“Nossa Communidade, Nossa Historìa” (“Our Community, Our Story”) will bring a program of artistic expression to the youth of Brazil’s Rocinha favela. The program will take a group of twenty children, aged ten to fifteen, and spend four months providing them the opportunity to express their stories through different artistic modes with the goal to improve the student’s conception of the self. The programs will provide guidance for students to tell their personal narrative, focusing on writing, photography, reusable art and music, and ultimately create an exhibit that will be displayed in all socio-economic areas of Rio de Janeiro. The children will meet four times a week in this program to receive assistance with homework and cultivate the emotional benefits of an increased sense of self-worth that comes from accomplishment and much needed personal attention. The children will stay involved in the program to develop leadership skills and remain involved in art classes after the four months finish, even as the program will restart the cycle with twenty more children.
Often overlooked in urbanization are relationships between people and animals. This project will reveal how changing human-animal relationships are related to the development of global cities through artistic maps. By understanding the secret lives of urban animals in developing cities, the project will offer insights into how to develop Zoopolis, or cities where both people and animals can coexist. Team member Rebecca Hui was struck by the resiliency of urban animals, noticing that a unique sense of place emerges as cows manifest self-awareness and personalities, a consequence grounded in India’s long traditions of reverence towards all life forms. But this form of coexistence is diminishing as cities are changing, and conflicts arise over possession and use of space. As cities urbanize, human-animal relationships change as crucial ecological corridors for many animals are destroyed. By following animals in a developing world urban context, “The Secret Life of Urban Animals” intends for these maps to help us empathize with the animals whose lives are increasingly affected by people, and highlight the importance of those beings with whom we share our world, no matter how familiar or alien.
Both sighted and blind people value having a photographic memento of a moment, a place, or an event. However, due to the visually oriented nature of photography and the lack of non-visual cues to indicate the content of the photo, the photographs taken by blind people are often lacking, sometimes missing the photo subject entirely. This proposal draws on research from team members that investigated how blind smartphone users take, store, and retrieve photos, which found that blind people want to, but hesitate to share photos because it is impossible to identify the photos after they are taken. The advent and ubiquity of smartphones provide a customizable framework that can help blind people capture, organize, browse, and share photos. The overarching aim of this research is to facilitate independence for blind people in capturing, browsing, and sharing photos using a smartphone. As blind people have to rely on non-visual cues to retrieve or organize photos, we plan to test various aural representations of the photos. We also plan to help blind people organize their photos by providing an organization scheme that matches their mental models, which would vary by various characteristics.
GoodWheels will be a UC Berkeley student-run market where students can buy used bikes. Beginning in summer, they will offer a location for students to buy bikes at a lower cost and in a safer manner than they would be able to buy used bikes from strangers online. Student’s purchases from GoodWheels will have a social impact because all profits from bike sales will go to supporting CA Bikes in their work constructing and donating custom bikes to orphans and paraplegics in Uganda.
We believe all humans have the right to health and wellbeing regardless of socioeconomic status. The roots of good health must begin long before the administration of a therapeutic drug. Several socioeconomic factors including nutrition, housing, and education often determine a family’s state of health. We plan to train a group of committed undergraduates to staff a “help desk” at Highland Hospital in Oakland. Emergency room and chronic disease clinic staff will refer appropriate patients and their families to the help desk, where the volunteers will walk these clients through the process of accessing a multitude of resources. We will provide support with finding housing, employment, food access, child-care, and medical-legal advocacy, among other necessities. We are collaborating with East Bay Community Law Center and students at the UC Berkeley Boalt Law School to provide legal services. The goal of this interdisciplinary approach is to improve the health of low-income patients, enhance the patient experience, reduce emergency room utilization by high frequency patients and ultimately lower healthcare costs in outpatient clinics and the emergency department.
India is experiencing rapid migration from rural areas to cities. Rampant urbanization in India has caused the proliferation of slums and increased demand for adequate housing. Among many of the physically and socially deteriorated living conditions that characterize life in the slums, housing with poor structural quality is one of the major limiting factors in the advancement of socio-economic growth. A functional roof is a basic and essential component of shelter for a family, but poor house planning and a lack of resources results in inadequate and unsafe roofs for families. After surveying 15 low-income households in a slum in Ahmedabad, India, this team got direct feedback from the field that helped them identify the top current roofing problems: extremely hot indoor temperatures, high roof maintenance costs, leaks during monsoon season, and the presence of asbestos. Roofing Out of Poverty’s challenge is to design an affordable and reliable roof that not only addresses these top priorities, but is modular, fits within a financially viable business model, and improves the safety and quality of living of low-income home dwellers. Their product will fill the market gap between inexpensive, low-quality roofing options and cost-prohibitive concrete slab roofs.
The Berkeley City College Service Community (BCCSC) is a student-led program that assists community college students with the transfer process, provides them with enhanced leadership and service opportunities, and connects them to resources that will help them achieve their education and personal goals.
This team aims to open a maternal care unit with an onsite OB/GYN in the Knights Landing community of Yolo County. Since the closing of CommuniCare in 2008, the community of approximately 750 migrant families and undocumented workers living in Knights Landing has lacked access to comprehensive health care in their community up until the beginning of this year.
The project will provide women with more birth control options, urine tests, emergency contraception, and prenatal packages. These packages would include prenatal vitamins and vouchers for transportation to hospitals in Sacramento and the greater Yolo County. The goal is to integrate community members in all steps of the process, ensuring they take an active role in their own health care and the health care of their neighbors. Que Viva La Mujer would not just be a place where women can see a gynecologist in their own community, but also their resource for all their maternal and post parturition health care and educational needs.
Haath Mein Sehat (HMS), Hindi for “Health in Hands,” is a student organization at UC Berkeley that has worked to address water, sanitation, and hygiene issues in urban slums in Mumbain and Hubli, India since 2004. Moving forward, HMS will concentrate its efforts on hand hygiene among children as a way to tackle diarrheal disease and respiratory infection—two leading causes of childhood malnutrition and mortality in India. In doing so, HMS will positively impact household livelihoods by easing the economic burden (i.e. expense of money, time, and effort) often associated with taking care of chronically ill children. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Safe Water Enterprise” category.)
