Samyukta Shrivatsa arrived at Berkeley knowing the huge privilege it was to receive an education at Cal — indeed, what a huge privilege it was to even afford the flight all the way here from India. She came in wanting to change the world for the better, and do so “with an A-plus.” 

Then the pandemic hit. The magnitude of the problems it caused and revealed left Shrivatsa, a peer advisor of the Global Poverty and Practice minor who graduated last week, feeling ready to throw in the changemaker towel. 

But that was when she discovered the GPP minor — “or perhaps,” she mused to her fellow graduates, “when GPP found me.”

While the paths taken by the 60 newly minted GPP alumni to and through the minor differed greatly, they ultimately converged May 15 at Sutardja Dai Hall’s Banatao Auditorium following classes on poverty alleviation, a hands-on “practice experience” combining theory with practice, and deep reflection on what they learned. GPP’s 16th graduating class drew from 25 different majors and has joined an alumni community numbering over 1,000.

“We went into this thinking we were alleviating poverty for others,” said Shrivatsa, who is preparing to start an environmental engineering PhD at Stanford, “but we came to understand that we were really doing this for ourselves and that there is infinite hope in recognizing that, thankfully, none of us are alone in shouldering this responsibility. 

“There is so much power in recognizing the process of working for change as its own reward: All one has to do is stay the course, regardless of where the path leads.”

Prof. Dan Fletcher, faculty director of the Blum Center, which houses the minor, pointed out that the graduating class weathered pandemic disruptions in the classroom, during their practice experiences, and in their personal lives — not because the GPP program was required of them but “because of their commitment to these ideals.”

“As champions of social justice,” Fletcher said, “they represent the best of UC Berkeley.”

Keynote speaker and anthropology professor Aarti Sethi marveled at students’ ability to accomplish all that while having to do so much to take care of themselves, their families, and others. “Thank you for teaching us about resilience,” she said.

Sethi asked students to consider the “heart of the liberal university”: libraries — those “spaces of autodidactism” where one could discover the world’s vastness and interestingness, be transported to new places, find intellectual freedom, and wander without purpose. In a world where the uneven distribution of power and resources divides us into those who must “live in need” and those with the privilege to “live in desire,” it’s the latter — a cultivation of “impractical pleasures” — that is a worthy goal to pursue not just for ourselves but for others. 

All people have a right to to build an “impractical relationship to the world,” Sethi said. “What an education here can do and should do is to question this division and to create conditions in which everyone can live without purpose in some aspect of their life.” 

Thomas Kouyate, a molecular and cell biology major preparing for a position at Boston Children’s Hospital, recalled the minor as one of Berkeley’s biggest draws. He grew up in Senegal and remembers seeing poverty everywhere while he and his friends had the latest material goods. For a time, he accepted that reality. 

Understanding the roots of poverty came through interactions with his classmates, faculty, GPP staff, his parents, and “debunking those lies we were taught” about what causes such stark inequality. “We’re not here to solve poverty in a single day,” he discovered, “but rather that we’re here to understand that it starts with us, one day at a time, at a small scale.” 

Kouyate took that wisdom back to Dakar, Senegal, where he did his practice experience at a hospital and with the country’s National Tuberculosis Control Program. He implored his classmates not to become inured to the giant, complicated issues they’ve committed to grappling with: “My hope is that we keep serving and loving those in need, knowing that they will not be able to pay us back.” 

That kind of optimism was what alumna speaker Peyton Provenzano most liked about being a student at Berkeley — that students could make their campus and the world a better place. 

“The challenge for all of you will be translating that optimism and spirit of the Berkeley campus into your lives beyond the university,” said Provenzano, who just finished her JD at Berkeley Law. “It’s not naive to believe in the prospect of a more just, equitable, and kind world.” The students before her, she added, are uniquely equipped to be the change they want to see. 

But progress won’t be linear, Provenzano warned; the inevitable setbacks can’t be cause for discouragement. “Contributions large and small do make a difference.” 

For Shrivatsa, these large and small impacts, as well as how the graduating class arrived at them in the first place, form the stories that shape how we see the world around us.

“GPP has been a process of tearing down everything we thought we knew about the world and rewriting the stories we tell about it,” she told her peers and commencement attendees. And the story that GPP tells “is one of audacious hope in the world and each other.”

Following months of designing, workshopping, mentoring and pitching, High Tide, a student team working to produce a bio-based coating for compostability and recyclability, took home top honors at the 2023 Grand Prize Pitch Day and Awards Celebration, the Rudd Family Foundation Big Ideas’ annual finale. Judges gave High Tide, one of 23 finalists to appear at the May 3 event at UC Berkeley’s Blum Hall, the $10,000 Grand Prize.

High Tide, led by Ivan Jayapurna, a PhD candidate in Applied Science & Technology focusing on biodegradable plastics and Kira Erickson, MBA candidate, is dedicated to ending the use of plastic-coated paper in single-use containers unable to be composted or recycled. Their solution prioritizes structure over chemicals, using renewable resources to create a water repellent bio-based coating that will harmlessly degrade in natural ecosystems and can safely fall into green and blue waste bins. 

“The past few months have been hectic but fun and definitely educational. We got to talk to a lot of experts and I personally learned a lot about the packaging industry and on developing new materials from a commercial perspective. Today was really cool to see it all come together, as well as seeing all the other really cool projects,” said Jayapurna. “Hopefully this big idea can be a small part in helping us achieve a waste free future.” 

“The concept behind High Tide was born out of a realization that the majority of our paper products are destined for landfill, despite paper being a compostable and recyclable material,” added Erickson. “It’s an extremely pervasive, yet less widely known issue. The potential for systemic impact is massive if addressed properly. I hope it’s a challenge High Tide can help solve with our nature-inspired solution.”

This year, the Rudd Family Foundation Big Ideas received 160 applications from UC Berkeley students and 30 applications from its partner campus in the UK, the University of Sussex — representing  more than 600 students, 60 disciplines, and 15 countries — all aimed at addressing pressing social issues from food insecurity to workforce development to maternal healthcare. Of the final-round teams, over half of the projects were led by women. During the pre-proposal application period, Big Ideas provided students with a wide variety of resources including entrepreneurship skills workshops, team-building development, networking opportunities, and startup advising. Twenty-three finalists emerged from the 190 applications after a review by over 150 experts from academia, industry, and the venture community. These 23 teams continued to receive support and even more personalized mentorship as they prepared a final application. In addition to participating in today’s poster session, 5 of the 23 finalists were also chosen to pitch their innovations to three judges.

