Today, the increasing popularity of social media campaigns has heightened the importance of multimedia. Videos are an essential aspect of an influential online presence, but professional videography services are usually too expensive and inaccessible for nonprofits. AMASS Media aims to democratize access to multimedia services to empower social impact organizations.
This project addresses the unmet needs of clinics serving the most at-risk populations in developing countries, where anemia is prevalent and has a great effect on treatment of other diseases. The ability to rapidly detect hemoglobin levels throughout pregnancy and during childbirth mitigates the risks associated with anemia. Working with Dr. Megan Huchko of UCSF and Nick Pearson of the non-profit Jacaranda Health, the team seeks to develop an improved method to assessing hemoglobin levels that is affordable and accessible to mobile clinics working in resource-poor areas. One current method commonly used in clinics, the WHO Hemoglobin Color Scale (HCS), uses a comparative color scale to determine hemoglobin levels. While affordable and yielding quick results, the test is based on subjective assessment from the clinician and can give inaccurate results due to variation in color interpretation and lighting. The project’s goal is to program a phone application that can measure hemoglobin concentration based on the RGB values of a digital phone image of a blood sample, allowing for the quantification of color and eliminating the ambiguities and human error.
In a survey of 132 students about 84% of them agree that a better campus-wide lighting system will increase their sense of safety at nighttime. Footstep Energy provides an interactive renewable-resource solution utilizing the human footstep to generate electricity. When a person walks, there are vibrations between the footsteps and the road surface. This project is aimed to capture and convert that kinetic energy into electricity. This would involve paving piezoelectric tiles into the ground of the busiest areas of campus, which also need an improved lighting system, such as VLSB and Faculty Glade. When a person steps on the surface of the tile, the compression on the piezoelectric material creates voltage to generate electricity. Higher foot traffic will generate more electricity through the Direct Piezoelectric Effect, which can be stored and used at night. UC Berkeley’s 35,838 students give the campus the ability to utilize footstep energy.
Jacaranda Health works to address safe motherhood in the underserved peri-urban areas of Nairobi, Kenya through a model that combines mobile health vans with high-quality local clinics. Jacaranda has launched their mobile health van system which provides antenatal and postnatal care and is looking forward to opening their first standing clinic in January 2012 which will provide labor and delivery care allowing for the much-needed continuity of care in these underserved areas. Jacaranda’s non-profit healthcare uses evidence-based standards of medicine, quality improvement methodology and is driven by feedback from clients.
Earth energy is a technology that produces electrical energy from the change in the rate of chemical reactions produced by microorganisms that can be found in soil, mud, and decomposed organic material. Light from Below takes this existing technology to the undeveloped areas in Panama in order to create Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) Lamps. The goal is to prepare a design that will facilitate the low-cost manufacture and cheap maintenance of MFC lamps in the community. The project will generate electricity for the community for about one year at an estimated initial cost of $10.00 per lamp and will have a positive impact on tourism, safety in the community and the environment.
The Youth Leadership Now Program (YLN) is a community-oriented model, led by youth who have grown up in West Oakland and wish to inspire younger generations by sharing their experiences. The goal is to help younger generations rise above the constraints of their communities or current situations through a one-year project, Looking Through Our Lens, which will work to reverse the traditional image of marginalized youth as “damaged” or “needing to be fixed”. YLN will provide a consistent level of commitment to these youths through lasting and meaningful relationships and a restored sense of community. YLN will launch Looking Through Our Lens in the Summer of 2012 equipping youth with photography and research skills to encourage them to critically analyze their community and their own potential to work for changes that impact their community.
Information latency profoundly limits agricultural cooperatives’ ability to conduct business and access financing – an avoidable problem with serious consequences for rural farmers in the developing world. Acopio is a nascent social venture offering information systems that enable farmer-owned cooperatives to better manage the data that is vital to managing their operations, accessing financing, and marketing their products. The team’s solution has the potential to positively affect the lives of millions of farmers in the developing world.
Politify (www.politify.us) is the first web application to forecast the financial impacts of political scenarios. Users input their demographic information and then Politify projects the effect that a candidate or policy will have on that person’s well-being—in dollars, including changes to tax incidence and government services. In addition to personal impacts, the user can also view impacts by income quintile and by geopolitical level (e.g. zip code, state, and nation). The results are displayed in an interactive HTML5 visualization with animated graphs and policy breakdowns. All forecasts are based on a non-partisan reading of the legislation or candidate platform. For aggregate impacts, Politify uses a state-of-the-art economic simulator developed by the Urban Institute. After learning this information,
users are encouraged to engage in the political process. Each page includes the option to: (a) register to vote, (b) donate to advocacy groups, or (c) endorse or oppose a candidate via social media outlets.
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.
