Social Resources for a Healthy Community aims to take available social services and fully maximize their effects on communities. The program is designed to engage Berkeley students in service learning and immerses them in real life issues. Students will be trained through DeCal classes on campus in social work approaches and methods with the assistance of the School of Social Welfare. The ultimate goal of this project is to establish a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance site at Berkeley, establish a social resource consultant structure, and provide information regarding finance, health, education, and legal rights through workshops and educational outreaches.(Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Justice & Community Engagement” category.)
The Youth Empowerment Program (YEP) aims to provide a network of support and hope to immigrant children held in federal custody by connecting them to student role models from the University of California. YEP uses a five-month curriculum to help detained youth develop teamwork and leadership skills, reflect upon their past and make positive plans for their future while connecting with college student mentors. YEP provides an extensive leadership training program for volunteers by bringing in experts in diverse fields with the purpose of building future leaders for social justice. YEP volunteers utilize their leadership immediately by working with detained unaccompanied immigrant children every other week and engaging in direct community outreach. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Justice & Community Engagement” category.)
Development organizations around the world are increasingly reliant on accurate and timely data for decision-making at all levels. Unfortunately, the infrastructure and capacity for data entry and management have not kept pace, especially for low-resource organizations in the field. Even though millions of dollars of aid money each year is spent on data collection, entry and cleaning, most data efforts suffer from delays, inefficiency and difficulties in maintaining quality. Shreddr provides organizations an affordable and effective data digitization service that ensures accurate paper data entry with minimal additional investment in technology, training, or staffing through a series of simple “microtasks.” (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Entrepreneurship Category” category.)
Access to standard lab equipment is a serious limitation to scientific education, research and capacity building in many parts of the world. To combat this problem, Tekla Labs aims to empower scientists and engineers to construct their own quality lab equipment from locally available supplies using detailed and reliable protocols. While many real-world examples of doit-yourself (DIY) equipment already exist, quality assurance and comprehensive instructions on how to build education and research grade lab equipment are lacking. To address this, Tekla Labs is creating an interactive online library of tested “How-To” blueprints. All equipment instructions will be freely available under an unrestricted creative commons license to allow users throughout the world to use and add to Tekla Labs. The interactive online forum will allow researchers to ask questions and make requests, share their own improvements and alternative solutions, and connect to other labs worldwide.
(Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Entrepreneurship” category.)
There are countless student projects completed each year in academic classes that never get used in the real world because students do not know how to move them to the next level. Similarly, there are real causes that desperately need creative solutions. They can provide a forum for learning in class projects. “Class Projects to Social Ventures” will facilitate collaboration with social ventures to lead to a win-win situation: students will be more motivated because they will know their work can be utilized in a real world context, and the organization will benefit from a project overseen by experts: professors who are specialists in the field. “Class projects to Social Ventures” will provide the missing matchmaker that can 2 connect these parties. Through it, collaborations would be facilitated and students would have more opportunities to apply the knowledge they learn in classes in engaging “real world” projects. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Entrepreneurship Category” category.)
This research aims at the design and realization of a high-precision, low-cost, handheld, pulsed-based, reflection-sensing imaging module in microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies. The device termed the Time-Domain Ultra-Wideband Synthetic Imager (TUSI) would be capable of accurately detecting minute reflections and by capturing the data from multiple transceivers form a synthesized image of the object. The transceivers are synchronized using a common reference clock and individual locking circuits. The TUSI system is designed for battery operation and given the integrated processing unit, could be interfaced to a laptop PC or another display device for image visualization. Some of the applications are the detection of breast cancer, leukemia, melanoma and also non-invasive blood glucose monitoring as well as assessment of internal injuries at the accident site.
Through the introduction of an all-access computer center at San Quentin State prison, we propose a feasibility study and a pilot impact study of computer training in two distinct educational programs: one program will focus on instructing basic computer literacy to inmate students in the GED preparation class, and the other will concentrate on teaching advanced computer-aided design (CAD) to inmate-students in the prison’s vocational-training machine shop. This will be the first study of the ability of Information Technology to reduce the crisis of overcrowding in California’s prisons. This project has the full support of San Quentin’s administration and expands upon a thriving service-learning project that we coordinate, in which 70 UC Berkeley undergraduates teach and tutor weekly at San Quentin.
We are developing a novel, easy-to-use, patent-pending, point-of-care platform for multiplexed, digital disease detection. We have applied digital Integrated
Circuit (IC) technology, the same technology that has underpinned the IT revolution, to encapsulate the performance of a laboratory assay in the palm of the hand. We envision that our device will be capable of communicating with computers via Ethernet and with cell phones via Bluetooth to enable truly distributed, low-overhead, diagnostic testing.
The project is a partnership between the Pinoleville-Pomo Nation (PPN) and the University of California, Berkeley. The purpose of this project is to develop a series of community-based service learning modules (CBSLM) in which graduate and undergraduate students at UC Berkeley will partner with members of the PPN to co-design a Tribal Energy, Land Use, and Sustainability (TELUS) Plan. The TELUS plan will aid the PPN in achieving their sovereignty, economic self-sufficiency, and environmental goals, as well as educating students at UC Berkeley and members of the PNN about designing sustainable communities, using the tenets of human-centered design.
