Grad and Family Living seeks funds to cultivate the UVA Community garden with native CA plants in order to attract beneficial insects, and support gardeners/the environment. They hope to teach and engage the community about native plants and insects through field and planting days.
Vertical Farming at Berkeley is requesting funds in order to research detergent-degrading bacteria to purify water for their farm. Their future goal is to supply fresh produce to eateries like Cal Dining.
Vertical Farming at Berkeley is seeking funds to support research on oyster mushrooms, which are alternative food sources that can reduce food inequity. They will be researching how to create a mushroom resistant to the Trichoderma mold, and hope that their strain can eventually be used in campus dining halls as a meat alternative.
By building upon UCB’s watershed monitoring efforts, we aim to raise awareness of aquatic ecosystem health, enhance accessibility to creek sensor data, and expand UCB’s creek monitoring capabilities. Our focus is to create a surface water monitoring platform that provides access to current and historical surface water monitoring for Strawberry Creek. Our deliverables include an open source web app that enables users to download all available Strawberry Creek surface water monitoring data, graphical data summaries, and text message alerts based on fluctuations in...
Over the 2024-2025 academic year, the Queer Indigenous Speakers Series will explore the intersection of indigeneity and queerness to challenge and expand our concepts around activism, sustainability, identity, and sovereignty. Through a series of talks and workshops, indigenous activists and scholars from the Bay Area and beyond will work with students to explore the historical constructions of our current conceptions around selfhood and nature, and understand how these seemingly disparate categories might be more closely entwined than we think. Ultimately, this...
The Peaks of the Bay program’s goal is to introduce and connect the UC Berkeley community to the beautiful mountains of the Bay Area. Within an academic year, SERC NEWT would provide a free and accessible experience to four iconic mountains in the Bay Area, including one overnight trip. Our trips focus on merging fun outdoor movement with environmental justice education and healing, and will be especially catered to those with limited outdoor experiences. Through skilled facilitation, we want to provide students with a safe, enjoyable, and memorable outdoor...
In Spring 2025, it will have been 10 years since the founding of the Students of Color Environmental Collective (SCEC), a campus student organization that has helped pave the way for environmental justice conversations on UC Berkeley’s campus. In celebration of this anniversary and in an effort to honor BIPOC voices and labor in the environmental movement, we intend to host a BIPOC Earth Day Festival. It will take place in Spring 2025 just a few days before Earth Day (likely August 19th, 2025) and will be a half-day outdoor event featuring guest speakers, eco-...
Modern agriculture is highly inefficient, with traditional growing methods wasting resources as compared to methods like hydroponics. While hydroponics significantly improves efficiency with yield and water usage, it can still be highly laborious. In the case of strawberries for example, many new roles emerge such as pollination, pruning, and continual supervision. This project aims to solve these restricting issues by integrating computer models to offload a significant chunk of work to robots -- thereby improving the proposition hydroponics can offer. VFB has...
The Island Justice Fellows Program at the Critical Pacific Island Studies Collective (CPISC) enables UC Berkeley students to contribute to environmental justice practice, research, and campus community engagement opportunities concerning issues facing Pacific Islander (PI) communities, both residing in the Pacific Island region and in the diaspora in California. This year-long fellowship programs supports a team of graduate and undergraduate students to address multiple gaps on the UC Berkeley campus: (1) the lack of institutional support for...
This project focuses on capturing roof rain water for the Convent house within the Berkeley Student Cooperative (BSC). Each winter, 236,000 gallons of roof rainwater exits the property entering the Berkeley Marina. This two-day workshop will redirect rainwater into rain gardens and tanks to support 1) groundwater recharge 2) water tank storage during drought and 3) install a perennial food gardens to mitigate local climate extremes by providing: 1. Microclimate: vegetative cover mitigating extreme heat, 2. Food Security: mediterranean perennial...
