Following the announcement of this year’s Student Leadership Award winners at JAM 2009, The Jenzabar Foundation spoke with several of the winning organization’s student representatives to hear more about their causes, campaigns and upcoming initiatives and goals.

Read on for our interview with the University of Tulsa’s Allison Johnston, to learn about her role with the SENEA project and the organization’s plans for using the new $5,000 grant.

The Jenzabar Foundation: For those unfamiliar with the SENEA Project, could you briefly describe what the team does and the results of the team’s work thus far? Also, what role do you have within the SENEA team?

The SENEA project is comprised of a group of students who research sustainable energy technologies for use in rural areas, particularly North East Asia and now Haiti as well. We then travel and implement these technologies, hoping to improve people’s access to energy in these areas.

At our site in the Jilin Province of China for example, we have technologies such as wind turbines, solar ovens, and biogas digesters set up around a shepherd’s house. We also have built a greenhouse designed to generate renewable power at this site. Future plans for the area include wind powered air compressors and human powered vehicles. In Haiti, a new extension of the SENEA project, we are researching the feasibility of biogas digesters and hydropower.

I personally am the Project Lead for SENEA, which means I oversee the research being done and when it comes time to implement our technologies, I make sure that it happens.

TJF: As you alluded to above, one of the most significant contributions of the SENEA Project has been the construction of a model home and greenhouse called the Sustainable Shepherd’s Residence (SSR). How does the SENEA team plan to further implement these SSRs into the region?

The SSR is really a model home. It includes more technology than is needed for the resident shepherd to survive. Consequently, people living in areas near the SSR are encourage to explore it, decide which technologies would work best for them, and then choose from amongst sets of plans that include various combinations of the available technologies. With directions written in a language that they can read and built using materials that they have access to, the SSRs can be implemented into these rural areas. The SENEA Project is conducting continuous research on new and better sustainable energy sources that could possible become included in the SSR as well as on other sites in the area to continue the spread of information.

TJF: The SENEA Project hopes to someday be able to present sustainable energy systems to millions of underprivileged minority residents in North East Asia. What is it like being part of such a large-scale service initiative, especially one that is centered on the other side of the globe?

Undertaking the SENEA project requires ambitious and dedicated students, willing to help people that they never have met. And for many, traveling across the globe to do this is an added incentive and increases initiative.

TJF: Finally, how does the SENEA project plan to use the $5,000 Jenzabar Foundation Student Leadership Award?

One of the nice things about working in North East Asia is the availability of cheap materials. Because of this, individual components of the SSR cost hundreds of dollars, rather than tens of thousands of dollars as they would in America. Therefore, $5,000 will go a long way in helping the SENEA project facilitate the advancement of the SSR in the form of materials and labor costs.

One of the downsides of working in China is the cost of travel just to get to the project site- often approaching $3,000 per person. Therefore, the Jenzabar Foundation Student Leadership Award will also be used to help meet travel costs, which are not yet funded.

You can read more about the University of Tulsa’s SENEA Project by visiting their website at

http://orgs.utulsa.edu/senea/index.htm.