“These finalists are the best of the best of social innovation,” said Jill Finlayson, Managing Director of the CITRIS Innovation Hub and a Big Ideas judge for the last decade. “They could all easily go out in industry and make the next step. But Big Ideas is about making that big leap, pushing boundaries into reality. And that’s where we felt the winning team stood out.”

“It was such a thrill to bring the idea to life with Ivan and with support from our mentors, Tony [Kingsbury], Mathieu [Aguesse], Karenna [Rehorn], and Phillip [Denny],” Erickson said. “We got to meet and learn from many more people along the way as well who inspired us with their dedication to sustainability and generosity with their time.”

The other headliner of the night was 2ndWind, winner of the Lab for Inclusive FinTech (LIFT) “FinTech for Social Good” Initiative, a parallel Big Ideas track focused on advancing innovations that can unlock the potential of digital financial technologies to benefit underserved populations around the world. The FinTech for Social Good contest is made possible by Binance Charity and Ripple Impact.  2ndWind aims to help small and medium businesses continue even when the owners retire. The project creates an efficient platform to facilitate small and medium businesses in this time of transition, allowing owners to achieve their retirement’s goals, while preventing the layoffs often associated with small business closures.

Another highlight of the evening was when two undergraduate teams were recognized by Rich Lyons, Vice Chancellor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Blackprint Technologies and the Potion Project each won the Berkeley Changemaker award.

By Anehita Okojie

Farhiya Ali joined Blackbook University as a development intern in 2019 after Ibrahim Baldé, one of digital platform’s founders, reached out to the Black campus community seeking women in STEM to be a part of the organization, which equips Black students with relevant information, opportunities, and a network to connect with their peers. Ali’s passion for accessibility and using technology for social good drew her in. Through her involvement with the 2020-21 Big Ideas winner, the first-generation college student and child of Somali immigrants bolstered her service to — and helped bring together — the Black community while developing her technological skills.

Ali, a senior born and raised in the Bay Area, describes Blackbook University as “a diversity, equity, and inclusion solution to empower Black students and enable peer-to-peer connection, academic enrichment, and professional development.” Currently, the platform connects students with on-campus organizations and alumni through its mobile application. Blackbook hopes to create connections between Black students on campus while utilizing its alumni network to create opportunities for current Cal students. 

During her internship, Ali analyzed the enrollment trends of Black students going back to the 1990s, helped create the initial mobile application, and directed social media content. While working on the application, she tested prototypes, worked on the user interface, and conducted user interviews about how to improve the mobile app. She learned how to connect each page of the mobile application so they were easily accessible. 

Ali says Baldé consistently encouraged her and the rest of the Blackbook team to take ownership of their work. “You had his full support to explore different areas of the company and take ownership,” she recalls. “Or, if you saw that someone was working with some really cool data sets that you want to work with, you have full support to go work on that and explore that area.” 

During her sophomore and junior years, Ali moved up to a product marketing role within Blackbook and is currently its user design/experience expert, where she continues working on the mobile Blackbook University application, available for download on the App Store and Google Play Store. 

“We want [the app] to be a space where alumni can reach out and provide students with opportunities,” Ali says. (The team is currently building toward securing angel funding.) 

In addition to benefiting her peers, Ali’s tenure at Blackbook has developed her own professional repertoire in, among other things, software development, product management, and creating social campaigns — and all while exploring different disciplines through her projects and team members, whose majors range from data science to legal studies, business administration to media studies. She’s utilized platforms like Excel, Asana, and Trello, though some of the most important skills she says she learned were interpersonal skills, like “how to communicate differences professionally and how to maintain a level of respect, accountability, and transparency within a team.” 

All of these skills and experiences came in handy during her fast-paced internship last summer at Kinestry, an innovation studio that helps clients develop meaningful brand experiences through technology and specializes in non-fungible tokens (NFTs). One of her projects at Kinstry was Metaverse Fashion Week, a completely virtual fashion week that allows designers to showcase their work digitally. Thanks to her Blackbook experience, she was able, in her collaboration with clients, to make sure artists felt their projects were feasible and their work valued. Her experience with user interfaces and interviews at Blackbook helped her as a Kinestry product manager to gain insight into how to best assist clients in meeting their goals as well as staying organized in her own work.

Ali, however, has actively supported Berkeley’s Black student community beyond Blackbook. She’s been involved with the Black Engineering and Science Student Association since her sophomore year, when she started as BESSA’s pre-collegiate outreach chair. Founded in 1968, BESSA’s mission is “to increase the number of culturally responsible Black engineers and scientists who excel academically, succeed professionally, and positively impact the community.” Now, as president, Ali leads a team of 12 other board members whose programming focuses on K-12 outreach in the Bay Area, study jams, tutoring, and corporate-sponsored events for current UC Berkeley students. As president, she launched a paid, peer-to-peer tutoring program for Black STEM students as a form of academic retention and supports fundraising to sponsor students’ trips to national conferences. 

Ali also credited a change in major to opening up opportunities to serve her peers. She started out in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), but that changed in spring 2022 when she took a gap semester to take community college classes and network to expand her professional opportunities. During the break from Cal, she spoke with friends and people in her network and learned more about the Interdisciplinary Studies Field major, “what it did for them, and what doors it opened.” These conversations inspired her to switch from EECS to ISF, with a focus on human-computer interaction, in order to further serve the Black community on campus and pursue internship opportunities — the latest being a technical project management internship at Dolby Laboratories. The lighter load of the ISF major allowed her to both earn a fulfilling degree while having enough time to devote herself to other opportunities outside of academics and serve her community. 

Throughout her time in university, Ali has had mentorship from other students and alumni, from Baldé to her BESSA predecessors. Now an upperclassman herself, she’s taken up the role of giving back to underclassmen. “You should move forward,” she says, “but always give back to the community that helped you get where you are.”

Tisatayane had been a teacher, a nurse, and an unsuccessful social entrepreneur. Now, he’s using development engineering to provide his fellow Malawians clean energy and an opportunity to free themselves from economic hardship.

By Sam Goldman

Growing up, Mathews Tisatayane had few boundaries about where he could go and who he could see. His corner of Malawi, in southeast Africa, was multicultural, and he hung out with people from different tribes, who spoke different languages, and who practiced different religions. He didn’t have electricity or running water, and his family took him shopping for clothes once a year if he was lucky. But “growing up,” he said, “I didn’t feel like I was poor at all.”

As the third child and first-born son of his mother’s 12 children, he held a lot of responsibility and worked on his family’s farm growing tobacco — a major component of the Malawian economy. When he was seven, he used the income he earned to self-enroll in a school about five miles away.

