Pinoleville Pomo Nation (TELUS)

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.

Men’s Story Project

The Men’s Story Project (MSP) is a replicable, performance-based, community discussion project through which participants critically examine social ideas about masculinity. The MSP mission is to strengthen social norms that support healthy masculinities and gender equality, and to help eliminate gender-based violence, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and other oppressions that are intertwined with masculinities, through ongoing events of men’s public story-sharing and collective dialogue. The Bears Breaking Boundaries funds are supporting: a) bringing a production of the MSP to UCB in April 2009, b) filming the production for educational use, and c) conducting a qualitative study with UCB students and MSP presenters regarding project content, process, and perceived short-term impacts, to inform development of a Masculinity Studies DeCal and UCB MSP initiative for the 2009-10 academic year.

Disability Awareness through Sport

The Disability Awareness Through Sport (DATS) project partners UC Berkeley and the Bay Area Outreach & Recreation Program (BORP) in a collaborative effort to increase disability awareness and student service on the Cal campus and in the surrounding Berkeley community. These two organizations will work together to implement a course in which students will use the sport of wheelchair basketball as a framework for exploring issues of disability awareness, advocacy, and outreach. In addition to learning how to play wheelchair basketball, students will also work in close collaboration with BORP as mentors, coaches, and community organizers.

CS0: Beauty, Awe and Joy of Computing

We propose to develop Computer Science 0 (CS0): a new introductory general service course, available to students across the university, to share the beauty, joy and awe of computing. This course has the potential to serve as a model for a new CollegeBoard Advanced Placement course in the works, which could have national impact. Students will be gently introduced to programming and computational thinking using a new graphical programming language called Scratch, with the emphasis on problems relevant to themselves and society.

Cal Science Corps

The Cal Science Corps (CSC) will place teams of scientists and engineers from UC Berkeley research programs at universities and research institutes in developing countries to share expertise and collaborate with local partners. Modeled after the Global Science Corps proposed in 2001 by Dr. Harold Varmus,1 the six- to nine-month CSC program will offer UC Berkeley students and researchers a unique opportunity to participate in scientific research in a middle-income country while helping develop the scientific capacity of the developing world. By assuming temporary roles in science education and research, CSC Fellows will
offer a valuable service to fledgling science programs in poorer nations, gain an exceptional experience in applying their scientific understanding in the developing world context, and provide a service to UC Berkeley and the United States by developing goodwill between two distant countries.

The Economics and Business Perspectives of Philanthropy

This is an interdisciplinary undergraduate course that aims to give students a better understanding of philanthropy. There are insufficient resources available to fund all charitable causes, so funds should be prioritized to the projects that yield the highest returns in social benefit on dollars invested. Students will be challenged to prioritize causes with this framework, and will explore needs, roles, and strategies from the perspective of both donors and charitable organizations. By the end of the course, students should be better prepared to make educated decisions as future nonprofit leaders, policy makers, and philanthropists.