Congratulations to the award recipients for 2018.
Brandon Doan
Integrative Biology
Undergraduate Award for Civic Engagement
In his time at Berkeley, Brandon has demonstrated deep and broadranging commitment to public service. Brandon worked to build a safety net for low-income, underserved communities in the Bay Area by co-founding the Health Advocates of Alameda Health System, which integrates social workers with student volunteers, ER doctors, and lawyers within the same hospital shift. He also designed a corresponding app and a new DeCal course to confront the social determinants of health that keep disadvantaged communities cycling into the emergency room. Brandon has volunteered with the Berkeley Free Clinic for years and serves as co-director of UC Teach in Prison, where students serve as tutors in San Quentin. His public service contributions extend to many other countries, including promoting health care reform in refugee camps and slums across Latin America. Brandon serves as Berkeley’s global ambassador with Worldview Education Services, and he served as Secretary General for Berkeley Model United Nations.
Ken Goldberg
Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Faculty Award for Research in the Public Interest
Professor Goldberg and a team of postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students have spent the last four years developing the Collaborative Assessment and Feedback Engine (CAFE), an open source, e-participation platform. CAFE provides participants with dynamic visual feedback about their position on key social issues, applies statistical models and collaborative filtering to discover emerging trends as data are collected, and presents insights from the data for decision makers in near real time. The team has successfully implemented CAFE to address a variety of social issues, from the effectiveness of family planning measures in Uganda to the political context of midterm elections in Mexico. So far, the platform has gathered feedback from over 25,000 participants in four countries, increasing engagement in decision making processes. By fostering open-ended dialogue and facilitating a more nuanced assessment of public opinion about complex issues, CAFE enables more informed organizational decisions.
Jeff Selbin
Law
Faculty Award for Community Engaged Teaching
Clinical Professor of Law Jeff Selbin directs the Policy Advocacy Clinic at Berkeley Law. His pedagogical passion is to encourage students to embrace public service as central to the legal profession. He provides them with opportunities to engage in projects with social justice aims. Since 2009, Professor Selbin has overseen an effort to end the assessment of administrative fees charged to youth and families at all stages of the juvenile justice system. These cumulative fees placed a significant burden on thousands of California’s most vulnerable families. The efforts of Professor Selbin and his students led to the passage into law of Senate Bill 190 — ending juvenile administrative fees in California. Several California counties are moving to vacate millions of dollars of outstanding debt attributed to these fees, and some families are being reimbursed for amounts that were improperly and unlawfully assessed. Professor Selbin is now working to eliminate juvenile administrative fees in three other states.
Resilient by Design Bay Area: Y-Plan Youth Challenge
College of Environmental Design, Department of City and Regional Planning, and partners
Campus-Community Partnership Award
Resilient by Design Bay Area (RbD) is a year-long collaborative design challenge bringing together local residents, public officials, and design experts to develop innovative, community-based solutions that will strengthen the region’s resilience to sea level rise, severe storms, floods, and earthquakes. Within the broader RbD collaboration, the Y-PLAN Youth Challenge works with 17 Bay Area high school and five elementary school classrooms to engage students in the urban design process. The program connects youth with Berkeley faculty and students, professional architects and planners, and community organizations. Most of the student participants in the Youth Challenge come from low-income, minority communities. The aim is to prepare and empower youth to inform policy and interrupt patterns of neglect, while simultaneously guiding civic leaders to more successfully involve diverse young people in planning. Students share their insights through digital storytelling, website development, video documentation, and a quarterly e-newsletter.
Derrika Hunt
Graduate School of Education
Graduate Award for Civic Engagement
While at Berkeley as a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education, Derrika has integrated her academic learning with her passion for service and social justice. Derrika founded the Dreamers4Change Foundation with the intention of both teaching girls and helping them to understand that they have something to teach the world. The Foundation’s Lemonade Workshop Series centers the experiences, voices, and ideas of girls of color through creative expression. Another Foundation program, Passports4Change, is rooted in the belief that low-income black girls have a great deal to gain from opportunities to experience new social contexts. This program uses travel to explore how the intersections of race, class, gender, and citizenship impact how black girls situate themselves in our global world. This summer, Passports4Change will take a group to South Africa.