Tisatayane, now 50 and finishing his final semester of UC Berkeley’s Master of Development Engineering program, says his family still grows tobacco “out of desperation, out of ‘what else can we do?’”

When he finally did get the chance to go to school, he encountered his first Peace Corps volunteer, which made him think the U.S. had something to offer the world. These ideas lodged in the back of his mind.

Tisatayane finished high school in 1994, but the introduction of college-entrance exams that favored elite kids halted his plans for college. It was already a dark time: His great uncle, who owned his family’s farm and had funded everything in his life, had passed away. He recalled trying to compose himself and asking what he could do in this bleak situation.

If there is one thing that defines Tisatayane, it’s resilience: “When I’m put in a situation, no matter how bad or good it is, I’m always trying to say, ‘How can I do better for myself and the people around me?’”

The mantra has guided him through famine, nursing school, full-time nursing, a deep but unsuccessful foray into social entrepreneurship, all the way to the inaugural cohort of the M.DevEng program. During his three semesters at Blum Hall, he parlayed new professional and peer connections to launch Umodzi with Sean Mandell, a recent graduate of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. The company is a reincarnation of Tisatayane’s failed attempt at social entrepreneurship, allowing women-led co-ops in Malawi to raise quail in a 100-percent sustainable, self-contained system.

“I’m almost happy I failed,” he said of his first attempt at sustainable development. “If I didn’t fail, I wouldn’t have come to Berkeley.”

From famine to the San Francisco Department of Public Health

After his great uncle died, Tisatayane found his way to a teacher’s training college, spent two years there, and returned to his village to teach kids — all while continuing as a subsistence farmer providing for 17 people as the elder man of the family.

But more hardship was in store. In 2001, a terrible famine hit Malawi. Tisatayane lost half his body weight and, at one point, while still teaching, went three days without food. The problem, he realized, wasn’t that there was not enough food in the country, but that it was not accessible to poorer people — including those who grew it. “That was the famine that changed my life for good,” he recalled two decades later. “It’s one of the things that pushed me to” apply to UC Berkeley — “to try to do something to relieve my people of that.”

Meanwhile, he had gotten involved in a government program where people planted trees for food. There, he met another Peace Corp volunteer. They married. And that was how Tisatayane made it to the country that, in high school, he started to realize had something to offer the world.

“When I came to the United States, I was totally useless,” he said. In Malawi, he had friends, family, a teaching job. “I had everything there. And then all of a sudden, I’m in a completely different situation.” He was lost. It was like the end of high school all over again.

But that spurred the same thought process: What could he do to help himself and those around him? Tisatayane enrolled in the City College of San Francisco not knowing what he wanted to pursue. But it reminded him of his youth, surrounded by folks speaking different languages, practicing different religions, displaying different personalities. It buoyed him.

While at CCSF, Tisatayane volunteered for six months in the unit serving patients with HIV/AIDS, learning about U.S. patient care. Many of them nearing the end of their lives didn’t have family, and he saw how the nurses became the closest relationships they had. “The passion, the love, and the dedication of the nurses who worked in that care unit,” he said, “inspired me to be like, ‘I think I want to be a nurse and do what these people are doing.’”

He studied intensely and improved his grades while at CCSF but did not get into the nursing program there, which used a lottery system. Persevering, Tisatayane later found a different school, and he became one of the very few men or Black people in the University of San Francisco’s undergrad nursing program, from which he graduated with a bachelor of science in nursing in 2011.

With the mission of helping the homeless suffering in the wealthiest country in the world, over the next five years, he worked at the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Medical Respite & Sobering Center, aiding those who were discharged from the hospital and needing housing or social services as well as those passed out on the street and smelling of alcohol. Despite the 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift — and the beginning of a new family here — Tisatayane continued to support his family back home in Malawi.

“If you’re not going to do this, you’re going to regret it on your deathbed.”

Though he had spent years helping those in need in San Francisco, his family in Malawi continued to grow and need support. His sisters and their friends had started a cooperative, Yankho co-op in Kauma Village, and he gave them $5,000 to use however they wanted. Six months later, the group of women had started an informal microfinancing program among themselves; every Sunday, they got together to lend money to whoever needed it most that week.

Tisatayane found that many women, along with their children, were raising chickens and other small birds, but they couldn’t scale their efforts. The cause mirrored that of the famine: Bird-feed ingredients grown in the village were bought up by middlemen, who sold them to businessmen in the city to make the feed, and who then sold it back to the farmers. He wrote up a business plan and showed it to contacts of his wife, who secured him $35,000 in funding. He would bring to his community a self-sustaining bird-raising operation.

The key, he learned, was energy: ubiquitous in the U.S., scarce in his hometown. He studied microgrids — small-scale, self-sufficient energy systems — and reached out to friend and fellow Malawian William Kamkwamba, of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind fame, who put him in touch with someone who got him the solar panels and batteries that Tisatayane would assemble into bird incubators and brooders. The equipment was paid for using the funds Tisatayane had raised.

The incubators could replace a hen lying on her eggs for 21 days — not an easy model to scale — in order to hatch as many eggs as possible. The chicks would then stay in the brooders — warm rooms that mimic their mothers’ feathers. After two weeks, the birds would be ready to be sent to farmers.

If his community could raise their own chickens all on their own, then they would eat well, which meant better health. They could sell the ones they couldn’t eat for income. And building a system run by women and youth would empower them, too. One of “the most profound moments” in the process, he recalled, was being in the U.S. and receiving a video of incubated chicks hatching at his village — “life coming out of an egg, because of the invention that we made.”

The machines worked well for two months. When they started failing at night, he hired independent solar companies to check them out. The panels, it turned out, had come from different manufacturers, as did the wiring. Either they were put together improperly or the batteries were used too quickly and died. The endeavor was paused indefinitely.

Tisatayane said he felt like “a failed social entrepreneur.” He tried out some online courses on social entrepreneurship, but they didn’t help. Then, he discovered UC Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab, run by Prof. Daniel Kammen. He spent a week on YouTube devouring Kammen’s talks. He wanted more. “How can I be part of people like this,” he asked himself, “because I truly, truly believe that I can do more in Malawi.”

In following the lab online, he came across Berkeley’s new Master of Development Engineering program, the first cohort of which was to start in the fall of 2021. “This is it,” he thought. “If you’re not going to do this, you’re going to regret it on your deathbed.” 

Investors and biodigesters 

Sure enough, he was accepted. He’d wake up at 6 a.m., take BART from his home in southern San Francisco to downtown Berkeley, and hike a mile up through campus to California Memorial Stadium for DevEng C200, “Design, Evaluate, and Scale Development Technologies,” at 8 a.m. He had started his dream program, a chapter in his life he hadn’t even considered not long before.

