Big Ideas Award Celebration, May 2012 Photo Credit: Blum Center
Teach For Health, an NGO founded by UCSF and Berkeley students, won 1st place in the 2010 Global Poverty Alleviation category. The team proposed a model to catalyze cost-effective social change in rural, low-income villages in Nicaragua by training motivated community organizers, assisting local health promoters in Community Diagnosis and Action Planning (CDAP) and building local resource capacity. The team has expanded and strengthened the infrastructure, with 4 local staff, 69 active health promoters working in 21 communities conducting basic health-promotion activities and completing their own health-improvement projects. The team now plans to move to the next level of CDAP, which involves promoters facilitating a process in which their communities identify and prioritize their most pressing challenges, and develop and enact a plan to address specific challenges. To achieve this, the team will pilot the “Microgrant Empowerment Initiative”, providing a series of competitive, escalating grants with local matching for village-developed program proposals, in order to build local capacity for program planning and implementation, and lay the foundation for independent grant writing to implement community-driven projects.
Pioneers in Engineering (PiE) will begin a year-round mentorship program for UC Berkeley students to share their passion about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) with Bay-Area high school students and inspire them to pursue higher education in STEM fields. In the fall, Berkeley students from PiE will interact with students at targeted underprivileged high schools. This one-on-one mentoring program will include weekly meetings where high school students will learn about STEM majors through modules involving project-driven, hands-on activities. In the spring, the project activities will culminate with the design and construction of a robot for the 5th annual PiE robotics competition. Many of these students will be the first in their families to attend college, and will receive class tutoring, college application assistance, and career opportunity exploration. Cal students in PiE will be trained to serve as mentors and role models so they can directly handle the challenges in our education system and their protégés’ daily lives.
In collaboration with a U.S. based, Kenyan registered, 501c3 non-profit, called the Organic Health Response, a team of interdisciplinary UCSF, UCB, and University of Minnesota undergraduate and graduate students coming from a range of different departments including, but not limited to: medicine, environmental science, architecture, and anthropology have created a hyper efficient bio-dynamic aquaponic farming system to be built on the remote island of Mfangano, located in Nyanza Province of western Kenya. This project is to be realized during the summer of 2011 with the help of local artisans, farmers, and builders,and a group of students from UCB and UCSF. The continued iniative of the Organic Health Response and this group of students to find alternative forms treatment to the staggering prevelence of HIV/AIDS in the region prompted the need to create reliable, sustainable, economically viable, and highly efficient food production systems to turn the tide against HIV/AIDS in this region of the world.
Many piped potable water systems in developing countries do not provide continuous service. Intermittent supply is a nuisance to users and can degrade water quality. During much of the year the Capellanía water system in Coclé, Panamá provides only intermittent service to many of its clients. This project examines ways to address the issue of unreliable service in the Capellanía water system by managing demand rather than increasing supply. Many supply management approaches are explored, including improved metering, a changed billing structure and infrastructure improvements to prevent water loss. The paper finds that managing demand is a less expensive and more effective way to improve service quality for residents in developing countries affected by unreliable water availability. (Note: This project originally won in the Big ideas “Science, Technology, and Engineering Policy” category.)
This video invites viewers to imagine a more sustainable future and shows us how we can apply the 12 principles of green chemistry to live in a more environmentally friendly fashion.
“Waste Into Fuel” is a plan that will allow the Berkeley campus to harness the energy potential of the waste cooking oil that it currently disposes to replace various diesel-using appliances and utilities on campus — resulting in an overall savings of $30,000 annually after the first year of use. “Waste into Fuel” proposes that the campus convert waste cooking oil into bio-diesel by investing in 55-gallon steel drums and a Freedom Fueler Deluxe w/ Drywash, a machine which will conveniently carry out the process to create the biodiesel. The project will also use a MR-50 Methanol Recovery System to separate the byproduct of the energy extraction process into methanol. This will lower costs of the needed methanol and potentially result in a monetary gain, as the glycerin could then be used to make soap on campus or even sold to companies that process it. The goal is to not only create a system that can produce and use biodiesel, but also to execute the idea in a way that is most optimally cost-effective and environmentally friendly for the Berkeley campus.
Dengue virus causes the most common mosquito-borne viral disease affecting humans, with 3 billion people at risk for infection and an estimated 50 million cases each year. The goal of this project is to prevent severe illness and death from dengue through the use of a portable method in the field to identify the most at-risk patients. The first part of the project will develop risk scores to predict which patients presenting with fever in dengue-endemic areas are infected with dengue virus and of those infected, who will progress to develop severe dengue. In order for the risk scores to be used effectively in the field, the project team will also develop a mobile application for the iPhone that will enable any health professional to instantly calculate a patient’s risk score. The iPhone risk score application will enable physicians to distinguish dengue cases from cases of other illnesses that cause fever, as well as mild dengue cases from severe dengue cases, so they can provide patients with the appropriate medical care sooner. Additionally, it will help physicians prioritize the treatment of dengue cases in lowresource settings, where medical care and supplies are limited.
Like rural areas in many developing countries, India’s rural regions lack reliable electricity. Energy needs are often met by kerosene or highly inefficient power generators. This project will address this problem by developing micro-grids that will bring reliable, efficient and inexpensive electricity to regions of rural India. The project combines local, small-scale energy production facilities with innovative means of billing, storing and distributing energy to create a new “microgrid” system optimal for rural areas. The new microgrids will provide reliable, energy-efficient and inexpensive electricity to areas that were previously dependent on highly inefficient and expensive forms of energy.
Teach for Health is a non-profit organization founded in 2009 by UCSF students of medicine, nursing, and pharmacy, and a Berkeley MPH graduate. Teach for Health’s (TFH) mission is to train communities in program planning and leadership to improve health and well-being. Currently, Teach for Health in Nicaragua has 43 health promoters in 18 communities educating residents about health-related issues and working to expand healthcare in these communities. Funding will allow Teach for Health to evaluate, improve and expand on the work it has been doing in Nicaragua. Teach for Health will develop measures to evaluate the impact that it has had on the communities in which the program is active. This will allow Teach for Health to improve its services and its approach as it continues to expand its program. Teach for Health also plans to expand on its current offerings by partnering with several local institutions to develop a disaster response plan for participating communities.
