From a Conference Hallway to a Village on the Sea of Cortés
How one request from Comepesca became a solar-powered pilot program — and why it’s only getting started.
A conversation at the Sustainable Ocean Conference
Comepesca — Mexico’s leading nonprofit council for sustainable seafood production and consumption — hosted a Sustainable Ocean Conference bringing together fishing communities, industry, and conservation partners from across the region. Steve Bender, of the 7 Seas Initiative and a Rotary Club of Newport Beach leader, was invited to speak.
Following his talk, Luis Bourillón — Comepesca’s Director of Sustainability and Special Projects — approached Steve with a request on behalf of a community he knew well: San Evaristo, a small, remote fishing village on the Sea of Cortés in Baja California Sur, in northwestern Mexico.
A village running on borrowed ice and scarce water
San Evaristo’s economy depends almost entirely on small-scale fisheries that supply regional markets. But the village has no reliable, affordable source of ice. To keep their catch cold, fishers transport ice from the city of La Paz — more than 100 miles away — a trip that adds cost, cuts into quality, and limits the markets they can reach.
Good-quality drinking water is just as scarce. Despite existing local infrastructure, the isolated desert community struggles with water quality that contributes to real health problems, particularly for children. Luis explained that these are not problems unique to San Evaristo — hundreds of coastal villages across Mexico face the same combination of unreliable ice and unsafe water.
Making it a priority for the 2026–2027 Rotary Year
Steve had built a career designing modular, deployable humanitarian infrastructure — most notably Doc in a Box, a mobile aid clinic created for rural South Africa, along with related projects like Dental in a Box and Vision in a Box, each bringing essential services to communities that lacked them.
As he learned more, the scale of San Evaristo’s daily burden became clear: fishers were driving more than three hours a day, every day, burning diesel fuel just to keep ice supplied — while the village’s children grew up without access to reliable, safe water. Steve agreed to design and help create a solar-powered ice facility for San Evaristo, with one condition attached to the project from day one: the community would also receive safe drinking water. He committed to making the project a priority for the 2026–2027 Rotary Year.
A first prototype, and a call to a longtime partner
Steve designed the first prototype for what would become Ice in a Box: a solar-powered unit that produces ice from desalinated seawater, built on the same “box” philosophy that made Doc in a Box work — modular, transportable, and built to be deployed where the need is greatest.
To bring the design to life, Steve turned to GivePower, longtime friends and collaborators who have spent years engineering solar-powered desalination systems — their Solar Water Farms — for communities around the world. GivePower had both the technical expertise and the fabrication capability to build the unit at their facility in Austin, Texas, before it is shipped to Mexico for installation in San Evaristo.
One village becomes a model for many
Word of the San Evaristo project has traveled quickly. Since the original request from Comepesca, the 7 Seas Initiative has received similar requests from coastal and rural communities across Latin America and Asia — each facing some version of the same challenge: no reliable ice, no safe water, and a heavy reliance on fossil fuel to bridge the gap.
What began as a single design for a single village is now becoming a pilot program — a replicable model that Rotary clubs, NGOs, and communities anywhere can adapt to their own coastline.