To address the inequality in educational opportunities provided to children of lower income areas and school districts, this project is designed to harness the potential of young minds, and provide resources to inspire and encourage pursuit of further education and the largest ambitions of these students. Through its student organization, the Cognitive Science Student Association, the team has developed and piloted an engaging neuroscience course designed for elementary and middle school students. The lesson is entitled “Feel Real Brains” and lasts approximately one hour in length. At each lesson, a hand full of UC Berkeley students will come into a classroom, and give an interactive lesson on what it means to study neuroscience, and all the ways the brain affects health, thoughts, and daily life. This project proposes to expand the existing program. In addition to coordinating and facilitating its outreach efforts between schools, the team seeks to design a website through which teachers, students, or parents can submit requests for lessons to visit their school.
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.
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.
This project will improve women’s health outcomes by stopping domestic violence (DV) before it starts. Leveraging behavioral tools, the program engages young, at-risk adolescent boys, ages 11 to 14 years old, from poor districts in Barranquilla, Colombia. Through workshops and youth-driven media campaigns, the boys will learn about DV prevention and become advocates for change. Participants will undertake a month-long series of play-based workshops on relevant themes, including power, oppression and the effects of gender expectations. The project will enlist older adolescent volunteers to help lead the workshops and create positive role models for the boys. The campaigns will be designed by the students with the help of the volunteers, and will be disseminated to each participant’s online social circle. If this pilot program is successful, it could be scaled-up regionally by the Ministry for Women and Gender Equality in the Atlantic region of Colombia.
As a field, environmental science has not yet had the impact it needs to have on the general public, mostly due to limited amount of exposure to information. A powerful visualization tool would help bring all types environmental causes to the forefront and help the general population understand how the environment influences their day to day lives. This project seeks to achieve that goal by creating an open source environmental data visualization suite for researchers and data scientists. The tool set will be especially tailored toward geographical and energy related data; however, the end project will create a much more versatile set of abilities. This tool would make it incredibly simple for researchers to submit any kind of geographic data and create meaningful visualizations of that data, without the need for much technical knowledge on the part of the researchers.
Mama Ope proposes to develop a cell phone based lung-monitoring device that could be used to radically improve the early diagnosis of pneumonia. The affordability and wide availability of cell phones make them an innovative platform for the development of simple medical diagnosis capabilities for use in the field. This is especially true in under-developed countries where skilled medical practitioners and their most sophisticated devices are often thin on the ground. The cell phone based prototype, coupled with specially developed cell phone applications, will make possible a detailed analysis and preliminary diagnosis of individual lung crackles through digitized audio obtained from the patient’s chest. To ensure that the lung sounds are of sufficient signal strength, the team intends to couple the cellphone to a modified passive stethoscope. In addition, the stethoscope will be embedded in a vest to ensure continuous monitoring. Since the recorded sound can be stored on the cell phone as a digital file, it can be sent later on for expert analysis through the cloud.
Every year cervical cancer causes 275,000 deaths worldwide. Screening for cervical cancer significantly reduces this mortality rate, given that most cervical cancer cases caught early are treatable. Visual inspection of the cervix with acetic acid (VIA) is a low-cost and effective method to screen for cervical cancer. VIA is not widely used, however, due to a lack of training and awareness of the method. With proper training and follow-up, VIA can avert 68% of cervical cancer related deaths; thus saving an estimated 150,000 lives in low and lower-middle income countries. The aim of this project is to design and implement a trainer and training program to teach VIA to midwives in Ghana, implementing three phases. Phase 0, which has already been completed, was to develop a low-cost, low-fidelity simulator to assist in training of midwives on VIA. Phase 1 is to develop an implementation plan to launch this program in Ghana and begin training a small group of midwives over the next year. Phase 2 will leverage the initial target group of midwifery students and train them to teach VIA to other midwives in Ghana. This allows more women to get screened for cervical cancer and detect pre-cancerous cells early, thus allowing these women to get the treatment they need to save their lives.
Globally, 200 million people are at risk of developing dental/skeletal fluorosis by drinking groundwater containing toxic levels of fluoride that surpass the WHO limit. Although many defluoridation technologies have proven to be effective in labs, most are technologically and/or culturally inappropriate for remote rural areas like Nalgonda, India. Given the pressing need for a more sustainable removal method, this project proposes to: I) use raw bauxite ore to develop a defluoridation technology that is locally sourced and affordable, highly effective, culturally appropriate, technically feasible, robust, and requires minimal operation/maintenance, and II) design business models based on successes and failures of previous services targeted at low-income users to provide a reliable source of defluoridated water at an incremental price that encourages user uptake.
The Somo Project’s mission is to identify, train, fund and mentor entrepreneurs looking to drive social change by building enterprises in their own low-income urban communities. This project seeks out talented individuals with vision, drive and a concrete plan to change their communities from within. Focusing on taking a long-term, investment-focused approach, the project will identify focus areas that have long-term importance to a community, such as health, education and the environment. The project will identify and build partnerships with local grassroots leaders to establish Somo’s presence and local platform. The project aims to prudently allocate capital and mitigate risk by seeking partnerships with only a limited number of excellent entrepreneurs (5 -15) in each start-up class. The focus is simple: seek entrepreneurs who can build sustainable, socially focused franchises, and who have a long runway of growth ahead of them. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Conflict & Development” Category)
