Big Ideas Award Celebration, May 2012Photo Credit: Blum Center
The Health, Equal for All team works to achieve equal health care for all citizens in Chile regardless of background, ability to pay, preexisting diseases, sex, age, location, etc. This group is seeking to create resources that can be used to advance policy reform with the goal of aligning policy with ethical principles. This team will include individuals that are well informed in health policy and are motivated to work with a team of multimedia experts to achieve greater equality in access to health care. This team will implement multimedia resources to attract citizens to the debate on health policy. The first step will be a series of short videos that will be disseminated through Chilean social media by the end of the year.
The Youth Leadership Now Program (YLN) is a community-oriented model, led by youth who have grown up in West Oakland and wish to inspire younger generations by sharing their experiences. The goal is to help younger generations rise above the constraints of their communities or current situations through a one-year project, Looking Through Our Lens, which will work to reverse the traditional image of marginalized youth as “damaged” or “needing to be fixed”. YLN will provide a consistent level of commitment to these youths through lasting and meaningful relationships and a restored sense of community. YLN will launch Looking Through Our Lens in the Summer of 2012 equipping youth with photography and research skills to encourage them to critically analyze their community and their own potential to work for changes that impact their community.
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.
Handwriting can be especially difficult for Children with disabilities such as autism, hypotonic cerebral palsy (HCP), and sensory integration disorder (SID). Through interviews with four independent occupational therapists (OT’s), The Pika Pen team has identified three indicators of poor handwriting technique in children with disabilities: improper pen tip force, grip pressure, and pen inclination angle. Additional visual, auditory, and tactile feedback of the above indicators is effective for retraining different tasks. The goal of Pika Pen is to improve handwriting by these three indicators through the development of a low-cost, sensor-rich pen that allows children, especially those with disabilities, to improve their handwriting technique. The Pika Pen introduces children to an improved sensory- feedback system which is relayed to the child as real-time visual, audible, and tactile feedback.
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.
The Children’s Oral Health and Nutrition Project in Vietnam aims to contribute solutions to two global health epidemics– childhood tooth decay and malnutrition. The project’s intervention is a set of cost-effective preventive measures. It includes free dental supplies (toothbrushes, toothpaste, floss) for all study children and family members, application of fluoride varnish to children’s teeth biannually, referral of children with tooth decay to local dentists, and education about oral health and nutrition for community health workers, teachers, and families. The goal is to demonstrate that the project is a cost-effective and valid preventive health initiative that addresses the neglected global diseases of childhood tooth decay and malnutrition. Ultimately, the goal is to make the project sustainable and ensure its expansion with the support of the Vietnamese government to reach more children across all regions in Vietnam.
On any given night Berkeley has between 1,000-2,000 people sleeping on the streets. These individuals contend with a myriad of medical and psychiatric issues, but one problem that is often overlooked is oral health. A Healthy Smile at the Suitcase Clinic Dental Section provides free comprehensive restorative dental care in the form of dentures, stay-plates, and crowns on a weekly basis. Through the existing collaboration with the Berkeley Free Clinic and five volunteer dentists, the goal is to provide this much-needed restorative care to four clients per week. A Healthy Smile hopes to establish a mutually beneficial and sustainable collaboration in order to purchase dental materials at a reduced cost. The aim is to secure funding to ultimately provide 30 dentures, 30 partial dentures, 30 stay-plates, 29 implants crowns, and 100 crowns per year with the hope of improving the lives and social mobility of those in need.
Information latency profoundly limits agricultural cooperatives’ ability to conduct business and access financing – an avoidable problem with serious consequences for rural farmers in the developing world. Acopio is a nascent social venture offering information systems that enable farmer-owned cooperatives to better manage the data that is vital to managing their operations, accessing financing, and marketing their products. The team’s solution has the potential to positively affect the lives of millions of farmers in the developing world.
Politify (www.politify.us) is the first web application to forecast the financial impacts of political scenarios. Users input their demographic information and then Politify projects the effect that a candidate or policy will have on that person’s well-being—in dollars, including changes to tax incidence and government services. In addition to personal impacts, the user can also view impacts by income quintile and by geopolitical level (e.g. zip code, state, and nation). The results are displayed in an interactive HTML5 visualization with animated graphs and policy breakdowns. All forecasts are based on a non-partisan reading of the legislation or candidate platform. For aggregate impacts, Politify uses a state-of-the-art economic simulator developed by the Urban Institute. After learning this information, users are encouraged to engage in the political process. Each page includes the option to: (a) register to vote, (b) donate to advocacy groups, or (c) endorse or oppose a candidate via social media outlets.
