This project will enhance community engagement on campus on three levels: practice, education, and research. A collaborative process between design students on campus, a nearby community, and CARES – a multidisciplinary team of designers and researchers – will be initiated through a design challenge, where students will offer design ideas to a real life design problem of an underserved community in need. The collaborative design process will provide ideas ready to be used by the community, real-life design experience, and a research platform for evaluating various methods for their ability to engage the community in the design process and produce more locally appropriate designs. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Justice & Community Engagement” category.)
The goal of CAL Community Kitchen is to create a community-run kitchen which makes use of consumable leftover food goods from a network of local restaurants and small farms to creating healthy boxed meals for families in need. This work will be done by UCB undergraduate and graduate students and various community organizations dedicated to hunger alleviation and food justice. Ultimately, CAL Community Kitchen will offer a sense of community and a safe space to enjoy healthy meals. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Justice & Community Engagement” category.)
Development organizations around the world are increasingly reliant on accurate and timely data for decision-making at all levels. Unfortunately, the infrastructure and capacity for data entry and management have not kept pace, especially for low-resource organizations in the field. Even though millions of dollars of aid money each year is spent on data collection, entry and cleaning, most data efforts suffer from delays, inefficiency and difficulties in maintaining quality. Shreddr provides organizations an affordable and effective data digitization service that ensures accurate paper data entry with minimal additional investment in technology, training, or staffing through a series of simple “microtasks.” (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Entrepreneurship Category” category.)
The Men’s Story Project (MSP) is a replicable, performance-based, community discussion project through which participants critically examine social ideas about masculinity. The MSP mission is to strengthen social norms that support healthy masculinities and gender equality, and to help eliminate gender-based violence, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and other oppressions that are intertwined with masculinities, through ongoing events of men’s public story-sharing and collective dialogue. The Bears Breaking Boundaries funds are supporting: a) bringing a production of the MSP to UCB in April 2009, b) filming the production for educational use, and c) conducting a qualitative study with UCB students and MSP presenters regarding project content, process, and perceived short-term impacts, to inform development of a Masculinity Studies DeCal and UCB MSP initiative for the 2009-10 academic year.
Patients facing the most complex and difficult diagnoses sometimes see dozens of doctors and spend years searching for answers. Ultimately, resolving many of these cases depends upon matching a patient with a unique, complex, and potentially rare condition to the doctor with the expertise, experience, and insight to recognize and diagnose it. By providing a forum that allows patients to post a structured medical profile and offer a monetary reward for information leading to a diagnosis, Hyoumanity flips diagnostic search around, giving doctors both a mechanism and incentive to find the patients they can help. Using the reach of the web and the power of market forces to better match patient needs with distributed medical expertise will help to lower medical costs, improve health outcomes, and alleviate pain and suffering.
The Disability Awareness Through Sport (DATS) project partners UC Berkeley and the Bay Area Outreach & Recreation Program (BORP) in a collaborative effort to increase disability awareness and student service on the Cal campus and in the surrounding Berkeley community. These two organizations will work together to implement a course in which students will use the sport of wheelchair basketball as a framework for exploring issues of disability awareness, advocacy, and outreach. In addition to learning how to play wheelchair basketball, students will also work in close collaboration with BORP as mentors, coaches, and community organizers.
Historically, marine management policies have been unable to ensure sustainable, economically viable fishing practices. These policies have been ineffective in regulating technological advancements in fishing, and flawed policies have contributed towards hastening the use of harmful technologies. As a result, several once-major fishing stocks are overfished or collapsed, resulting in both severe environmental degradation and large economic losses. This paper proposes a series of initiatives to encourage the fishing industry to adopt sustainable fishing practices and provide support to maintain healthy, profitable commercial fish populations.(Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Science, Technology, and Engineering Policy” category.)
Cyanobacteria transform solar energy into chemical energy through photosynthesis. Once modified by plasmid transformation, they will be able to use this chemical energy to establish electric potentials across their membranes. This project aims to design a plate, based off the extracellular organization of Electrophorus electricus, that will be able to harness this stored energy.