That first-semester M.DevEng course turned out to be pivotal. Tisatayane met Sean Mandell, a student at the Haas School of Business who had been a data scientist for four years at a health-tech start-up. Mandell had had a longtime interest in — but limited involvement with — global development and had come to Berkeley to pursue social entrepreneurship. The two chatted during class breaks. 

“We truly liked each other and respected each other’s views on what needs to happen in terms of development,” said Mandell, who graduated in May.

“Without Sean, my business wouldn’t be what it is,” Tisatayane said on a recent afternoon at a cafe on Euclid Avenue, near Blum Hall, home of the M.DevEng program. He described their blueprint: Solar panels heating multiple hatcheries incubating quail eggs, and biodigesters turning quails’ waste into fertilizer for the birds’ food as well as fuel to supplement the solar electricity. Once up and running, the circular system could address a panoply of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, including zero hunger, gender equality, affordable and clean energy, responsible consumption and production, and more. The whole enterprise, which they named Umodzi — “togetherness” in Chichewa, one of Malawi’s main languages — would be run by the women cooperative with whom Tisatayane had collaborated on his first try. The name reflected the unity with which Tisatayne’s community approached everything, from work to celebrations, as he grew up. 

Prof. Layla Kwong of the School of Public Health, his capstone advisor, gave him the idea to use biodigesters — mechanical stomachs that convert organic material, like quail poop, into biogas to heat incubating eggs, cook food, or make fertilizer to grow the quails’ food. Tisatayane read up on the process and discovered a biodigester maker already in Malawi. The country also had an incubator maker. “Talking to people, we found out all the systems were already there,” he said.

Eventually, Tisatayane and Mandell registered Umodzi as a public-benefit corporation in the U.S., with a subsidiary company in Malawi and a lawyer in each country, too. Tisatayane is founder and president; Mandell, co-founder and CEO. They went on to raise over $100,000 from individuals interested in supporting their project and even contributed some of their own savings. They bought a 25-kilowatt solar power system with a 60 kilowatt-hour lithium battery system from a Malawian supplier.

But getting a fully functioning enterprise off the ground required even more investment, and that’s where networking through the M.DevEng program came in handy once again. Prof. Alice Agogino, chair of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering, introduced Tisatayane to Stephen Isaacs, former president and CEO of Aduro Biotech and a member of the program’s advisory board, who then introduced him to his own friend Bob Reed, former CFO at Sutter Health. Reed immediately took to the idea. “What can I do for you?” he asked Tisatayane.

“I have an idea to change my community, but I know nothing about the money world,” he had replied. 

Reed enthusiastically obliged and became a friend and mentor to Tisatayane, introducing him to another potential investor. Umodzi’s circle of backers grew.

“Here for the indefinite future”

In the spring, Mandell surprised Tisatayane: He had bought a one-way ticket to Malawi, departing the day after his May graduation. “I’m here for the indefinite future,” Mandell told him. 

Tisatayane himself left for the country in June and stayed for two months, his longest trip to Malawi since moving to the U.S. Gut instinct told him to stay for a second month; it allowed him to be with family when his father passed away.

The batteries (lifespan: 10-plus years) and electrical equipment arrived in modular shipping containers and joined the hatcheries and biodigesters in Kauma Village. Solar panels (lifespan: 30 years) were installed, and a borehole was drilled to provide potable water to the birds. While drilling, they decided to install taps for the local community to access the water for free.

Umodzi’s fundraising efforts have netted just enough money to launch; Tisatayane estimated all the investment will be recouped in about a year of operations. As site manager, the pair hired Bernadetta Ndongera, a young woman from the community with experience working with farmers, raising poultry, and growing crops and with a degree in agriculture from Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, in the country’s capital. “We didn’t want to bring in a man when both co-founders are men,” Tisatayane said. The Yankho co-op remains Umodzi’s backbone. In fact, it was the women’s cooperative that aspired to raise quail as a ticket to economic freedom and self-sufficiency in the first place. 

As his final semester in the M.DevEng program wound down, Tisatayane bought a one-way ticket to Malawi to be full-time hands-on. Before departing in mid-January, he’ll wrap up his current job as a health nurse at a San Francisco County jail, which he had been juggling alongside his studies, entrepreneurial activities, and parenthood. He expects to split his time between the two countries he calls home, with plans to come back to California later in 2023. 

With only a couple weeks left in the M.DevEng program, Tisatayane was sent a familiar type of video — the first sign that months of hard work, perseverance, and passion were beginning to bear fruit for his community. Umodzi hatched the first quail chicks from an initial batch of 900 — a mere fifth of the number all its incubators will hold. On his screen, he watched in awe as a few of them broke through their shells. 

“My goal is to relieve Malawi of its tobacco industry and replace it with clean energy, and from there, move on to the rest of Africa or the rest of the world, to the extent that we can,” Tisatayane said. “But I can’t clean up Zambia and other neighboring countries until I clean up Malawi, my backyard.”

After 16 months, three semesters, 44 internships, 26 capstone projects, and countless hours in the classroom and out in the field, the inaugural cohort of UC Berkeley’s M.DevEng program walked across the stage of campus’ Sibley Auditorium in the Bechtel Engineering Center on Saturday to receive the country’s — if not the world’s — first master of development engineering degree. The 44-student Class of 2022 — pioneers of the burgeoning discipline that originated at Berkeley — will leave Blum Hall for careers in social impact, technology, and sustainability or to further their educational careers.

Students and their families, many of whom flew in from around the world, gathered at dusk for an intimate ceremony and reception to celebrate a group hailing from 15 countries and with backgrounds as diverse as education, electrical engineering, finance, and nursing. During their three semesters, the graduates studied a multidisciplinary curriculum focused on design and management of technology, application of emerging technologies, evidence-based assessment techniques, economic development, social problem solving, cross-cultural collaboration, and community engagement. From their first class, they’ve been devising and implementing technological solutions to complex societal challenges in low-resource settings.

“Regardless of the path each one of us is taking, we all agree the world would be a better place if we all put our efforts together,” said student speaker Mathews Sapemba Tisatayane, who took the stage to raucous cheers from his peers.

He began by asking the room to take a deep, collective breath. That breath, he pointed out, is an interaction of, and made possible by, all sorts of elements, from air molecules to lung cells, tissues to organs. “Although all these cells are different in some ways, by working altogether they maintain life as we know it,” he reminded us.

