For this Executive Director Update, I want to provide a glimpse into some of the “behind-the-scenes” work we’ve been doing at 33 Buckets. Thanks for staying up-to-date and feel free to get in contact with us here. 

Improving Our Assessment & Monitoring

Over the past year, we’ve worked hard to improve our ability to accurately assess existing conditions in a potential partner community and to also assess how our interventions have impacted an existing partner community. Our Project Development Team has created a strategy that involves interviewing/surveying/conversing with community leaders, families, and water managers. We utilize one-on-one interviews as well as group discussions to develop a thorough understanding of perceptions and behaviors. The team has developed documents for each of these activities in both Spanish and English. Following a standardized procedure gives us the opportunity to identify key areas of need, necessary improvements in our implementation, and ultimately to understand/communicate our impact to you, our supporters. 

As a small team and a start-up company, a major challenge we face is not only facilitating these surveys and interviews, but also effectively documenting the lessons learned. Moreover, we’re often limited by our physical presence on the ground. In response, we’ve been exploring ways to streamline our assessment and monitoring procedures with the eventual goal of enabling local partners, community leaders, and other individuals to facilitate surveys and interviews in their communities. This led us to the idea of “digitizing” our surveys so that collected data is automatically reported and stored in our desired format. Over the past few months, we’ve worked with tech-savvy professionals from within our team and even outside of our organization to develop a digital survey network capable of collecting offline data, on-the-ground, and transmitting it to our database accessible through the web. We’ve entered the final phases of testing and development and we hope to start piloting our digital surveys soon. 

Preparing for our Annual Key-Note Event: Art-4-Agua 

Simultaneously, our Fundraising & Marketing Team already has the ball rolling in preparation for Art-4-Agua 2022, our 3rd annual art auction that brings together our community of supporters. This year, we’ve made an intentional effort to connect with more Peruvian artists in Cusco and in our partner communities. In Mollepata, we connected with a nonprofit group whose focus is empowering local artisan women who create traditional Peruvian textiles and other products. In Totora (Ccorca District), we connected with Leo Claudia, the mother of a family with a long history of creating Cusqueñan-style textiles. Without giving away much detail, we’re very excited to feature some of these women’s products at Art-4-Agua 2022. Attendees to the event will get a special glimpse into the lives of these artisans and how their products are made. Stay tuned for information about tickets. In the meantime, there’s a few ways you can help: (1) Refer an artist! If you, or anyone you know, is interested in having work featured at the auction, we’d love to connect. (2) Refer a sponsor! Do you know any individuals or companies that may want to sponsor the event? Let us know! We accept sponsorships of all kinds. Currently, we’re looking for companies interested in donation matching, providing catering, and more. We provide brand exposure before, during, and after the event as well as through our online presence. Have a friend, brand, company in mind? Shoot me an email at daniel@33buckets.org.

As always, thanks for following along with our work. I hope this provides some insight into just a few of the initiatives we have in progress behind the scenes. Next week, I’ll provide updates on Part Two of our WASH program in the community of Totora and other project updates as we round out our summer in Cusco. Have a great weekend.

Pura Agua, Pura Vida

Daniel Hoop

Executive Director