The Somo Project’s mission is to identify, train, fund and mentor entrepreneurs looking to drive social change by building enterprises in their own low-income urban communities. This project seeks out talented individuals with vision, drive and a concrete plan to change their communities from within. Focusing on taking a long-term, investment-focused approach, the project will identify focus areas that have long-term importance to a community, such as health, education and the environment. The project will identify and build partnerships with local grassroots leaders to establish Somo’s presence and local platform. The project aims to prudently allocate capital and mitigate risk by seeking partnerships with only a limited number of excellent entrepreneurs (5 -15) in each start-up class. The focus is simple: seek entrepreneurs who can build sustainable, socially focused franchises, and who have a long runway of growth ahead of them. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Conflict & Development” Category)
Bahay Kubo (“Little House”) revitalizes Filipino food and culture to promote health through the creation of a culturally based garden and culinary arts program. Bahay Kubo’s purpose is to lift up sustainable, healthy Filipino food practices that can ignite a culture shift towards good health. This will be accomplished by 1) culinary and nutrition education 2) the act of growing food and 3) building community through food and cultural exchange. Bahay Kubo is aware that there are a number of existing projects and programs in nutrition, cooking, farm and garden-based education. Bahay Kubo is distinct and unique because it targets underserved Filipino/American youth, while also promoting culture as an essential factor to food systems transformation.
This project seeks to implement a two-day “UC Berkeley Financial Literacy and Economic Justice” Conference, an annual, campus-wide event open to all college students. It will be the first student-led and student-organize conference of its kind. On the first day of the conference, facilitators from dozens of student organizations, UC Berkeley faculty, and community partners will host a projected thirty lectures and workshops on various aspects of financial literacy and topics on socioeconomic inequality. Core workshop topics will include preparing a tax return, planning a personal budget, navigating student financial aid, and tackling the rising cost of tuition and housing. Students can opt to do public service around the Berkeley/Oakland area in pilot groups focusing on how to apply financial literacy skills to needy communities. Students may also choose to directly engage with student organizations and community partners on specific financial needs such as having their taxes filed for free. Finally, attendees will reflect on the entire conference — workshops, public service, keynote — in specially moderated groups by conference organizers.
The increased market demand for household cooking fuel in Kenya provides an opportunity to improve livelihoods and the environment. This project unlocks the potential in human feces and other waste streams by transforming it into an affordable household cooking fuel. Sanivation, a partner organization, produces charcoal briquettes derived from human and agricultural waste that is cheaper than traditional charcoal. These fuel briquettes produce less smoke than traditional charcoal, consequently reducing the users’ exposure to toxic fumes and reducing indoor air pollution. Feces to Fuel aims to aid Sanivation with the technical and design work necessary to expand their business and scale production to 180 tons of fuel derived from waste products per month.
This project seeks to develop an experiential learning tool that allows users to personally feel what it is like to be censored. The site would feature a highly visual and interactive system that allows users to see what content from their own document would be censored in China. The need for this project is twofold: there is a strong need to raise awareness among Americans about censorship in China to encourage citizen participation and engagement in free speech, and to collect more data for researchers to understand American’s perception and understanding of censorship in China. This visualization will allow users to submit their own content and then visually see words and phrases that are censored being removed from their document. The project will educate them of potential reasons for each removal, provide related articles that are censored in China and create an interactive and engaging narrative for users to recognize the importance of Internet freedom.
Slow-sand filtration (SSF) is a tertiary treatment process that has been widely used for drinking water treatment. This technology has yet to be applied to wastewater treatment on a large scale. Pathogen reduction can be further enhanced by the addition of seeds from Moringa oleifera (a typical tree in Guatemala), which have proteins with antimicrobial properties. This project proposes to construct and operate a pilot-scale slow seed-sand filtration system at UC Davis to assess the feasibility of this technology, then to build a pilot-scale system in Sololá, Guatemala in order to adjust the system to local conditions. If successful, the pilot project will serve to encourage the community to build a full-scale treatment system.
This project employs local teachers to create and teach reading materials that integrate Haiti’s mother-tongue language and native culture. At its core, it is a software application that enables writers to create books for beginning readers using a systematic phonics approach. Based on customized wordlists for sequential texts that start with the most basic letter-sound patterns and build to more complex ones, the app recommends or discourages words based on the level of reader the teacher is writing for. The books will be stored digitally on a server that students access with laptops. The project has selected Lascahobas, Haiti as its pilot location because several elementary schools there have already received laptops that are going unused. Teachers at three schools will use the app to produce books for a reading intervention program that they will then conduct over the summer. The process of creating books for their own classroom based on sound literacy acquisition principles will make them more capable of using these principles in their own classroom. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Mobiles for Reading” category)
The ubiquitous presence of mobile phones in Uganda presents an enormous potential to transform the lives of small-scale farmers if well leveraged. m-Omumilisa is a mobile and web based platform that allows farmers to interact with extension officers in their local languages effectively and efficiently. This platform allows a farmer to type text messages about any agricultural problem and sends it to a telephone short code. Then, the message will be delivered to a web-based database, where registered extension workers can reply correspondingly. Once the questions are answered, the answers will be instantly sent back to the farmer’s mobile phones.
EKR is Africa’s first wind- and solar-powered radio station, reaching 200,000 listeners across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania within the first year of broadcasting. In 2014-15, the second full year of station operations, EKR intends to “scale-up” the programming by integrating interactive radio technology, starting a Creative Expression for Youth Initiative and expanding community engagement efforts. By scaling the youth-led platform to engage more listeners into EKR’s programming, OHR intends to have significant impact in communities along the shores of Lake Victoria. Among EKR’s goals are: 1.Provide youth with a pathway to sustainable employment; 2. Expand ICT services for secondary school youth; 3. Create networking opportunities for young people to build mentorships with ICT experts; 4. Slow the degradation of traditional knowledge by using radio broadcast and social media create dialogue about the Suba culture; 5. Inspire excitement of technological literacy and its links to creative expression through broadcasting student-produced audio projects across Lake Victoria.