If togetherness is so vital to making the world work, why, he asked, is modern society so resistant to working together to solve climate change and poverty? We’ve been taught to work as individuals and to think of our divisions as almost natural, he said. “But it’s not. I came to UC Berkeley to find minds who could help me challenge these divisions. And I’m happy to tell you I found them,” he said, gesturing to his erstwhile classmates in the front rows. “They’re right here. Through different interactions with each other, faculty, and capstone projects, we researched and found our differences are what bring us closer.” 

Tisatayane turned to Nelson Mandela for how the cohort could turn its togetherness into action: “‘Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity. It is an act of justice,’” he quoted. “‘Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is manmade. And it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. … Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. And you can be that generation.’” 

“Let us be great. Let us be that generation that Nelson Mandela was talking about,” Tisatayane added. “Let our greatness blossom together. Let’s go out in the world to do actions to positively impact the planet and the lives of those living in poverty. In togetherness, we believe.”

Tisatayane cited his own capstone project as a product of togetherness. It was a reincarnation of an unsuccessful attempt at sustainable development in Malawi, where he was born and raised. He had teamed up with Sean Mandell, a Haas School of Business student he had met in his first DevEng class, to found Umodzi — “togetherness” in Tisatayane’s native language, Chichewa — which allows women-led co-ops in Malawi to raise quail in a 100-percent sustainable, self-contained system. His classmates’ capstone projects included a business for seamstresses in rural Ghana to sell their high-quality wares, a toilet that recycles the nitrogen from urine to use in fertilizer, advancing an initiative to bring arsenic-safe drinking water to rural cities in California, and a blockchain-certified recruiting platform enabling Nigerian students to close the gap between job seekers and employers.

“What you’ve done with your projects is remarkable,” said DevEng and Energy and Resources Group Prof. Dan Kammen in a recorded message to graduates. “You’ve launched this program with your passion and all the projects you’ve done.”

Civil and Environmental Engineering Prof. Maya Carrasquillo, the newest member of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering, which offers the M.DevEng, gave the commencement address.

“When I learned that this was the first cohort — the first cohort — for the Master of Development Engineering, I felt myself awestricken,” she said.

“You have become the precedent for what this program can and will become: a program marked by educating and equipping changemakers to develop innovative global solutions. What a powerful vision, and each of you embodies that so much,” Carrasquillo said. “It takes a certain kind of individual to step out into unproven, untested grounds. … You’re the ones who dare to do something different, in pursuit of something greater than yourselves. You are the ones not motivated by titles or prestige but by an inner voice that reminds you there has to be more than the way things have always been.”

Carrasquillo offered reflections shared at a book-tour event she attended for former First Lady Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry: “To treat yourself and others with gladness.” 

“In a world and in a profession where we are constantly striving to do good, it is all too easy to forget to be good,” she said. “And more than just being good — being kind — and even then, it is far too often that we are kind to others and less kind to ourselves. As you all go out to do all the amazing, undoubtedly life-changing things that you have been prepared to do in this world, never forget to greet yourself and others with gladness.” 

Early in the ceremony, the M.DevEng program honored retiring Prof. Alice Agogino for her years of service in developing and guiding Berkeley’s DevEng programs, in which she chairs the Graduate Group in Development Engineering, serves as the Blum Center for Developing Economies’ education director, leads the M.DevEng’s Sustainable Design Innovations concentration, led DevEng seminars, mentored many students, and held innumerable office hours with both enrolled students and prospective ones. Director of DevEng Programs Yael Perez presented Agogino with a scrapbook of photos and messages from the DevEng community, and Kammen highlighted her career of developing opportunities for students, faculty, and others to collaborate across disciplines and focus their STEM work on social impact. “What an honor and pleasure to work with you,” he said.

Bioengineering professor and Blum Center faculty director Dan Fletcher closed out the ceremony by noting how clearly the commencement showcased the tight-knit and supportive community the graduates had formed over their three semesters. Each grad walked across the stage to not just a reading of a self-written, third-person statement detailing their accomplishments, but to the cheers of their fellows. 

Though classes are over, Fletcher said, “the connections among you continue.” He called out how fitting it was to conclude the students’ recognition with the ending of the final student’s statement: “And she loves you all very much.”

By Anehita Okojie

In 2018, the USC Race and Equity Center released a report that measured postsecondary access and student success for Black undergraduates at public colleges and universities across the United States. In this report, the University of California, Berkeley received a C in representation equity and a D when it came to completion equity. According to the report, Black students at UC Berkeley are graduating at a rate of 75.4 percent — 15.9 percent less than the overall graduation rate. 

Ibrahim Baldé is a Bay Area native and UC Berkeley alumnus who graduated from the Haas School of Business with a BS in Social Entrepreneurship and Finance in December 2020. The Report led Baldé and a team of peers to question the implications of UC Berkeley’s ranking for Black students and how “community organizers and groups [could] use this to challenge or call out the narrative of UC Berkeley.” Baldé believes that the prestige surrounding UC Berkeley tends to downplay and often erase recognition of the barriers and challenges that underrepresented communities face. He wanted to do something. Blackbook University was the answer. 

Blackbook University is a digital platform that equips Black students with relevant information, opportunities, and a network to connect with their peers. It was launched to meet the needs of Black students on UC Berkeley’s campus — and to be a model that can be replicated across California, and eventually the nation.

In its research, the team discovered the legacy of the African American Student Handbook, which served as a resource guide for Black Students at UC Berkeley in the 1980s and 1990s. This resource guide, dubbed Blackbook, listed Black faculty, advisors, student organizations, alumni, and Black-owned businesses that would support students during their time at UC Berkeley. It was a tool “for the community to streamline networking and belonging the moment that someone [touched] base on this campus,” Baldé says. 

In 1996, Proposition 209 was passed in California, elimating “state and local government affirmative action programs…based on race, sex, color, or national origin.” Once this proposition went into effect, it significantly decreased the number of Black students admitted to Berkeley, as the University of California system could no longer provide outreach, counseling, and tutoring services targeted at individuals based on sex, race, or ethnicity. Baldé notes that the impact of Proposition 209 on UC Berkeley’s campus was that the infrastructure of the Black community started to diminish and “the resource guide was no longer maintained.” 

The Blackbook team came together in 2019 to discuss the importance of the resource guide for students in the past and how they could modernize it to meet the needs of current Cal students. The team included UC Berkeley students Chase Ali-Watkins ’20, Nahom Solomon ’21, Farhiya Ali ’23, Nicholas Brathwaite ’20, and Imran Sekalala ’22. Kyle Parkman, a 2020 UC Santa Cruz graduate, rounded out the founding team. 

