Campus Name

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University of California Berkeley

Berkeley, CA (see Serve 2.0 Mini-Grant Map)

 

Campus Contacts

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Carrie Donovan / Carriedonovan@berkeley.edu / 510-642-5429

Students Names:  Name / Email / Phone

Cal Corps

505 Eshleman Hall, #4550 • University of California Berkeley 94720-4550

http://publicservice.berkeley.edu

Graduate students in Information Technology:  http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/ 

 

Add Photos Here if you'd like (select Bonner logo and replace, size to 65-100 pixels square)

 

Issue Focus Area(s)

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Education/Youth Development (equity issues in education) 

 

Brief Overview

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UC Berkeley's Cal Corps Public Service Center will utilize the Serve 2.0 initiative to engage students and community partners who are working to address educational equity issues. Each UC Berkeley community partner site that runs a youth program will create a short 1-2 minute video that tells the story of how they are working for educational equity. Each video will then be linked to a Google-map that others can access to learn about each other’s programs, see achievement statistics based on income and race/ethnicity, for the school or city, and decide where they want to volunteer. In addition, Graduate Students from our School of Information will create a Facebook application so that students serving at a youth program or school can use to invite friends to work on educational equity issues with them.  The application will also allow Cal Corps to email all “educational equity” students with updates on relevant events, speakers, and policy news.

 

Key Community Partners

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A majority of UC Berkeley programs and student volunteers focus on serving K-12 youth. These programs include 15 America Reads literacy programs, student-run tutoring and mentoring programs, and 13 schools and youth programs that have Bonner Leaders serving with them as Volunteer Managers.  

 

Please feel free to add names of partners, which can be linked to their websites.  Or insert the link to your Google Map.

 

(see Serve 2.0 Mini-Grant Map)

 

Social Media Tools to Be Used

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Video, YouTube, Google Maps, Facebook, Wikis, new Facebook widget to be developed, Volunteer Match (link with national non-profit's resource database)

 

Context and Rationale (Explanation of Tools)

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UCB has chosen to use multiple social media tools and technologies for this project in order to better deepen our understanding and general Center use of a variety of tools: 

 

• Video: UCB will use Flip cameras to have students leaders and community partners work together to create short videos about how they experience or witness educational inequity and how the work happening at their sites is working for change. These videos will help us to better tell the stories of our work, which is actually one of our 2008-2009 Center goals. We will be launching a new website this spring andwill showcase some of the best videos on the homepage, where we will also link to the full map.  These videos can also be integrated into the Bonner Video Project, and will help students better understand each other’s work as Bonner Volunteer Managers at different school and community sites.

  
  

•  Google maps: UCB will then embed the videos in a Google map, so that users can identify community sites working with youth in their neighborhoods, or they can compare Oakland sites with Berkeley sites, and consider how the different demographics for these cities might play a role in educational opportunity for youth. The video will add a much more personal perspective to the map, allowing users to “meet” staff, volunteers, and youth at the site and hear directly from site stakeholders about their strategy for creating educational equity.  We have wanted to create an interactive map that creates a useful visual for the campus and community to better understand the scope of our work, and this will be an excellent pilot to determine if this Google tool is the best way to do this.

   

•  Social networking: Facebook is currently the primary social networking tool used by students. Cal Corps has an undergraduate student working with us this year as a “Artist-in-Residence” who will create a graphic for a Facebook application that can then be added to current Cal Corps students’ Facebook sites (similar to the “Hug” application). Our current student leaders will be able to send the app to friends, inviting them to get involved.  Students who are interested, can accept the app and an Educational Equity widget will appear on their Facebook page, which will link to the google map.  The application will serve to both help students educate their “Facebook friends” about their work, and recruit them to support their projects (either as volunteers, donors or in other capacities). The application will also allow people to give feedback on the project, video, etc. Graduate students from our Information School will help to create this tool.

   

• One hope is that this application will become a pilot for larger project that we have hoped to develop over the next year, which is to create a way for students to connect through Facebook to our campus portal of the national volunteer database VolunteerMatch (See http://calcorps.volunteermatch.org/, our local database that we created in partnership with VolunteerMatch to help us showcase our partnerships, recruit student volunteers, and track participation, while also linking to the national online database).

  
  

•  Wikis: UCB has not been actively using our UC Berkeley wiki, so we would like to take this opportunity to start to populate the wiki with information about all the community partners that will be involved in this project and to have Bonner leaders share how the project has benefited their work.

 

Link to Campus Organizing Strategies

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This proposal builds on a strategic university focus to better support the various education and youth development programs and to deepen their impact on educational inequity in the Bay Area. UCB now has two full-time staff managing and advising  students in these programs, and this fall we offered a first annual “Education Summit” which included over 25 workshops, panels, and dialogues on education issues and skills-building for youth workers.  It  was attended by 400 students and local community members. This project will help students better understand each other’s work, help student leaders recruit other volunteers, draw attention to educational equity issues, and help our many community partners learn about each other’s work.

 

UCB have also chosen to focus on education because the City of Berkeley has recently passed a city resolution called Vision 2020 that calls for the City, the University and a diverse group of community organizations to work together to eliminate the educational achievement gap in Berkeley by the year 2020. We are developing a variety of ways, as a Center and University, to support this important and necessary resolution, and this project could help us to highlight what is already happening to support local youth succeed in education. 

 

Goals of Initiative

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Goal One: Engage a minimum of 20 of our youth-serving sites in creating edited videos that are suitable for the public. (Our hope is to actually have all 35 sites create videos, but we know that some of our partner sites may not be interested in participating in this project.

    Objectives:

• Provide training for all students leaders at all 35 program sites that will introduce them to this project, solicit their input for how to achieve the goals of this project, and train them on how to approach their video projects.
• Provide information and training for all 35 Community Partners that will help to engage them in this project and help them to think about how they might use the outputs in their work.

 

Goal Two: Develop a presence on Facebook, the Bonner wiki and on our new website to draw additional attention to our programs and issues of educational equity.

      Objectives:

• Partner with graduate students from the School of Information to develop the Facebook application, and to learn from their expertise about other ways we can harness social networking tools to serve our work.
• Provide training for all Cal Corps professional staff and Bonner Leaders on how to use these different technologies and think about they might serve their work through the Center.

Goal Three: Student leaders in our youth programs will demonstrate an increased awareness and understanding of local educational equity issues.

 

Goal Four:  Student leaders will report that they have seen an increase in volunteers recruited for their programs.

 

Key Activities and Timelines

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Spring Semester, 2009:

• Partner with the School of Information to develop the Facebook application and to set up the Google Map with a listing of all 35 programs.
• Develop the visual art for the Facebook widget.
• Provide training for student leaders to pilot the video project at their sites so that we can learn what other training students need to create good videos. Ask students to help develop the training that will be provided for students in the summer.
• Launch the new Cal Corps website (http://publicservice.berkeley.edu)

Summer Semester, 2009:

• Edit and load the videos created in the Spring Semester on both the map and the Bonner wiki.
• Develop information and resources about educational equity issues and statistics to be placed on the map.
• Create, edit and load at least 10 more videos of our summer literacy tutoring programs

Fall Semester, 2009:

• Actively use all the new tools for volunteer recruitment.
• Require students leaders at every site to develop additional information to be on the map and to be disseminated to student participants.
• Evaluate the success of the project and develop other strategies to increase our success for implementation in the Spring of 2010.
• Meet with VolunteerMatch to determine if a possible partnership is possible. 

 

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