A UC Berkeley student team, along with professor and mentor Laura Mason, will work in Tanzania in July to improve the quality of life of 2,600 people living in the Nyamagongo village of Tanzania, by constructing a rainwater harvesting system at a vocational school, a second brick oven, an improved waste management system incorporating pit latrines, and living quarters for the vocational school staff. The team will collaborate with the African Immigrants’ Social and Cultural Services (AISCS). Their mission is to assist African immigrants in the Bay Area adjust to life in the US as well as the people of Tanzania and other African countries with education, vocational training, medical services, and community organization. This project will ultimately increase water availability, food security, crop production, gender empowerment, economic development and significantly alleviate poverty.
The UC Berkeley student chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) will partner with the Appropriate Technology Design Team (ATDT) of the San Francisco Professional chapter of EWB to develop a simple and scalable solution to the recycling and reusing of plastic bottles as building material. With the mission of empowering communities by providing tools that facilitate local economic development and provide basic needs, ATDT will work with the community in San Juayua/Juan de Dios, El Salvador to utilize discarded waste products, primarily plastic bottles, for non-structural construction materials. The project aims to design, create, test and deploy a manual recycling system to the community with instructions for local manufacture, operation, and maintenance. The community will benefit from both the reduction in the solid waste pollution and by introducing a new source of construction materials to insulate dwellings from rain, wind and heat.
Nearly 25% of the world’s population still burns the midnight oil after sunset. Another 20% gets fortunate only for a few hours a day or several times a week when the grid to their houses finally carries power. The lack of electricity is not only a strong impeding force against development that prevents people from getting access to modern communication and other resources, it deprives them of very basic amenities like education, lighting and healthcare. This project will work towards creating ultra affordable electricity access for the 2.6 billion underserved people in the world by implementing a novel technology combined with innovative distribution channels and financial schemes.
The lack of a central county database of patient hepatitis B statuses in the Bay Area results in an inefficient allocation of resources in the fight against hepatitis B. This project will address that issue by utilizing existing databases of non-sensitive patient data to create dynamic maps of hepatitis B prevalence and at-risk populations in the Bay Area. The mapping project will combine Geographic Information System (GIS) technology with an easy-to-navigate interface, allowing users to visualize the areas of greatest need for preventative and disease management services. The project aims to ultimately consolidate all sources of hepatitis B patient data to help public health officials and community organizations target at-risk and affected populations in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.
The Berkeley Student Food Collective BSFC (formerly known as the Berkeley Student Food Cooperative) was the 1st place winner of Big Ideas Improving Student Life competition in 2009. The mission was to provide fresh, healthy, environmentally sustainable, and ethically produced food at an affordable price to Berkeley students and community. Since winning the 2009 grant, BSFC has been successful in the opening of the Bancroft Way storefront, actively expanding its educational presence on campus, facilitating a “Berkeley in the Global Food System” DeCal, and holding their 2nd Annual Harvest Gala in 2010. With the new grant award, BSFC plans to scale up their program to increase outreach to the student and greater Berkeley community through several educational and outreaching venues, such as creating a curriculum to increase food awareness and the REAL food guidelines, scaling up catering and food prep programs, and expanding the preparation of food made and sold at the storefront. A long term plan for the BSFC is to open their own cafe in the renovated Lower Sproul area.
BTTR stands for “Back to the Roots”, a phrase that encompasses their business model of transforming one of the largest urban waste streams in America – the tons of coffee ground waste generated daily – into a highly-demanded, nutritious, and valuable food product: gourmet mushrooms. Not only has this initiative created a healthy food source, but it has also provided urban jobs, prevented thousands of tons of valuable substrate from being dumped into landfills, and donated a substantial amount of its mushrooms, soil amendment and kits back into the communities from which the coffee ground waste originated. Scaling up efforts for BTTR will go towards their sustainable business for a Whole Foods national rollout of mushroom kits, efforts to diversify their raw material (soy and barley), invest in an industrial autoclave, hire more employees, and to overall push the urban gardening and growing your own food movement.
Youth Creating Change (YCC) is a program that connects inspired high school students with UCB student groups. The design of this program will includes high school students submitting proposals for projects they believe will positively benefit their community. UCB student groups will then pledge to serve as mentors, advocates, and partial funders for those projects. YCC believes community-led projects are most reflective of community needs and youth’s perspectives should be more valued. Organizing students and making them experts in their community helps youth see that they have agency and the possibilities of change. YCC gives students the financial support to work on these issues, as well as the logistical support to help them succeed. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Justice & Community Engagement” category.)
Project Pueblo is seeking to build a sustainable cordwood office Hogans and a 20’x40’ multipurpose warehouse in the former Bennett Freeze region of the Navajo reservation for Forgotten People, a grassroots nonprofit organization formed and based in the region. With only 24% of homes in the region habitable, these funds will provide a base that will enhance organizational capacity to house work crews, host meetings, and conduct distribution and storage of safe drinking water, produce, and other forms of aid. This project will also enable UC Berkeley students from various disciplines to engage in a unique and sustainable construction project while simultaneously learning and experiencing the Navajo culture. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Justice & Community Engagement” category.)
This research aims at the design and realization of a high-precision, low-cost, handheld, pulsed-based, reflection-sensing imaging module in microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies. The device termed the Time-Domain Ultra-Wideband Synthetic Imager (TUSI) would be capable of accurately detecting minute reflections and by capturing the data from multiple transceivers form a synthesized image of the object. The transceivers are synchronized using a common reference clock and individual locking circuits. The TUSI system is designed for battery operation and given the integrated processing unit, could be interfaced to a laptop PC or another display device for image visualization. Some of the applications are the detection of breast cancer, leukemia, melanoma and also non-invasive blood glucose monitoring as well as assessment of internal injuries at the accident site.
