Volunteers from the Alternative Technology Association (ATA) are once again heading to East Timor in July for three to four weeks installing Solar Power Systems and conducting Training in Remote communities across the country.

The International Project Group (IPG) in the ATA (wow! that’s a mouthful of acronyms) have a diverse mix of projects to complete this year, in collaboration with our friends and sponsors in Timor and Australia, including several large community and school based systems together with the supply of equipment and training for the roll-out of almost 200 household systems.

Many of the volunteers take unpaid leave and pay their own way as part of their commitment to our friends in East Timor. This year the ATA has setup some projects on Pozible to help raise funds to cover some of the costs (eg. airfares, accommodation, etc.) for the volunteers.

Pozible is an Australian Crowd Funding website set up to help people raise funds for projects in a variety of fields. This new kind of model allows people to participate and help mostly small to medium projects get off the ground by accessing funding outside the traditional funding model. Rather than investing, people pledge money to the projects, and in return, the project creators offer rewards in line with the level of commitment. There are similar schemes in place overseas and the model in proving to be very popular and effective for all kinds of creative projects.

If you would like to help out this year’s projects in East Timor or find out more, head over to the ATA page (click-here) on the Pozible website and check out the current projects.