Amplify Impact raises global awareness about social innovation in the Middle East by providing an online platform for nonprofits and socially minded for-profits to produce and distribute story-driven, low-cost videos. The platform guides users through a process for identifying their core values and outreach objectives, building a compelling narrative, connecting with local filmmaking professionals or volunteers, and sharing the finished product. In addition, the platform provides video viewers with a means through which to connect and share the causes they care about. The platform also identifies the types of talent needed for a given video and offers users the option to work with professional talent or select their own volunteers. The Amplify Impact team envisions a world where initiatives that are catalyzing opportunity, hope, and positive change receive the attention they deserve. Focus is on the Middle East for now; however, Amplify Impact hopes that the platform can be a model for spanning other cultural and physical divides around the world.
Millions of people with physical disabilities lack control of their bodies but still can control their minds. Recent advancements in Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) have enabled people with physical disabilities to drive wheelchairs, write, and communicate. The BCAPI team is developing a powerful software and hardware package that will enable technology developers and researchers to create a range of BCI-enabled assistive technologies. Through extensive and research in the field, the team has identified the key problems that limit BCI assistive technology development and has made significant progress in addressing these issues.
In rural Guatemala, where multiple factors conspire to undermine the public’s health, adolescent empowerment represents a promising strategy. Today’s adolescents are future leaders capable of promoting health within their communities, but too often, poor and indigenous youth are denied the opportunity to use their gifts in service of their communities. By providing these youth with the opportunity to attend college and gain work experience, the “Preparing Future Leaders” internship project helps these youth overcome two of the principal barriers they face: lack of prior work experience, and lack money to pay for college. Thus, this program helps youth take the first critical steps toward becoming agents of change who promote sustainable change and improve health conditions in their communities for the long-term.
Responsive City Lights uses interactive light installations to enhance the perception of streets as engaging public spaces. The project implements Crime Prevention through Environmental Design principles by increasing foot traffic and pedestrian interaction, bringing the internet of things into urban spaces to help fulfill a vital social need. The interactivity of the lights creates activity support for legitimate uses for previously “unclaimed” sections of the street, of curious pedestrians interacting with the lights, particularly children and their families. Through installations that engage residents and pedestrians, and provide a source of expressive and meaningful diversity in an otherwise uniform environment, the project ultimately seeks to provide a rich, additional tool to communities in order to enliven and enrich their streets and pathways as public spaces.
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.
