By Jerry W. Venters, Past governor of District 6040 and member of the Rotary Club of Lander, Wyoming, USA
Four members of our Rotary Club in Lander, Wyoming, attended the 2023 District 5440 Conference in Estes Park, Colorado, USA expecting to promote our recent projects in Mexico and Rwanda. Much to our surprise, another international project found us!
Andy Lenec, a former senior Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, stirred the audience at the district conference with his story of a developing program to convert used solar panels into cell phone chargers for the people of Ukraine. The program, developed in coordination with a professor and students at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado, was still in its infancy and only a very few chargers had been shipped to Ukraine.
The Ukrainian power grid remains a target of Russian airstrikes and blackouts are common. Gas generators are more expensive, harder to ship, less mobile, and require fuel which is in limited supply. Solar chargers are easier to move and relatively inexpensive to replace if damaged or destroyed. With charged cell phones, the Ukrainians can receive evacuation orders, air raid warnings, and school schedules. They can also stay in touch with friends and relatives fighting on the front lines.
We couldn’t wait to get started
Our excitement for the project was instant and electric. We couldn’t wait to get back to energize our 65-member club and start converting used solar panels into cell phone chargers. Our service committee quickly endorsed the project, and Ken Schreuder (a retired engineer and current club secretary) agreed to lead it. We planned to ship the chargers to schools, medical facilities, internally displaced people’s camps, and others in desperate need of a means of communication in the war-torn country.
No special engineering is required to turn the 12-volt solar panels into a 5-volt power source to charge phones. The positive and negative wires coming from the used solar panels are wired to the respective wires in the power converter. We worked with a local solar installer to make sure the panels we purchased produced enough power to operate the four charging ports on the power converter without exceeding the input capacity. This allowed us to use the smallest and cheapest panels possible.
A student pen pal relationship springs up
In just six months, our club has shipped 36 chargers to various groups in Ukraine. Each unit can charge four cell phones in about two hours. Our club contributed $750 to kick-start the project, and numerous individuals and churches have given more than $5,000 in support. We have also helped three other Rotary clubs in Wyoming, and one in Missouri, to replicate the project.
Students at local high schools in Lander and the adjacent Wind River Indian Reservation have also been attaching converters to solar panels. The students write encouraging messages on the panels’ backs and ship the units to high schools in Ukraine. Recently, a pen pal relationship started to develop between the students in Wyoming and Ukraine.
The cost of attaching a voltage converter to a small solar panel and shipping it to Ukraine is about $120. That seems like a small price to pay to build goodwill and friendships with the people of Ukraine and help them survive a war that is ravaging their country. We believe we are “Doing Good in the World,” one charger at a time!
Learn how Rotary members are supporting those affected by the war in Ukraine.
https://blog.rotary.org/2024/02/22/solar-cell-phone-chargers-help-ukrainians/