To assess need, the team polled Black students on campus and found that around 90 percent of Black Cal students wanted a platform for Black students built by Black students. Blackbook was founded on three pillars: an accessible mobile application for students, university programming to empower the professional development of students, and storytelling to highlight the success of Black students and professionals. Blackbook University’s mobile platform connects students to events, opportunities, and programs led by on campus organizations. The team is currently in the process of reaching out to Black student leaders on UC Berkeley’s campus to get them onboarded and to begin utilizing the platform to communicate with Black students. 

“We’ve made it so that any Black student can enter the platform and understand exactly what resource or experience is available and optimal for them,” Baldé says. 

Currently, the mobile application is available on the App Store and the Google Play Store for download. Blackbook’s goal is to have 500 active users on the platform by the end of the 2022–23 school year. 

The 2020–21 Big Ideas Contest gave the Blackbook University team the ability to take Blackbook from an idea to a tangible product. The competition helped the team challenge themselves, offered them access to advisors, and helped them structure the model of Blackbook. One of their advisors was Bill Allison, the current campus technology officer at UC Berkeley. Baldé notes that Allison offered insight on how to “think about and navigate both the development of the platform and the onboarding process for our users in our pilot [and] also at scale.” Big Ideas also allowed them to network with several other entrepreneurs who have built other university-based platforms. The networking opportunities showed the Blackbook team it was on the right track, Baldé says. He also credits Big Ideas workshops and advising sessions with helping Blackbook solidify its approach to building their program. 

Since winning Big Ideas, Blackbook has continued evolving through app development, a pilot program, and continued involvement in the Black community at UC Berkeley. In late 2021, it created a pilot in collaboration with African American Student Development on Berkeley’s campus to work on projects to integrate Blackbook further into the Berkeley ecosystem. This pilot program consisted of five interns who worked on thinking about and tailoring solutions related to the complexities of Blackbook. They pitched different ideas about the trajectory of Blackbook and how to further leverage technology to positively impact the experience of Black students. The team continued to connect with the Blackbook interns over the summer to ensure that their input was being integrated into updates to the Blackbook application and marketing strategies. 

This past summer, the Blackbook team connected with high school Black Student Unions and community colleges to continue their outreach and upliftment of the Black community across the Bay Area. It hopes increased contact with high school and community college students will allow the platform to create meaningful connections with these students and communities before they arrive at a four-year institution. 

“We are working to make the Blackbook platform accessible beyond the UC Berkeley campus,” Baldé says. “Our goal is to build a Blackbook presence on every campus in the US, starting with major campuses and the UC system. We see university recruiting as a huge aspect of the growth of our model moving forward — we intend to position Blackbook as the access point for companies and organizations to hire Black talent.”

The Global Poverty and Practice minor was the reason Grace Elam ended up at Berkeley in the first place. The university was “way too close to home” for the San Franciscan, and she felt skeptical that Berkeley’s reputation for real-world change had continued to live up to the 1960s’ Free Speech Movement. After receiving an admissions letter, she snuck over to Cal Day to scope things out. She only remembers attending one event: a GPP alumni panel that “shared their experiences building a schoolhouse in Ghana and working in carceral reform in California.” She knew where she wanted to go for college.

The fourth-year, who’s majoring in rhetoric and minoring in both GPP and public policy, has spent the past two summers working full-time in the legal office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Pacific Southwest region, and continues working there part time. Much of her work focuses on the EPA’s engagement with other governments, including those of Navajo Nation, Guam, and California, as well as tracking civil rights compliance of grant recipients, processing the public’s requests for agency records, tracking citizens’ environmental lawsuits, researching the history and cultural practices of Native nations, and looking into the community impacts of polluters. 

Through “tricks of timing and my own desire to make the most of GPP’s foundational praxis,” the EPA job became her GPP practice experience, the hands-on component of the minor where students apply in the field what they learn in the classroom. Elam is also one of seven GPP peer advisors who use the experience they’ve gained in completing most of the minor to counsel their newer peers.

“I found that GPP was the most welcoming community I had come across at Cal,” said fellow peer advisor Samyukta Shrivatsa. “From the staff to the faculty and students, I owed so many of my best experiences to the encouragement and warmth extended by them. Finding meaning in one’s college experience can be a lonely journey, and I wanted to pass on the support I received to other similarly lost students!”

“Expanding how I look at the world”

Mahima Sinha’s passion lies in increasing access to healthcare in communities. It drove the fourth-year, pre-medical track public health student to take GPP 115, “Challenges and Hopes,” in the first place. What stuck out to her was how the program could be tailored to students’ personal experiences, combined theoretical frameworks with real-world action, and promoted reflection on learnings and experiences. “I learned to think critically about poverty and inequality in a way that I had never thought of before,” Sinha said.

But it was the program’s community that also drew her in. “I loved how supportive everyone was of each other and how inclusive it felt.”

Sinha has stayed close to home with her practice experience, which can take students around the world. She continues to work remotely with Transitions Clinic Network, a San Francisco–based nonprofit providing healthcare services to those transitioning out of incarceration, doing data analysis of patient demographics, designing a manual for the TCN’s healthcare hotline, writing articles for San Quentin Prison’s social justice–oriented news site, and interviewing TCN’s community health workers — folks who have been incarcerated whom TCN hires to “create a supportive healthcare experience for patients and support their autonomy,” Sinha says.

“I have been able to learn so much about the effects of mass incarceration and how that impacts health specifically,” she said. “It has been challenging because I have never worked with the reentry population before and I am learning a lot as I go, such as the proper language to use, the harmful stigmas associated with incarceration, and the increasing need for reentry services in the United States.”

Expanding her perspective has been a key element of her overall GPP experience, which is open to all majors, allowing for a wide array of outlooks and frames of reference.

“This has really expanded how I look at the world and analyze what I see in the news,” Sinha says. “The minor has also offered me a lot of insight into how I can incorporate these frameworks into my future career, regardless of what I end up doing.”

“A lot of ownership for this project”

Also a fourth year, Samhita Bhat studies public health and molecular and cell biology. 

Over this past summer, she worked at Public Health Research Institute of India (PHRII), a nonprofit in the southern city of Mysore that researches women’s reproductive health, runs education and screening programs, and offers health services. As her practice experience, Bhat evaluated the impact of PHRII’s cervical cancer screening program through interviews with local community health workers, who were often overburdened managing the health of thousands of rural community members. She brought with her fluency in Kannada and, “as the daughter of immigrants from the state of Karnataka, a lot of personal knowledge and deep-rooted connection to the poverty that community members experience there.”

