Using basic behavioral finance principles and leveraging the Donor Advised Fund structure, GivingFund makes it easier for young professionals to give, give more, and give more intentionally, all through a single, online interface. Users can automatically donate a percentage of their paycheck to their personal “givingfund”. GivingFund pools the capital across funds to invest in the impact investing market, tax-free – giving users access to more deals than the average retail investor. Users can donate the returns and their original principal, to any NGO of their choice – when they want, how they want. By providing space between the monthly payment and the donation experience, and by providing a central spot to track and measure all of a user’s impact throughout the year, GivingFund believes it can turn the pain and obligation of giving that Millennials feel into joy and even excitement, and double the amount of impact capital Millennials deploy.
University: UC Berkeley
Better Journey
Better Journey provides a platform for organizations to more effectively engage with refugee communities at scale and track key milestones along a refugee’s path. Through a web based messaging application on the refugee’s phone, caseworkers define milestones for their refugee clients and customize various forms of engagement around those milestones. Caseworkers can send the right message at the right time along a refugee’s journey based on defined triggers to provide reminders, motivation and information regarding milestone targets. Caseworkers can also follow up and solicit information from refugees asynchronously and have responses automatically upload to their current case management system. Finally, Caseworkers can effectively track the progress of their cases and intervene if necessary. Engagement and relationship building are at the core of the platform and the team believes that better engagement leads to a better journey and ultimately better outcomes.
TextTrainer: a dialog system to train crisis helpline counselors
The rise of smartphone usage has changed communication patterns and paralleled an increase in individuals reporting feeling lonely and disconnected, especially amongst young adults. As a result, crisis helplines are expanding their text services to keep pace with new communication trends during a time of growing need. However, tools for training counselors remain time consuming or provide insufficient practice. TextTrainer is leveraging recent advances in natural language processing and partnerships with crisis helplines to build a dialog system to train crisis counselors on how to intervene and de-escalate crises. With this system, counselors can easily practice formulating text responses, get feedback on their responses, and gain expertise in a low pressure setting without putting any individuals in danger, thus helping crisis centers meet the rising demand for their services.
Loom
Loom is a platform rooted in life review therapy that guides families to collect, curate, and share digital heirlooms (recipes, videos, voice memos, etc.) for generations. Loom provides a place to organize lasting memories and connect with users’ closest loved ones. Loom is designed to help people easily collect mementos from relatives, the internet, and shoe boxes filled with artifacts to bring together users’ favorite memories enhanced with the stories behind them. Loom guides users with crafted personalized prompts, created by content experts, designed to guide families to tell these stories and attach an annotation (voice or text) to them to store forever. Loom connects people, adding hands-on support to help families explore their heritage, record memories and artifacts, and share legacies.
Museum of Tomorrow
The Museum of Tomorrow is an immersive, interactive, fun and educational pop-up museum on climate change targeting Millennials to promote behavioral change. Through six interactive exhibits and a behavior change challenge, it translates an abstract and distant challenge into a tangible and immediate experience for the public. Furthermore, the Museum provides easy, accessible, everyday solutions to battle climate change. It attracts audiences by bridging the gap between popular mainstream culture and sustainability with highly engaging and Instagrammable exhibitions. The exhibits are designed to travel after opening for 6 months to reach a wider audience. The Museum will be launched at UC Berkeley and then travel to other UC campuses and cities around the world.
Artists in Residents
Based out of The Suitcase Clinic, Artists in Residents provides a meaningful and enriching artistic outlet to Berkeley’s homeless residents, allowing participants the opportunity to grow through their art and gain compensation for their work. Through public events that showcase the artistic side of this underrepresented community, Artists in Residents will facilitate a more complex understanding of homelessness throughout the Berkeley community.
VIDI
Every patient’s nightmare is putting one’s health at risk by receiving a failed surgery. In the US, medical errors kill more than 200,000 patients per year, making it the third-leading cause of death. The avoidable morbidity is partially due to lack of vigilance from manual counting and tracking of surgical instruments. Time-consuming and error-prone, the current tracking procedures jeopardize patient safety by replacing time that should be spent on patient care with time accounting for surgical instruments. VIDI builds smart systems that leverage computer vision to increase hospital workflow efficiency and minimize medical errors by tracking the full spectrum of surgical tools, enhancing inter-department and multi-room collaboration, and seamlessly generating documentation and analyses for hospital staff.
Codi
In the US, 1 in 4 renters spend half their income on rent. City life has become increasingly unaffordable while residential spaces remain empty during the day. Meanwhile, technology is disrupting the traditional work structure leading to ever more freelancers and remote workers. The demand for flexible workspaces during the day is soaring, as expensive co-working spaces and crowded coffee shops mushroom in cities. Codi addresses the mismatch between unused residences and need for workspace. Based on a sharing-economy model, Codi allows anyone, anywhere, to run their own co-working space at home. Codi provides the first micro-rental platform of residential spaces for remote workers. Members can access reliable home offices with the amenities, the comfort and the social component they need to thrive, while creating an additional source of revenue for hosts. The Codi model promotes circular economic values and revitalizes local neighborhoods.
Acarí
Acarí takes the hated and feared invasive armored catfish or ‘devil fish’ as it is colloquially known in Mexico and transforms it into tasty, nutritious food products to increase employment in rural fishing communities and provide a healthy, sustainable alternative to beef jerky. To Acarí, the devil fish is much more than an invasive ‘trash fish’; it is an opportunity to improve the livelihoods of marginalized fishermen across Mexico. Though the devil fish has perplexed politicians and development professionals for nearly two decades, Acarí considers it to be a marketing problem first and foremost and has begun to develop the sales channels and supply chain to effectively transform the devil fish from plague to a protein-packed snack that makes their customers say, “Quiero más.”