About Engineering for Change

Engineering for Change (E4C), founded in the spirit of engineers’ harnessing a common passion for designing and applying creative technical solutions to a broad range of significant challenges, is a dynamic and growing community of engineers, technologists, social scientists, NGOs, local governments and community advocates whose mission is to improve people’s lives in communities around the world. To accomplish this, E4C intends to break down communications barriers by providing a common forum that facilitates connection, collaboration, knowledge exchange and aggregation with complete openness, transparency and accessibility. The result is better problem solving; more affordable, appropriate and sustainable solutions and a broader reach. E4C will extend its impact by forming partnerships with organizations that are ‘on the ground’ defining needs and implementing appropriate solutions.

E4C features an open, innovative, user-friendly online platform that:

Enables NGOs and local community advocates to connect and collaborate with engineers, technologists and others who together – as partners -- have the technical skills, training and management know-how to help create and shape solutions.

Enables people to access E4C Solutions Library, a free, open source archive of aggregated and cataloged potential solutions and related information (e.g. participants, funding, observations, perspectives, workarounds) that can be replicated and appropriately adapted across regions.

Enables people working on solving humanitarian problems to connect with organizations willing to fund solution development and partner on implementation.

Originally conceived by ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), E4C is a global alliance which now includes IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and Engineers Without Borders-USA (EWB-USA) as founding partners. The E4C partnership represents over 500,000 member engineers and technologists from industry and academia throughout the world. Going forward, we look forward to welcoming participation from the broader engineering community, corporate partners, academic institutions, NGOs and other organizations in the humanitarian and global development space.