Her internship work resulted in a research abstract she presented at a conference and will be published soon in Annals of Epidemiology. “I felt a lot of ownership for this project as I was able to conduct interviews on my own,” Bhat said.

What’s helped cement her interest in continuing to work with healthcare-oriented grassroots organizations, she says, has been a curriculum that’s allowed her to better confront her own privilege and recognizing “the harm that my own actions may have in conducting poverty alleviation and how to mitigate that.”

“GPP has been a really special and unique part of my Berkeley experience, and I felt like I found a really strong community within my GPP classes and cohort,” Bhat said. Being a peer advisor, she added, allows her to transmit that experience to others while connecting with peers who have similar interests to hers. “I love hearing about the various passions and experiences that such a diverse group of students have within the minor.”

“Challenging these systems in my professional and personal life” 

“I was very aware of the privilege that an education at Cal gives me,” recalled Samyukta Shrivatsa, a senior studying environmental engineering science, “and was interested in understanding the education system I grew up with, the role education has to play in social and economic mobility, and how we can better serve students who go through the system.”

Shrivatsa came to the US from Bangalore. “Navigating college as an autistic student during COVID-19 was very challenging.” But it brought with it an awareness “of the complexities of privilege and power omnipresent in my life” and the desire to find a way to leave the world better off than how she’s found it. GPP 115 convinced her that “engaging in meaningful activities of solidarity” was where she wanted to be.

To these ends, she returned to Bangalore this past summer with Parikrma Humanity Foundation, which provides a holistic education to students from marginalized socioeconomic backgrounds. She had been intrigued by the way the school supported its students emotionally, medically, and financially since meeting some of those students in high school.

“I realized very quickly that my role as a temporary volunteer was miniscule, and that I had to think carefully about what kind of work I could do that would be most helpful to teachers with decades of experience,” she said. Shrivatsa observed the love with which the teachers approached their students’ difficulties. Her own days varied widely: playing football with students one day, talking K-dramas another day, introducing them to parliamentary debate yet another day, and all the while hearing out their backstories, hopes, and dreams.

For Shrivatsa, the practice experience and her classes have been a source not only of extensive knowledge, a realization of how much she doesn’t know, and how to be critical of “the systems and rhetoric surrounding issues of poverty and development,” but has given her the tools to “challenge these systems in my professional and personal life.” 

“Celebrating the importance of their work and passion” 

“I’ve landed in a front-row seat for US federal environmental governance, which is fascinating to watch, and extremely complex to be a part of,” said Elam of her EPA job. Some of the public’s preconceptions about the federal government, she found, aren’t far off, like dense bureaucracy and “high-level political indifference” slowing the pace of the government’s justice work. But that front-row seat also hit home that the EPA and its sibling agencies are made up of people at every level, who do good work and bad, “occupying different roles and having different impacts, and most importantly, responding to different pressures as ordained by their roles.”

In her second year, in an unrelated campus organization, she got to know a peer advisor, who became a mentor not only in GPP but for her whole Berkeley experience and work in social change. “I missed her when she graduated, and thought of her immediately when last spring I received an email from the GPP minor suggesting I apply to be a peer advisor,” she said. “Partly in her honor, and partly because I was flattered by the anonymous nomination, I did so and applied, and now I’m here!”

During advising sessions, Elam continues to draw inspiration from the peers with “their passion, drive, and ideas for their own GPP trajectories.”

“I believe in those students, and I want to celebrate the importance of their work and passion, and to set them up as well as I can  to have their desired impact on the world and their issue of choice,” she added. “I’ve found that I leave every advising appointment I have with a smile.”

UC Berkeley helped pioneer the field of development engineering more than a decade ago. Yet for many years, the professors teaching Berkeley’s foundational class, DevEng C200 (“Design, Evaluate, and Scale Development Technologies”), didn’t have a textbook for their students. The discipline — which integrates engineering with economics, business, natural resource management, and the social sciences — focuses on technological interventions that can address the needs of low-income communities, at scale.

When the field of development engineering was first getting started, “we had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find case studies for the students to understand and debate,” explained Prof. Ashok Gadgil, Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Chair of Safe Water & Sanitation and professor of civil and environmental engineering.

So in true development engineering fashion, Gadgil and colleague Temina Madon, part of the professional faculty at Haas School of Business, teamed up to publish Introduction to Development Engineering: A Framework with Applications from the Field — the discipline’s first textbook. It was published by Springer as an open access title on Sept. 9.

“We want to make this a topic of academic research because, whether it’s business or engineering or economics, everybody is too fractured intellectually and looks up their own stovepipe and doesn’t solve the problem,” Gadgil said. “They just go deeper and deeper and get narrower and narrower in viewpoint.” 

“The big picture question,” he continued, “is how are we going to meet the U.N. sustainable development goals and still not blow our planet’s carbon budget?”

The textbook is available online at no cost and in its first few weeks was downloaded from publisher Springer’s website more than 30,000 times. The Development Impact Lab, a USAID-backed initiative co-led by the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and the Blum Center for Developing Economies, supported the expenses of creating the book, which included honoraria for contributing authors and other costs associated with open-access publishing.

Introduction to Development Engineering isn’t Berkeley’s only effort to formalize the field of DevEng. Gadgil, Madon, and Paul Gertler, an economics professor at Haas and the School of Public Health, launched Development Engineering, an open access research journal, in 2015. 

“We are going to launch this journal and it’s going to be open access,” Gadgil recalled telling the chairman of Elsevier — the world’s largest, and one of the most expensive, research-journal publishers — at a reception for a prize Gadgil had won. “Because otherwise the journal isn’t going to be useful for people and for the institutions in the countries where poverty is widespread.” To Gadgil’s surprise, the company wanted to get into open access publishing and was willing to take a loss for the first five years of the journal to ensure that DevEng could establish itself as a discipline.

That open access belief carried over to the book. 

After Springer expressed interest, Gadgil and Madon talked to EECS Professor Emeritus Eric Brewer, Haas’ Prof. Catherine Wolfram, economics Prof. Edward Miguel, and CEGA, among others, and knuckled down on the book “well before COVID” — as early as the beginning of 2019, Gadgil reckons. Some three and a half years later, anyone can download a free copy or purchase a hard copy from Springer’s website.

Whether or not other colleges’ efforts in this area use the term “development engineering,” there is no longer a need to “scrape the bottom of the barrel” for teaching materials.

Clocking in at 650 pages, the textbook features 19 DevEng projects that graduate students can use as case studies, ranging from fintech for rural markets in Sub-Saharan Africa to stopping arsenic poisoning in India to protecting electoral integrity in emerging democracies. The DevEng practitioners who authored a set of invited chapters have included open-ended discussion questions for students to consider the pros and cons of a project and debate other decisions that could have been made. None of the questions have simple answers, Gadgil said: “It’s still an evolving field.”

