This project will target students and their parents through a year-round program focusing on financial literacy. This program will focus on Richmond High School in Richmond, CA, which is a socio-economically disadvantaged and underserved school primarily serving students of color. L.I.F.E. will also conduct a one-day conference on the UC Berkeley campus in the spring semester for students from all around the East Bay area to increase outreach and accessibility as well as extend knowledge and resources.
Free Ventures is UC Berkeley’s first student-initiated non-profit startup accelerator, meant to catalyze the development of young entrepreneurs to innovate and create high-impact, sustainable ventures. Free Ventures is a key part of an innovation movement that involves changing the culture amongst the student body from focusing all of their energy on classes to a world where the things learned in the classroom can translate into real world products and services. They intend to do this by giving young entrepreneurs access to student consulting, mentorship, funding, and a more intensive accelerator program for students that show a higher potential of success. Initially they plan to implement a pilot program of roughly five passionate student teams that will be given mentors, project deadlines, and seed funding all wrapped up in 10 weeks. The pilot will help them to build an initial infrastructure, which they will use as a platform to build on. This organization will work along current leaders on campus to help accelerate Berkeley’s already talented student body into a more creative, free thinking group of students with a higher potential to pursue their passions and create meaningful ventures.
Though smoking is a prevalent issue among the homeless population, it is rarely addressed. Many factors predispose homeless individuals to nicotine addiction, and the underserved often do not have sufficient medical care or the strong support base that is critical to kicking the habit. The Suitcase Clinic, a student-run volunteer organization serving the homeless in the East Bay, aims to launch a project called Lungs for Life. They intend to treat the health related issues associated with smoking and create a social network to empower clients to successfully quit. The project has three main components: asthma/COPD screenings; treatment through prescription inhalers; and weekly, student-run support groups supplemented with nicotine replacement. Lungs for Life will establish monthly screenings for respiratory issues and secure more funding for inhalers and diagnostic tools, creating tailored client plans for asthma control. Lungs for Life will institute student-run support groups to not only provide important health information, but also offer an open space for clients to express their hardships and reach out to one another. The enactment of a smoking cessation program will mark Suitcase Clinic’s pioneer effort to expand services beyond acute treatment and into long-lasting care.
STORIE will help students of the Berkeley Unified School District and UC Berkeley jointly investigate the issue of educational inequality and tell their personal stories of how inequities have affected their lives. The project will work specifically with Studio H at REALM Charter School, a design and build program that teaches critical thinking and technical skills through a community project completed over the course of a semester. They will work with the teachers of Studio H to develop an educational equity project that will allow students to investigate educational trends on a national and local level, and will then offer a complementary, afterschool, documentary filmmaking project that would enable students to investigate inequities through the stories and experiences of their peers. In partnership with the Studio H teacher, they will apply the studio’s creative inquiry process to help the students’ research inequities, map out key stakeholders, and ground trends in lived experiences. Specifically, STORIE will invite community leaders, including representatives from the City and District 2020 Vision process, to speak to the students, and will travel to interview Cal professors in the Graduate School of Education. Together, the afterschool project will edit interviews into a 10-15 minute documentary that STORIE will show at a 2020 Vision community event and on the University of California, Berkeley campus.
Fruitful Minds is determined to address the obesity epidemic by bringing nutrition education and guidance to students in elementary, middle, and high school. Operating the educational programs will also provide practical experience for college student ambassadors. In Stage One, they operated through one college (UC Berkeley) and served 10 local schools from 2010-2012. In Stage Two, they will be expanding to 12 schools (including 2 high schools), introduce a condensed curriculum for two new primary schools, and will partner with Saint Mary’s College outside of Alameda County. The ultimate goal of Fruitful Minds is to support partnerships nationwide and provide their unique program to any school with access to the college volunteers and resources necessary to replicate their model.
Haath Mein Sehat (HMS) seeks to address the need for health interventions that concern a broad range of health issues. In order to meet this need, HMS proposes to pilot a Community Health Worker (CHW) program in Hubli, India during the summer of 2012. CHWs will provide front-line medical advice and care that is not easily accessible to slum community residents and will involve the community in order to create an effective and sustainable program.
The Ekialo Kiona Community Radio is a youth-driven community radio station that will bring together local residents to design programming that will cut to the heart of the health crisis on Mfangano. EKR will be broadcasted from Ekialo Kiona Center in the Suba and Luo languages. EKR will be able to reach tens of thousands of Suba and Luo people within a 30-kilometer radius along the shores of Lake Victoria and will focus on issues affecting the immediate communities as opposed to messages coming from beyond Mfangano. EKR will facilitate community-driven programs aimed at raising health and nutrition awareness, mobilizing youth activism, improving social solidarity, promoting sustainable agriculture and fishing innovation, and they will preserve the endangered Suba language and cultural identity. Their goal is to give young people a chance to contribute their voices and solidify a sense of community for thousands of isolated people along the shores of Lake Victoria.
Handwriting can be especially difficult for Children with disabilities such as autism, hypotonic cerebral palsy (HCP), and sensory integration disorder (SID). Through interviews with four independent occupational therapists (OT’s), The Pika Pen team has identified three indicators of poor handwriting technique in children with disabilities: improper pen tip force, grip pressure, and pen inclination angle. Additional visual, auditory, and tactile feedback of the above indicators is effective for retraining different tasks. The goal of Pika Pen is to improve handwriting by these three indicators through the development of a low-cost, sensor-rich pen that allows children, especially those with disabilities, to improve their handwriting technique. The Pika Pen introduces children to an improved sensory- feedback system which is relayed to the child as real-time visual, audible, and tactile feedback.
The Children’s Oral Health and Nutrition Project in Vietnam aims to contribute solutions to two global health epidemics– childhood tooth decay and malnutrition. The project’s intervention is a set of cost-effective preventive measures. It includes free dental supplies (toothbrushes, toothpaste, floss) for all study children and family members, application of fluoride varnish to children’s teeth biannually, referral of children with tooth decay to local dentists, and education about oral health and nutrition for community health workers, teachers, and families. The goal is to demonstrate that the project is a cost-effective and valid preventive health initiative that addresses the neglected global diseases of childhood tooth decay and malnutrition. Ultimately, the goal is to make the project sustainable and ensure its expansion with the support of the Vietnamese government to reach more children across all regions in Vietnam.
