2nd Place – Page 5 – Big Ideas Contest

Just Ripe

Just Ripe takes serving food to a whole new level. Just Ripe’s products—soups, salads, and smoothies all created from 100% recovered, organic produce — will be pedaled around Oakland’s streets on an innovative, eye-catching food bike. The team aims to hold daily “kickstands,” or food bike sales, at Downtown Oakland tech companies to sell products to young professionals at prices between $6-$10. In addition, Just Ripe will distribute refreshing smoothies to Oakland middle schools and high schools free of charge in order to promote healthy eating while spreading the message: “Don’t DiscriminEAT.” Just Ripe’s food bike allows convenient transportation of products through an innovative, low-cost, mobile, and environmentally-friendly alternative to a food truck. The team’s passion for healthy food and their dedication to making a lasting impact inspired this quirky food bike which aims to initiate a dialogue around food waste and food access in Oakland by “Pedaling with a Purpose.”

Poverty Alleviation through Poultry Education

The One Health Nicaragua team will address food insecurity concerns in Sabana Grande, Nicaragua, by working with children and focusing on improving poultry production. Integrative workshops for students in Sabana Grande will focus on egg production, chick care, coop management, and disease prevention. Local students will manage a demonstration flock providing them the opportunity to gain first-hand experience with effective methods for raising, handling, and vaccinating poultry. Children can then share this information with their family thereby increasing knowledge dissemination throughout the community. Introducing poultry husbandry skills in the classroom will affect changes at the family level and sustainably improve overall community poultry production in Sabana Grande. Ultimately, this will lead to greater food security within the community.

SocialForce

SocialForce is an impact management platform that leverages the core business competencies available locally to meet the needs of a community in a strategic and sustainable way. SocialForce is based on the premise that community-grounded organizations and their active members understand the needs of their communities best, but lack the ability to harvest the resources necessary to execute projects to address those needs. The team’s goal is to connect mission-driven small and 7 medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with relevant nonprofit organizations in their communities. The strategic match of local resources to local needs facilitates long-term relationships for greater impact and unlocks the potential of communities to solve what matters most to them. Through SocialForce, SMEs can identify, execute, manage, and measure impact activities in their local communities in a strategic and meaningful way by building long-term relationships that are in line with their mission and vision.

Husk-to-Home

In 2013, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck Bohol, Philippines, destroying thousands of structures and displacing nearly 350,000 Boholanos. In response, the International Deaf Education Association (IDEA) employed several teams to build temporary homes using coconut wood boards. However, the homes only lasted two years before they were deemed uninhabitable due to extensive termite damage. IDEA identified the community’s need for economic and sustainable building materials, so they contacted Husk-to- Home to find a reliable solution. As the world’s seventh largest rice-producing country, the Philippines generates an abundance of termite-resistant rice husk waste. Husk-to- Home intends to capitalize on this termite resistance and design a particleboard that is lightweight, water-resistant, and of comparable strength to a commercially available medium-density particleboard. The project’s mission is to create a proof of concept building material composed of rice husk and an innovative binder. This will enable construction of durable homes for the Bohol Island community.

Philippine “Labor Beat”

The Philippines is the “social media capital of the world,” but it is also a place where labor violations abound. Philippine “Labor Beat” is a social practice project to support Filipino unionists. Currently, unionists must rely on mainstream or indie media sources to report infractions. Pushing beyond the limitations of these forms of media, Philippine “Labor Beat” uses cell phone cameras, media trainings, and metadata technology to build a social media ecology around workers themselves to empower them to directly document their struggle. The project harnesses the creativity of interactive documentary and the reach of social media. Union institutions will serve as a network, support group, and audience for the project. Philippine “Labor Beat” will create and spread labor news that benefits the Filipino community at large by facilitating worker self-representation, communication, and collaboration in ways that their communities currently lack.

TIRO

TIRO is a hotline management system designed to give small NGOs serving vulnerable clients in China better record-keeping and reporting capabilities, ultimately improving the efficiency and sustainability of their services to create greater impact. TIRO’s approach is to equip NGOs that operate hotlines with better, lower-cost tools for record-keeping and report-making. Because phone-based consultations remain the most integral part of labor NGOs’ operations, the team is developing a mobile phone application to manage information that surfaces through their hotlines. The solution is based on an Android app that hotline operators can use to log conversation content and retrieve call details. An accompanied web application will permit NGOs to generate reports featuring demographic, caller relationship, and service provisioning metrics.

SeedEd Capital

SeedEd Capital’s mission is to provide responsible funding alternatives for disadvantaged students in Alameda County interested in pursuing higher education and to provide an impactful service opportunity for UC Berkeley students. Through a loan-based program, accompanied with mentoring, tutoring, and professional development curricula, promising high school students in the Oakland community will be selected as Seeds and supported financially and emotionally through their academic endeavors. In an attempt to reduce the lack of access to education, SeedEd will support students that show promise during high school and provide a holistic mechanism that will accompany them from high school until the culmination of higher education. The organization will take advantage of crowd-funding to support its financial needs and obligations and simultaneously use Shared Income Agreements as a source of revenue and sustainability.

Adelante – Youth Empowerment Program

The Adelante Youth Empowerment Program is a 6-week summer program that serves to motivate at-risk Mexican youth to pursue higher education and professional careers. This is achieved through the use of academic competition-based learning and entrepreneurship-based learning where students lead and develop community development projects. The project will develop fun and engaging STEM and leadership development-based projects while mentoring them to lead their own projects. Also provided are scholarships and mentorship to students who choose to continue their educational journey. The community development projects that the students lead and develop will further provide them with a sense of belonging and purpose. The team expects that Adelante youth will set an example to other community members in how they can be productive and conscious members of society. They will also become mentor figures to other youth who are at risk of dropping out of school.