Yet rather than just presenting “a bunch of projects put together and stapled into a book,” Gadgil, Madon, and co-editors led the development of four framework chapters at the beginning to provide the intellectual history, ethical challenges, and philosophical underpinnings of development engineering. This is important, Gadgil noted, given the history of white-collar and often-white researchers and engineers going into poorer areas without the context or cultural fluency to ask the right questions, include the right people, or solve the right problems. An instructor can start with those four framework chapters and then select any subsequent projects from which they would like to teach. 

“Top-tier universities across the U.S. and across the world have courses that recognize that engineering is not just about solving existing problems of big industry,” Gadgil said. “They recognize that it must also be about solving pressing problems of society.”

As the Campanile rang twice, indicating 2 p.m., students wearing blue and gold stoles over their formal attire found their seats below the iconic clock tower. It was a beautiful, warm day, with the sun shining down to highlight the sight of smiling faces and students mingling. After months of remote sessions, followed by masked-up classes, the 70 graduates of the Global Poverty and Practice minor finally got to experience a physical sense of community. Being the first in-person GPP graduation ceremony in three years, it was only appropriate to have it at the most quintessential UC Berkeley location. “After so much time having passed since we had a graduation, we returned to the heart of the campus,” recalls Chetan Chowdhry, director of student programs at the Blum Center for Developing Economies and GPP’s lead advisor.

The Global Poverty and Practice minor is an interdisciplinary program that provides students with theoretical frameworks, methods, and practical skills necessary to engage with global poverty and inequality in effective ways. This valuable program certainly deserved an exciting ceremony. Alice Agogino, education director of Blum Center, the home of GPP, welcomed attendees, followed by a speech by Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professor and Vice Chancellor for Research, Kathy Yelick. A special part of this year’s ceremony, though, was honoring Richard Blum, founder of the Blum Center, who passed away earlier this year. Agogino, Yelick, and Annette Blum, daughter of Richard Blum, recognized Blum and his family for his contributions and dedication to the center. Following these emotional parting words were two student speeches, both impactful and touching — a clear sign that the community cultivated within the minor is unlike any other.

“One of the things I always loved about being in GPP — we could always count on each other to care,” said one of the speakers, Madison Luzar, a molecular environmental biology major. “We knew that, at the very least, we could rely on each other to work together to try to overcome these obstacles and not just give up on the world.” 

Abigail Lomibao, the other student speaker, delivered a spoken word speech, poetically recounting how GPP students and faculty shaped her experience at Cal. The ceremony, too, strengthened relationships built within the minor; as each student walked down the Campanile Esplanade to receive their certificate, they read a statement for the following student. Rounding off the ceremony was a keynote speech from 2011 alumna Natalyn Daniels reflecting on the minor as a formative experience that shaped her commitment to activism and advocacy. “This campus and the world are lucky to have felt your presence and impact!” Daniels told the graduating class.

Students from all backgrounds and fields participate in this program; this year’s graduating class spanned 30 majors, ranging from architecture to public health to environmental economics. While there are only a few required classes, the program revolves around a student-arranged practice experience, where students connect poverty theories learned in class to tangible experiences by working extensively with organizations addressing poverty. “The practice experience is what many students find significant to them,” Chowdhry says. “It’s why the program even has its own graduation.”

But prior to fulfilling one’s practice, students must take two mandatory classes: GPP 115 and then GPP 105. In the former, students examine and critique popular ideas of poverty alleviation in the 21st century. By understanding 20th century development, students grasp the institutional framework of poverty ideas and practices. GPP 105 specifically prepares students to undertake their practice experience by learning the ethics of global service as well as methodological frameworks to work with organizations.

To formulate a practice experience, or PE, students are guided by their own interest and curiosities to identify a facet of poverty alleviation — from healthcare accessibility to food security to economic justice — that they want to focus on. With the assistance of the Blum Center’s network of connections, they then locate an organization, such as an NGO, a government agency, or a social movement which can foster hands-on community work. PEs can be arranged domestically or internationally and must be done for at least 240 hours over six weeks, although most students engage in their PEs much longer than this minimum. Graduates in the class of 2022 completed their PEs across the world, focusing on a variety of disciplines. Rhea Manoharan, a data science major, completed her practice experience in Moorea, French Polynesia working as an invasive species and pesticide management researcher with the French Polynesian government. Using data science and field research, she advised on environmental policy to find the safest and most equitable pesticide practices. Eniola Owoyele, an integrative biology major, worked on a USAID-funded research project focused on postpartum hemorrhage management and respectful maternity care for the Fitovinany and Atsinanana regions of Madagascar.

Following their practice experience, students take a course in which they reflect on their PE and learn to utilize the knowledge beyond the confinements of the curriculum. Students identify lessons which can be applied to public discourse and civic engagement by exploring the tensions between power versus privilege, tourism versus travel, and community service versus engagement.

Completing the practice experience did not come easy for the class of 2022, though. With many having practice experience opportunities lined up, only to be canceled due to the pandemic, they were forced to adapt to abnormal circumstances. While some were able to pivot and arrange for their PEs to be done remotely, others did not have that option. For example, while many students originally had work arranged within the healthcare sector, addressing COVID-19 dominated the interest of those organizations. These organizations could no longer manage hosting students, as their priorities completely shifted. The GPP program, too, worked to be as flexible as possible to ensure students were able to complete the minor. In the summer of 2020, students were able to do slightly fewer hours or work remotely if needed. For students who weren’t able to do the full amount of time, they were given the opportunity to do an optional summer study, which allowed them to address the problem they had originally wanted to study in their PE by conducting research around a question they came up with themself.

The class guided them through exercises and methods to help them explore an area of interest centered around group disparity. Questions ranged from, “How might we decolonize and increase Indigenous sovereignty in environmental science and environmentalism?” to pandemic-related questions such as “How might we harness the catalyzing power of COVID-19 to radically reconstruct our social welfare policies and programs?” Students used these questions as a jumping off point for their topic of study, then identified and interviewed community members to obtain various perspectives and complete their practice experience in this unique manner.

Despite adversity making completing the minor much more difficult, students remained dedicated to the cause.

“Students were willing to take this opportunity as a way to learn. That is one of the things I greatly appreciate about the minor — students are coming into this program seeking to learn,” says Chowdhry. “In the face of such challenges, everything falling apart, it could’ve been really easy for a student to no longer want to take on this minor. But these students did whatever it took to complete it.”