** This post is a modified essay that was originally published in the online literary magazine Drunken Boat. We hope this will give our supporters insight into SOIL’s guiding principles and we thank Drunken Boat and Ashoka Changemakers for encouraging us to philosophically reflect on why we do the....
In Theo Talks Episode 19, Theo's trip to the lumber yard gets momentarily interrupted by some unexpected guests. As Theo says: "this video was going about the wood... You can see how concentrated I am making my videos". All in all, this Theo Talks provides an interesting glimpse of a cemetery....
The world of composting toilets is full of different models and technologies. At SOIL we strive to design toilet models that are desirable to the users and affordably constructed entirely from locally-available materials. Almost all SOIL toilets use urine diversion (also known as UD) funnels which....
For the past five years SOIL has been renting a beautiful downtown building in Cap-Haitien that has served as our northern Haiti office. This building has many benefits: it's conveniently close to the urban neighborhoods we work in and also close to the bus station, the airport, our partner....
** This post is a direct transcript of SOIL Executive Director, Sasha Kramer's, talk at World Water Week Stockholm on September 3, 2013 during a session called " Learning from WASH System Failures: Resilient Risk Reduction". My name is Sasha Kramer and I am an ecologist who has been living and....
This past Thursday, SOIL hosted an educational training session with the American Red Cross (ARC) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to use SOIL’s experiences in ecological sanitation as a model for how to think about development work in an environmental context. The day-long workshop was attended by 36....
Join SOIL’s charismatic Regional Director Theo Huitema on another adventure. In Theo Talks Episode 18, Theo provides humorous commentary while we watch "the man with the basket" fish in our fish ponds that are made from repurposed concrete compost bins! These were SOIL's very first bins, but had to....
August 20, 2013, New York City - The Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) is proud to announce the Semi-Finalists for the 2013 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. "We received a record number of entries this year, making it more difficult than any year from the past six years, to narrow down the pool to....
By Vic Hinterlang Theo Huitema, SOIL’s Cap-Haitien Regional Director, met me at the airport. After coffee and a bite to eat at the office, located downtown not far from the waterfront, I went out with Monika Roy, a Program Coordinator whose specialties are environmental economics and sustainable....
By the International Political Forum, August 20, 2013. Original post available here. The earthquake of 2010 devastated Haiti – since then it has perpetually struggled to re-build itself and for those that have chosen to keep an eye on this impoverished Island we have seen few success stories....