Big Ideas Award Celebration, May 2012Photo Credit: Blum Center
Campus InSight is an online forum for discussing ideas meant to engage students in solving campus problems and encourage communication between students and administration. Each week, discussion will focus on one question or problem that affects the campus community. Students can log in with their school IDs and start discussions, in which other students can reply to. Up-voted comments earn points and are moved to the top of the discussion. At the end of each week, the discussion is closed and the student who submitted the best idea or solution, as determined by number of up-votes, is declared the ambassador of that week. Each month, the ambassadors of each week sit down to a meal with
administrators to discuss the solutions they came up with and how they can be implemented. In as little as two weeks, students can identify, discuss, and solve key issues, in a truly democratic fashion.
Big Ideas Award Celebration, May 2012Photo Credit: Blum Center
The TxtWorker team works to increase low wage workers ability to access information about social services in their community, through a mobile support project. TxtWorker is a text based bulletin that sends accurate and targeted information about social services in the area directly to a mobile phone.
Big Ideas Award Celebration, May 2012Photo Credit: Blum Center
Studies demonstrate a strong correlation between overall scarcity of nutritious food in low-income communities and high obesity rates and other health-related problems. BareAbundance strives to reduce the amount of waste generated from excess food by utilizing this excess in nourishment for the marginalized children in West Oakland. The team aims to combat this marginalization by creating an educational environment and stable local food community to foster healthy minds and bodies. By involving Cal students, the team plans to enable communities with poor access to nutritious food to get involved by supporting existing food distribution programs and educating children in these communities about food and nutrition. Cal students will teach a nutrition-education class series to West Oakland youth. Students from a wide range of disciplines will learn about, discuss, critique, and participate in the local food justice movement. The course provides the foundation that will review the BareAbundance curriculum, teaching strategies, program evaluation tools, and youth engagement.
As the number of aging Americans increases over the next 40 years, clinicians, city planners, government employees, program administrators and caregivers are ill-equipped to do much more than help Baby Boomers maintain their health as they age. The need for innovative thinking, discourse, and practice in the field of aging is at an all-time high. There is a desperate need for multi-generational and crosscultural community dialogue geared toward giving a meaningful purpose to the lives of elderly people. “Vibrant Aging” aims to produce a series of short films which will be used to catalyze much-needed community discussions about the future of aging in America. These discussions will stem from reactions to the short films, which spotlight culturally-diverse and often-underserved populations of older adults
in America. Documenting older adults and their collective wisdom and expertise of what it means to age “vibrantly” will empower not only them, but the hundreds of older adults, caregivers, practitioners, and students who will watch the films.
The E-du-waste project focuses on Guiyu, China, the largest electronic waste dumping ground in the world and provides an approach to help the people who are forced to rummage through E-waste for survival. The project will focus on educating middle school students in Guiy by organizing an Englishlanguage summer day-camp over 5 days for middle schools in Guiyu. The aim of the camp is to equip the local students with critical thinking skills and to help them gain insights on global environmental issues through education in Art, Film and Science. The process will be filmed and made available to recycling centers as possible publicity material. The goal is to motivate students in Guiyu to seek higher education and avoid harmful E-waste recycling jobs in the future.
Vuwa seeks to combat poor farming yields, low income and the declining living standards due to the high cost of water in Kenya. The Vuwa Enterprise has designed a scalable shower water drip irrigation system capable of irrigating cash crops for farmers in Kenya and other developing countries. The product sells at an affordable 1483 shillings and can be made even more affordable through Vuwa Enterprise’s lending models. The Shower Water Drip Irrigation System consists of a platform that is installed in a customer’s bath area. During bucket showers the water falls through the platform and is caught in the black plastic tarp and will flow into bottles that connect to drip irrigation tape leading to nearby crops. All components of the system can be bought in local rural Kenyan markets.
The Suitcase Clinic is a student-run organization that operates three drop-in centers for the homeless and low income community of the East Bay and Alameda County. This project will expand the Clinic’s services to include dental care. By addressing the dental care needs of underserved communities, A Healthy Smile will instill newfound confidence in clients. Dental Services to be provided include comprehensive and preventative care, cleanings and surgical extractions, dental x-rays, root platings, fillings, oral hygiene instruction and supplies, and 5 anterior root canals. The Dental Service is driven to provide more comprehensive services through the belief that adequate dental care is a right of all persons, regardless of their ability to pay.
(Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Justice & Community Engagement” category.)
Mobilizing Health is committed to increasing access to emergency and preventative healthcare for rural populations in developing countries through the use of mobile technology for medical advice and treatment. This is accomplished by using a text message-based platform to connect villagers to licensed medical practitioners in nearby towns and cities. Their goal is to help thousands of villagers by building a network of site directors who are managed by a full-time incountry Manager and two Regional Site Directors. During the summer of 2010, they have already implemented the program in 50 villages in India, and hope to expand the program to more areas in the upcoming years. Mobilizing Health tackles the issue of overcrowded facilities by giving people knowledge of how to treat the problem at their location if possible, thereby minimizing the need to travel to the hospitals and increasing equitable access to healthcare.
Fruitful Minds is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that aims to educate fourth through eighth graders in at-risk communities in making healthy decisions regarding diet and lifestyle. This is accomplished through nutrition education programs and activities that cater to the specific needs of each community. Fruitful Minds collaborates with local elementary and middle schools in Alameda County, in order to design a curriculum that complements existing programs. UC Berkeley students will work as Ambassadors to deliver the nutrition education program, which includes six one-hour lessons over the course of six weeks. The organization is run by UC Berkeley students and alums, who develop the website, write grants, develop marketing materials, conduct training programs, and review legal matters. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Justice & Community Engagement” category.)
