Rotary Connection

Tom Burns, the inventor of the SUN OVENS®, has been a member of Rotary International for more than 40 years. It was Tom’s involvement in Rotary that showed him the need people around the world had for a way to cook that did not require cutting down trees. 

A VILLAGER SUN OVEN® at the Village of Hope School donated by Rotary District 6930 of Boca Raton Florida. 

Since 1986, Rotarians have supported SUN OVEN® projects on five continents, saving countless trees and improving the lives of thousands of people. Rotary still remains an active participant in numerous projects around the world.

Tom Burns (left), the SUN OVEN® inventor, Paul Munsen President of SUN OVENS International, and Rotarian Ken Schumann of Hartland, Wisconsin supervise the preparation of a sun cooked meal. Ken Schumann coordinated a matching grant through the Rotary Foundation to provide two VILLAGER SUN OVENS® for Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 

District Governor elect Kent Converse, of district 5690, and Rotarian Sam Muyskens demonstrate a GLOBAL SUN OVEN® to members of the Rotary Club Cap-Haitian, Haiti. The Rotary Clubs of District 5690, in cooperation with the Cap-Haitian Rotarians, are starting a GLOBAL SUN OVEN® assembly plant in Lambert, Haiti in January 2004.

The TEMPLE SOLAR PROJECT (TSP) is a district level of Rotary District 6450 (the birthplace of Rotary Chicago) program established in November of 1997 in memory of Past District Governor William Temple ('94-'95).

HOW THE TEMPLE SOLAR PROJECT WORKS
In many underdeveloped nations, all cooking and baking is done with wood or wood converted to charcoal. Population growth has gradually consumed available fuel and now requires daylong journeys by women and children to locate remaining wood in many deforested lands. The conversion of scarce wood to charcoal in order to bake basic staples such as bread wastes 60% of the fuel, damages the body, deforests the land and pollutes the air. The VILLAGER SUN OVENS®, provided through the funding campaigns of the Temple Solar Project, can bake hundreds of loaves of bread, cook all forms of food or purify water.

One of the many Micro-Sun-Bakeries provided by the Temple Solar Project in Honduras.

The Temple Solar Project facilitates the funding to purchase these large ovens, arranges a partnership with Rotary Clubs in receiving nations and manages the shipment. Receiving clubs arrange for the delivery, set up and training to put the project into effect. This solar energy cooking and baking equipment forms the nucleus of micro-bakeries, which serve the basic needs of small communities and enable women to learn enterprise and greater self-sufficiency.

To date more than 50 VILLAGER SUN OVENS® will have been placed throughout the world in order to accomplish this improvement. These countries were poor to start with and have suffered due to natural disasters or war. The countries that have benefited from this project include:

Afghanistan	Ghana	Malawi	South Africa
Angola	Guatemala	Namibia	Swaziland
Argentina	Haiti	Nepal	Thailand
Bolivia	Honduras	Nigeria	Turkey
Burkina Faso	India	Panama	Uganda
Dominican Republic	Kenya	Sri Lanka	Zambia
Ethiopia	North Korea	Soma	Zimbabwe

These ovens are being used to provide food for refugee camps, aids orphans, schools, hospitals and remote villages that are frequently women enterprise projects. To best view how the ovens have been successfully implemented, please visit the TSP web site at www.rotarysolarovens.org

Why Solar Ovens?
Ever since man discovered fire, he began to change the ecology of the world. The industrial age saw tremendous strides in the consumption of wood and other fossil fuels, leading to pollution on a worldwide scale and to depletion of valuable natural resources. The demands of massive population growth and the inefficient conversion of wood to charcoal have outstripped the third world's forests ability to regenerate.  The ecological effect of wood fuels is burdensome and has a far-reaching negative global impact. 

These global trends will surely lead to environmental destabilization in two major ways, deforestation and global warming. Science strongly supports the fact that deforestation for agricultural and fuel use is changing weather patterns, causing soil erosion and depleting plant and animal life. It is predicted that wide-spread suffering will occur, including forced migration, crop failures, famine, destructive weather patterns and economic mayhem. 

No one on earth will be spared from these events, but those groups with the least resources and ability to respond will suffer the most.

One-half of the world cooks with wood or charcoal fires. Fuelwood shortages make essential, daily cooking very difficult for one-fourth of humanity. As forests are eliminated, villagers have to travel great distances to find wood. This often takes half of their day or requires that they spend half of their household income for cooking fuel. Solar cooking can have an enormous impact on the everyday life of millions of people in underdeveloped countries. Smoke from cooking fires is the leading cause of infectious lung afflictions among young children leading to the death of over five million children in the third world each year. 

The benefits are to:

•  provide a source of safe, sustainable energy
•  prevent deforestation from creating irreparable ecological destruction
•  provide nutritional, inexpensive food for local citizens
•  establish self-sustaining micro-bakeries
•  improve the quality of life
•  aid villages with community development through micro-enterprise and economic empowerment

THE TEMPLE SOLAR PROJECT has: 

• Reduced the demand on the forest
• Reduced global warming
• Helped curtail infectious lung afflictions
• Created jobs
• Provide new opportunities for communities to grow and prosper

You can help by supporting THE TEMPLE SOLAR PROJECT. Get involved! Adopt a village! Make a difference! Contact:

SUN OVENS® were invented by a Rotarian in 1986. Since then thousands of people in more than 126 countries have benefited from these wonderful devices that cook with the power of the sun. Our objective is to bring together like-minded Rotary Clubs from around the world, committed to placing solar ovens in developing countries plagued by poverty and deforestation to save lives by preserving forests. 

Rotary projects serve as a model to the world that solar energy and micro-enterprise can be combined to create self-sustaining solutions to environmental and economic dilemmas. We have identified worthy projects around the world and are seeking to match these projects with Rotary clubs and districts that want to make a difference. We stand ready to assist in matching clubs and districts with projects. When you provide SUN OVENS® to a deforested area, you are creating a sustainable international project for your club with social, economic and environmental benefits for many years to come.