Spring Grants

These projects were funded during our Spring grant cycle, where projects receive more than $5,000 for projects that take between one to three years to complete. 

BIPOC Earth Day Festival: Celebrating 10 Years of SCEC

Project Description

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-...

Island Justice Fellows Program at the Critical Pacific Island Studies Collective

Project Description

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...

Farm to Fork: Creating a Circular Food System at UC Berkeley

Project Description

To develop a circular food system and advance internal sustainable procurement goals within Berkeley Dining, the Housing and Dining Sustainability (H&DS) Office is partnering with Berkeley Student Farms to procure local, organic produce, grown at Oxford Tract, for Berkeley Dining restaurants. The Oxford Tract is an on-campus farm managed by UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. H&DS strives to pioneer a hyperlocal, circular food system in campus procurement by incorporating produce grown on-site. This furthers our sustainable procurement goal to...

Sustainable Menstrual Products Program (SMPP)

Project Description

The Zero Waste Coalition (ZWC) is seeking funding to expand their research from the initial pilot in Fall 2023, providing free access to eco-friendly, body-safe period products in the University Health Services wellness area and at community events. ZWC will hold best practices and care workshops, community events, and conduct outreach efforts to educate the UC Berkeley campus around the intersectional issues around environmental justice and menstrual equity.

Project Links

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Vermicomposting Implementation Project

Project Description

The Vermicompost Implementation Project heightens the impact of our existing Continuous-Flow-Through Vermicomposting Bin by unifying our material flows and expanding our educational offerings. First, we will relocate our Bin to the Clark Kerr Campus (CKC) Garden, where we will continue processing CKC Kitchen food waste and producing nutrient-rich vermicast to benefit the CKC Garden. By tightening our project’s geographic scope we will become a clear educational example of organics resource circularity. Second, this new location will form the foundation of...

SMART for Campus Construction

Project Description

The SMART (Sustainable Monitoring with Advanced Remote Techniques for Campus Construction) project is dedicated to addressing environmental challenges resulting from intensive construction on the Berkeley campus. Through the utilization of cutting-edge additive manufacturing and intelligent sensing techniques, the project aims to markedly mitigate issues like dust pollution and noise impact, empowering the construction team with effective management and mitigation strategies. This initiative will ultimately advance sustainability efforts on campus by developing a...

Cultivating Equity for a Just Future (CEJF): Empowering Latinx Students Through Sustainable Research

Project Description

The Latinxs and the Environment Initiative (LEI) is launching the CEJF Project, a year-long program intended to promote sustainability and environmental justice research to BIPOC students on campus through educational workshops and presentations and provide a paid summer research opportunity for undergraduate Latinx/BIPOC students at UC Berkeley to receive hands-on experience with faculty and graduate student researchers conducting research about sustainability and environmental justice. This project will relieve students of financial burdens for summer housing,...

EH&S Strawberry Creek Hydrologic Monitoring Initiative

Project Description

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...

Incorporation of Waste Streams into Algal Bioethanol for Sustainable Energy on Campus

Project Description

For the past decade, the Biofuels Technology Club has been collecting waste cooking oil from campus dining halls to convert it into biodiesel. This process has significant pitfalls such as waste glycerol production and variable diesel quality. This project aims to solve these issues by using algal biomass as a secondary source for both biodiesel and bioethanol. The waste glycerol serves as nutrient-rich feedstock for the algae boosting intracellular lipid content that can be converted into diesel. The leftover algal biomass after lipid extraction can be further...

Queer Indigenous Speaker Series

Project Description

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...