Amelia Miazad & Kara Ganter
Law
Staff Award for Civic Engagement
Shortly after the fractious 2016 election, Amelia and Kara launched Wall-of-Us. This civic action listserv and website began as a welcoming place for encouraging civic engagement in the new political reality. Currently, Amelia and Kara curate a set of potential actions based on their own or volunteers’ research — recommending each week four civic actions that citizens can take to contribute toward shifting our political trajectory. As WallOfUs.org has grown, it has created partnerships with other action-oriented organizations such as Indivisible and Daily Kos and has brought together hundreds of other groups in conferences (e.g. Wonkathon and ActLocal) organized around the country.
Kimberly Robledo
Political Science
Robert J. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Recognition Award for Service to Undocumented Students
A sophomore originally from Mexicali, Mexico, Kimberly has been a tireless advocate for undocumented students and the broader undocumented community since she arrived at Berkeley. Through her engagement with student organizations such as Rising Immigrant Scholars through Education (RISE) and the Undocumented Students Coalition, Kimberly has consistently reached out to support undocumented students in navigating their challenging circumstances. Kimberly also lives and works with other undocumented students through Casa Sin Fronteras, a program that helps Chicanx/Latinx undocumented students find affordable housing. However, the impact of her advocacy extends well beyond the campus. During the heated debates about DACA, Kimberly organized two trips to Washington D.C. to meet with Democratic and Republican legislators about the need for progressive immigration reform. She took steps to ensure that a diversity of students participated in these trips, so that students of color could share their personal narratives with lawmakers.
Katie Cruz
Social Welfare
Robert J. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Recognition Award for Service to Underrepresented Students
Katie is passionate about supporting the Latino community, especially by working with youth. She was introduced to La Clinica de la Raza, the East Bay’s largest provider of health and mental health care during a class, but her commitment to this community far exceeds class requirements; to this day, Katie volunteers with La Clinica. In addition to serving as a volunteer health advocate, Katie became a Behavioral Pathways Mentor, helping provide underrepresented, first-generation, and predominantly immigrant high school students with lectures and workshops promoting higher education. Katie also helps Berkeley students navigate the UC Health Care System to ensure that all students, but particularly underrepresented students, have access to the health services they need.
Cal Veterans Group
Centers for Educational Equity and Excellence(CE3)
Student Group Award for Civic Engagement
The Cal Veterans Group brings together military veterans on campus and provides resources and mentorship for current and future student veterans. This year, Cal Veterans responded to the fires in Sonoma County by raising funds, collecting supplies, and using their collective experience to help establish an emergency field hospital and provide sanitizing shelters to prevent viral disease outbreaks. One member of Cal Veterans has made a documentary about the Deported Veterans Support House in Tijuana, which houses many veterans of the U.S. military who have been deported. Group members have visited with deported veterans, delivered supplies, and raised funds to support the veterans’ needs.
Yvonne Dorantes
Political Science
Mather Good Citizen Award
Commitment to environmental justice and youth has characterized Yvonne’s time at Berkeley. As a Haas Public Service Leader, Yvonne initiated and implemented Training for Resource-Management, Environmentalism, Ecology, and Sustainability (TREES), a project to educate high school students, particularly students of color, about environmental justice and encourage them to get involved. She also works as a college advisor for the Pre-College Trio Talent Search program, where she started two new partnerships with high schools in an effort to increase college attendance rates from communities in Oakland. While a Cal-in-Sacramento Fellow, Yvonne was an intern for Assemblymember Rudy Salas. Yvonne continued her exploration of public service in her hometown of Salinas by serving as a Matsui Center Local Government Fellow for Assemblymember Anna Caballero and addressing policy-level issues affecting her local community