India is experiencing rapid migration from rural areas to cities. Rampant urbanization in India has caused the proliferation of slums and increased demand for adequate housing. Among many of the physically and socially deteriorated living conditions that characterize life in the slums, housing with poor structural quality is one of the major limiting factors in the advancement of socio-economic growth. A functional roof is a basic and essential component of shelter for a family, but poor house planning and a lack of resources results in inadequate and unsafe roofs for families. After surveying 15 low-income households in a slum in Ahmedabad, India, this team got direct feedback from the field that helped them identify the top current roofing problems: extremely hot indoor temperatures, high roof maintenance costs, leaks during monsoon season, and the presence of asbestos. Roofing Out of Poverty’s challenge is to design an affordable and reliable roof that not only addresses these top priorities, but is modular, fits within a financially viable business model, and improves the safety and quality of living of low-income home dwellers. Their product will fill the market gap between inexpensive, low-quality roofing options and cost-prohibitive concrete slab roofs.
STORIE will help students of the Berkeley Unified School District and UC Berkeley jointly investigate the issue of educational inequality and tell their personal stories of how inequities have affected their lives. The project will work specifically with Studio H at REALM Charter School, a design and build program that teaches critical thinking and technical skills through a community project completed over the course of a semester. They will work with the teachers of Studio H to develop an educational equity project that will allow students to investigate educational trends on a national and local level, and will then offer a complementary, afterschool, documentary filmmaking project that would enable students to investigate inequities through the stories and experiences of their peers. In partnership with the Studio H teacher, they will apply the studio’s creative inquiry process to help the students’ research inequities, map out key stakeholders, and ground trends in lived experiences. Specifically, STORIE will invite community leaders, including representatives from the City and District 2020 Vision process, to speak to the students, and will travel to interview Cal professors in the Graduate School of Education. Together, the afterschool project will edit interviews into a 10-15 minute documentary that STORIE will show at a 2020 Vision community event and on the University of California, Berkeley campus.
Today, the increasing popularity of social media campaigns has heightened the importance of multimedia. Videos are an essential aspect of an influential online presence, but professional videography services are usually too expensive and inaccessible for nonprofits. AMASS Media aims to democratize access to multimedia services to empower social impact organizations.
The Ekialo Kiona Community Radio is a youth-driven community radio station that will bring together local residents to design programming that will cut to the heart of the health crisis on Mfangano. EKR will be broadcasted from Ekialo Kiona Center in the Suba and Luo languages. EKR will be able to reach tens of thousands of Suba and Luo people within a 30-kilometer radius along the shores of Lake Victoria and will focus on issues affecting the immediate communities as opposed to messages coming from beyond Mfangano. EKR will facilitate community-driven programs aimed at raising health and nutrition awareness, mobilizing youth activism, improving social solidarity, promoting sustainable agriculture and fishing innovation, and they will preserve the endangered Suba language and cultural identity. Their goal is to give young people a chance to contribute their voices and solidify a sense of community for thousands of isolated people along the shores of Lake Victoria.
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.
As the number of aging Americans increases over the next 40 years, clinicians, city planners, government employees, program administrators and caregivers are ill-equipped to do much more than help Baby Boomers maintain their health as they age. The need for innovative thinking, discourse, and practice in the field of aging is at an all-time high. There is a desperate need for multi-generational and crosscultural community dialogue geared toward giving a meaningful purpose to the lives of elderly people. “Vibrant Aging” aims to produce a series of short films which will be used to catalyze much-needed community discussions about the future of aging in America. These discussions will stem from reactions to the short films, which spotlight culturally-diverse and often-underserved populations of older adults
in America. Documenting older adults and their collective wisdom and expertise of what it means to age “vibrantly” will empower not only them, but the hundreds of older adults, caregivers, practitioners, and students who will watch the films.
