoyed applying what we learned in the classroom to help people there access healthy food.”

Courtesy of Engineers Without Borders
Photos show the progress of the sanitation/latrine redesign for a primary school in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia.

ETHIOPIA

It all began in Fall Quarter 2022 in, of all places, Kerckhoff Coffeehouse. Jalal Abdel-Latif, who is Ethiopian, graduated from UCLA in 1985 with a master’s degree in African studies and urban planning. He was at Kerckhoff brainstorming international development projects with Alex Kunczynski ’23, president of EWB UCLA.

At the time, Abdel-Latif was the grants manager for United Support of Artists for Africa (USAFA), the nonprofit that recorded the 1985 fundraising song “We Are the World.” Over the next several months, he and Kunczynski discussed multiple concepts. They finally settled on a three-pillar prototype project at a primary school in Abdel-Latif’s hometown of Dire Dawa: modern latrines, a clean-water system and a virtual learning infrastructure to provide remote instruction.

Most EWB UCLA projects originate with the national EWB organization, but Abdel-Latif proposed initial funding from his family’s foundation, along with grants from USAFA. That put the project under the aegis of Engineering a Better World, a campus organization that steps in when EWB UCLA works directly with foundations, nonprofits and communities.

In Spring Quarter 2023, Kunczynski traveled to Ethiopia, where he and Abdel-Latif visited primary and secondary schools and met with representatives from the Ministry of Education and Dire Dawa University, as well as school principals and community leaders. After a week of evaluation, stakeholders selected the Gende Garada Primary School as the site for the prototype.

Back in Westwood, a team of some 20 students deployed digital tools to generate architectural drawings, blueprints, materials lists and budgets, and then sent their work to an Ethiopian contractor hired by Abdel-Latif’s family foundation. Construction began around May 2024 on eight latrines of reinforced concrete with slanted roofs to prevent flooding. Bathroom stalls retained squat toilets to remain culturally appropriate. The latrines were completed by October; the water tank was installed the following March.

While the remote learning component proved too challenging to implement at the Gende Garada school, in May Abdel-Latif and other stakeholders in Ethiopia selected a second school, Guguba Elementary, which is now slated to receive all three pillars of the concept. “It’s definitely the club project I’ve been most committed to,” says Aditya Niwalkar, an engineering major and co–project manager. “It resonates with me — the importance of doing work for people who are in need.”

NICARAGUA

In 2013, the town of San Sebastián reached out to EWB UCLA. It wasn’t the first time.

Four years earlier, the chapter had designed and built a modest sanitation project for the town, located an hour south of Managua. Now, the community needed help with a bigger issue. Its leaky, single-room schoolhouse was inadequate for its 100 students and for the 300 families who use it periodically as a storm shelter.

Thus began the Nicaragua Schoolhouse Project, the first and only large-scale structural project managed by an American EWB campus chapter. Mentors from the Los Angeles structural and civil engineering firm KPFF showed the students how to read engineering drawings and walked them through structural design, material procurement, scheduling and budgeting — incredibly valuable real-world experience.

The chapter designed a wooden, dual-purpose K–12 schoolhouse and storm shelter strong enough to withstand the country’s six-month hurricane season. The estimated cost for the 2,080-square-foot structure: $40,000, a huge sum to raise.

In 2014, the UCLA students visited San Sebastián to meet the community and gain a better understanding of its needs. They returned in 2017 and again in the spring of 2018, partnering with local volunteers to complete the 32-by-64-foot concrete foundation and stem walls.

With the Gende Garada project complete, the group selected a second Ethiopian school to implement the concept. “It’s definitely the club project I’ve been most committed to,” says Aditya Niwalkar, an engineering major and co-project manager. “It resonates with me — the importance of doing work for people in need.”

While the fundraising campaign chugged on, the students finished their design of the wooden structure in 2020, only to hit two unforeseen problems (what engineering wags call “an opportunity for revision”): First, the design included 20-foot joists, but Nicaraguan lumber isn’t milled that long; second, it turned out that the government imposes budget-crushing timber fees on wooden construction.

Back to the drawing board. The national EWB’s country office in Managua connected the club with local engineer-contractor Julio Muñoz, who took over the project, and swapped out wood for steel. “It essentially became a contractor-designed building,” says Ben Ferrero ’08, M.S. ’10, a project adviser from KPFF. “The role for students was changed to peer-reviewing Muñoz’ work.”

In April 2023, four students and three KPFF advisers traveled to the site. Working with Muñoz’s crew, the UCLA team cut columns, beams, and angle brackets; sanded welds; and painted. They also found time to play soccer with the local kids and talk to teachers and parents. By the end of the week, the structure had a foundation, I-beam uprights and a corrugated metal roof.

