India Smiles is a 3-year project aimed at alleviating childhood malnutrition and poor oral health outcomes caused by the transition from traditional agricultural-based diets to processed snack and “junk foods” in India. Through an effective entrepreneurial and social marketing model for community-based distribution of oral health care products and services by local community health workers, India Smiles works towards improving oral health in children ages up to age six. The project will employ oral hygiene education, application of fluoride varnish, preventative oral health care, dental examination, and distribution of toothbrushes, toothpaste and dental assistance to provide not only health benefits for mothers and children, but also financial benefits for the entrepreneurial health workers fostering a system of community involvement and sustainability.
Cash FLOW aims to address the problem of low financial literacy by bringing personal finance classes to high schools. Through these classes, high school students will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to make informed financial decisions during and after college. Currently, the team leads a weekly “Teaching Financial Literacy” DeCal course that teaches students about personal finance and guides them to apply their knowledge by counseling low-income individuals at homeless shelters. By using the student-to-student teaching model, instructors hone their leadership skills, solidify their knowledge base, and create a platform for open discussion with students. Leading an after-school program in high schools, starting with the pilot program at El Cerrito High during the 2013-2014 school year, the team intends to use their democratic teaching model to provide high school students with the key money management skills that they will need to succeed in their post-high school lives. The curriculum includes loans, budgeting, banking services, financial aid, and other financial information that may impact their lives.
This proposal’s plan is to develop a computer program that can be used to practice electron-pushing mechanisms in organic chemistry. Students struggle significantly in electron-arrow pushing mechanisms, a critical part of an organic chemistry course’s grade. By implementing this project, Push Me, Pull You hopes to increase students’ understanding of this phenomenon in organic chemistry, and therefore further students’ overall understanding of the subject. The application for this computer program will include a tutoring and a solving level. With this new program, Push Me, Pull You, will help students to better understand organic chemistry, and take away the unnecessary fear that strikes new organic chemistry students.
Many science students at UC Berkeley view science as a tool that allows them to advance the frontiers of human knowledge and have a positive impact on society. For many students, the gap between their work and its real impact on society makes it difficult to believe that their work is relevant, leading to a loss of motivation and ultimately to high attrition of these talented individuals from science-related degrees and careers. This attrition and disconnection is at odds with an increasing need for access to scientific knowledge and research in many communities. Science and technology are fundamental to problem solving, and access to science and research often dictates who has a voice in policy and societal decision-making processes. This big idea is to translate community research questions into projects that undergraduate and graduates can carry out. By facilitating and fostering the relationship between community non-profits or small businesses and students’ research in the Bay Area, which has a distinctive landscape of non-profit organizations in diverse fields, business startups and progressive local governments, Science Shop will spark distinct solutions for social and environmental problems.
100 Strong is an innovative non-profit that will give at-risk teenage girls in San Francisco the skills they need to take leadership roles in bettering their communities. First, one hundred teenage girls will be invited to participate in the program. The girls will be paired with a UC Berkeley undergraduate and, together, the pair will select a service-based project they want to develop during the program. Then the one hundred girls will attend a two week leadership workshop, the 100 Strong Summer Workshop, that focuses on developing their leadership potential by planning out their project and learning how to lead a non-profit project. Through the course of the two-week program, the participants in 100 Strong will observe non-profits in action in San Francisco, learn from guest speakers, and participate in leadership building exercises. 100 Strong will give at-risk teenage girls the skills they need to create change within their own communities, developing these girls’ leadership potential by equipping them with the training and skills they need to be change makers within their own communities. The goal is to pilot a new leadership program that will not only empower girls to better their own lives, but will also empower girls to better the lives of others.
Vision from the Bottom aims to bypass the costs of customized eyeglasses and vision screening by implementing a social business model and supply chain network to deliver easy, inexpensive and effective vision correction to people in Cambodia. Using recent innovations in self-refraction technology for vision screening and standardized eyeglass products for vision correction, Vision from the Bottom will provide job training for vision vendors—a door-to-door community-based sales force for self-adjustable glasses. Vision vendors will also provide a basic eye-disease detection test and can consult and coordinate visits to eye clinics or hospitals for patients who need further care. Vision from the Bottom will apply an incentive-based, scale-up supply chain so vision vendors who achieve higher sales are provided with more discounts when acquiring these self-adjustable glasses for the purposes of selling them to customers, and they will also be promoted to a higher position.
Six years ago, as a junior at UC San Diego, Michael Bakal received a student grant to coordinate a health fair in the indigenous community of Rabinal, Guatemala. Since then, Michael has returned to Rabinal 10 times and formed a non-profit organization. Named Voces y Manos, his nonprofit originally sought to improve health through direct provision of medical care. However, feedback from the community enlightened him to the reality that this was just a band-aid solution to a much deeper problem: the community’s lack of control over its own health. This project seeks to address this issue by empowering a group of indigenous teenagers to form their own Youth Leadership Association to design and implement innovative solutions to the community’s most pressing health problems. After receiving extensive training, the Youth Leadership Association will be given total control over a $4,000 budget, which they will have one year to allocate toward developing innovative solutions to the community’s most critical challenges. This will not only incubate sustainable solutions to local health challenges, it will also prepare the next generation of indigenous youth to assume leadership in addressing the most pressing challenges facing their communities.
The establishment of innovative and sustainable farms is crucial to changing our current food system into a sustainable, environmentally friendly, and healthy system. From Farm to People will illuminate innovative farmers, producers of food, and food activists across the nation, shedding light on the people making efforts to create a new paradigm for how we think about food. Providing visual context as well as written documentation for these sustainable producers will support the establishment of a closer connection between the consumers, as well as give people a notion of personal relation and responsibility. While there is a need for more future-forward thinking farmers, From Farm to People will also confront the larger problems encompassing public health and the issues within our current centralized, industrial food system. This project has three parts that use photography and writing to offer a way to see the community and larger public impact of sustainable farming, creating a strong relationship between users and the farms that produce their food.
“Nossa Communidade, Nossa Historìa” (“Our Community, Our Story”) will bring a program of artistic expression to the youth of Brazil’s Rocinha favela. The program will take a group of twenty children, aged ten to fifteen, and spend four months providing them the opportunity to express their stories through different artistic modes with the goal to improve the student’s conception of the self. The programs will provide guidance for students to tell their personal narrative, focusing on writing, photography, reusable art and music, and ultimately create an exhibit that will be displayed in all socio-economic areas of Rio de Janeiro. The children will meet four times a week in this program to receive assistance with homework and cultivate the emotional benefits of an increased sense of self-worth that comes from accomplishment and much needed personal attention. The children will stay involved in the program to develop leadership skills and remain involved in art classes after the four months finish, even as the program will restart the cycle with twenty more children.