In May, back on campus, the students got Muñoz’s new tab and a dose of sticker shock: The project would require an additional $42,000. “Everybody freaked out,” recalls Ali Davis ’25, the Nicaragua project manager at the time. “But we’d already met the community, and the schoolhouse was half-built. There was no turning back.”

The team began selling candy on Bruin Walk, throwing rent parties, applying for grants and launching a crowdfunding campaign. A foundation came through with a $35,000 grant, and by September, the students had raised nearly the entire amount. After a few cost-cutting tweaks, the schoolhouse was finished in May 2024.

The community was planning to host a grand opening later that month, which the students, Ferrero and his KPFF colleague (and former chapter president), Anabella Noguera ’22, were planning to attend. Twenty-four hours before flight time, the EWB Managua office phoned Davis to tell her that foreign volunteers entering Nicaragua would be arrested and deported. (Since 2018, the Ortega administration has shuttered more than 1,500 nonprofit organizations in the country that the government considers unaligned with its policies.) The UCLA team had to settle for photos of the celebration.

“Ten years ago, we told San Sebastián we’d build a new school,” Suraj Shah, the former chapter president, says. “For years, people had to walk past the skeleton of a building. It felt so great to fulfill our promise.”

COLOMBIA

Ali Davis grew up in the Mexican beach town of San Pancho, the daughter of a woman who founded a nonprofit that focuses on community, education and the environment. So, when she arrived at UCLA in September 2021 as an engineering major, joining EWB seemed like the obvious thing to do.

Courtesy of Ali Davis/Engineers Without Borders
Construction of the first greenhouse took a week; work on a second is about to begin.

After working for two years on the club’s Nicaragua schoolhouse project, Davis reached out to her mother’s international contacts in hopes of finding a nonprofit partner who wanted to tackle something with less fundraising and more design. It eventually led her in 2023 to SoyDoy, a Colombia foundation dedicated to sustainable food production.

The result was a collaboration to build biofactories in two rural Colombian communities, and maybe more. These greenhouses are designed to replace agricultural chemicals with eco-friendly biological fertilizers, pest-control agents and plant-growth stimulants. EWB UCLA agreed to raise $5,000 per factory; SoyDoy promised to underwrite the balance.

Davis spent most of 2024 setting up a student team of eight volunteers to work on the design. The greenhouse concept consists of a 26-by-32-foot concrete floor; concrete footings for a superstructure of bamboo, which is a common, low-cost building material native to Colombia; and a lightly sloped triangular roof of corrugated metal.

In October 2024, the UCLA team sent their vetted work to SoyDoy’s architects for review. For the next six months, the students solicited donations and used CAD tools and 3D printers to create physical models for presentations and fundraising.

By mid-June, when the secondary coffee harvest ended, the SoyDoy team went to one of the communities to help local volunteers build their greenhouse. Most of the construction was completed in about a week. Work on the second greenhouse is scheduled for later this year. “Most engineering projects take years,” says incoming project manager Ella Lee, “but with this project, I went through every single step in a year — a hands-on example of what this career will look like.”

GREATEST HITS
The UCLA chapter of EWB has been going strong since 2004 — with the track record to prove it.

Guatemala 2006–13
The goal: Clean, accessible water

EWB students raised $12,000 to cover the costs of travel, lodging and construction of 17 domestic rainwater catchment tanks in the Momostenango municipality in the country’s western highlands. UCLA students trained community members to build three of the tanks and created a Spanish-language manual with instructions, photos and diagrams to advance project sustainability.

Thailand 2002–04, 2006–14
The goals: Build a health clinic, construct school classrooms

EWB chapters at UCLA, Columbia University and the University of Maryland collaborated on construction of a 10-room health clinic in the mountain village of Samli. Two years later, in the border village of Ban Nor Lae, the UCLA chapter began work on expanding a two-room preschool overcrowded with 50 students, most of them children of refugees from neighboring Myanmar. In this seismically active region, the university volunteers designed an 1,800-square-foot structure built to California’s earthquake code, with three spacious new classrooms to accommodate an additional 100 children and double as a community center. Over the years, club members remained involved in the project, partnering with the Thai government on paved-road access, roof repairs, clean-water upgrades, improved stormwater drainage and schoolyard fencing.

Black Mesa, Arizona 2018
The goal: Build an off-grid water system

Uranium mining in the 1950s and 1960s contaminated groundwater around this community in the Navajo Nation. EWB UCLA designed a solar-powered water system for a family who had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing as a prototype for the widely dispersed community. In the summer of 2018, five club members traveled to the reservation, where the volunteers buried a 550-gallon water tank, dug a 30-foot trench for a gray-water PVC line, installed input and output pipes, built a stand for the solar panel, set up the electrical components and wired the electric water pump. They also added a shower, hot-water supply and gray-water recycling to help with water conservation.

Engineers Without Borders USA is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization. Donations to the UCLA chapter can be made online. For more information, visit ewbucla.org or write to the club at ewbucla@gmail.com.