By Kate Rix

Awarded every year to graduating seniors with projects that heighten social consciousness and public good, the Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize promotes idealism and hope. Four 2010 graduates were chosen from a competitive pool of applicants, and during the months ahead, each prizewinner will use the award money to make a difference in the lives of others, either here in the United States or overseas.

Ryan Bosworth plans to develop an interactive, web-based map of three temporary settlements in Cape Town, South Africa. The maps will provide a dynamic snapshot of conditions in the settlements, to help plan the location of essential services, such as schools and transportation. Irene Kucherova will travel to her native Ukraine to create links between orphanages and community members willing to volunteer as tutors and mentors. Isaac Miller will work in Detroit, Michigan to create poetry workshops that will involve youth in urban planning. Jacob Seigel-Boettner is producing a documentary about international development projects built around the use of bicycles. The film will also be part of a fundraising campaign to help deliver bicycles to health workers, farmers and students around the globe.

The Stronach Prize gives graduating seniors the opportunity to extend and reflect upon their undergraduate work at Berkeley by undertaking a special project after their graduation. Winning projects are creative in the broadest sense and strive to further understanding of what constitutes humane and effective participation in our worldwide community. Prize recipients are selected by a panel of faculty and other researchers or artists and are granted as much as $25,000 each to cover project costs, materials, and living expenses for up to one year.

“I’m so impressed by our students — by their passion, intelligence, and imagination,” said Janet Broughton, dean of arts and humanities in Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science. “This remarkable prize program enables them to stretch themselves after they graduate and go out into the world to make a real difference.”

Established by Berkeley professor of architecture Raymond Lifchez, the Stronach Prize celebrates the achievements of his late wife. Trained in art history, Judith Lee Stronach was a journalist for Amnesty International, an East Bay poetry teacher, and a patron of numerous arts, education, and charitable organizations. The Stronach Prize commemorates her commitment to lifelong intellectual and creative growth.

“Professor Lifchez has achieved a remarkable vision by creating the Stronach Prize,” says Broughton. “It is at once a beautiful tribute to Judith Lee Stronach and a way to enable extraordinary Berkeley students to make their own contributions in her spirit of generosity and engagement.”

Ryan Bosworth
A Community-Based Approach to the Provision of Informal Settlement Maps

During his time as a Berkeley student, Ryan Bosworth worked with community-based organizations in the townships of Cape Town, South Africa. What he found was that a “participatory” mapping project — a digital and updateable rendering of an area’s housing structures, streets, clinics markets and rail stations — had the potential to help both the relief organizations and township residents.

Bosworth graduated this year with a degree in Political Economy of Industrial Societies. His undergraduate research projects included examination of the forced eviction of thousands of migrant families from the area of Beijing that now houses Olympic Village. Bosworth discovered that because there were no public maps detailing the former Beijing migrant settlements, they were treated as though they had never existed.

This led him to conclude that digital maps can be powerful policy resources. Bosworth helped develop a mapping model to illustrate the occurrences of foreclosed properties in Richmond, California. Those maps were used by housing development agencies to deliver financial support to neighborhoods vulnerable to foreclosure.

With his mapping project in Capetown, Bosworth hopes to provide a more detailed picture of communities that often lack basic infrastructure like schools and transportation. Detailed maps will be able to provide information needed by support and relief agencies.

Irene Kucherova
Enhancement Pilot Program for Orphanage 1 in Kherson, Ukraine

One out of every 90 children in Ukraine is an orphan or otherwise without family care. When children reach the age of 16 they are released from the country’s orphanages and are often left to the streets, where they face the hazards of drugs, prostitution and crime.

Irene Kucherova grew up in Ukraine and lived near a large and impoverished orphanage. This is where she plans to volunteer, using her Stronach Prize funds to develop a pilot program to link community members with children living in the institution. Her goal is to raise awareness of the needs of orphans and help foster relationships between orphans and members of the surrounding community through mentoring and tutoring.

Her project will be web-based in part, offering a way for community members to learn about life inside the orphanage, buy artwork made by the children, make donations and volunteer as mentors or tutors at the orphanage.

Kucherova’s hope is that the project will become a model for other orphanages in Ukraine, offering online schedules for tutors to use and a broader web presence that orphanage staff can maintain over time.

“I will know that my project was a success,” she writes “when I see that children in the orphanage are more creative and eager to learn and when public service and volunteering become common practice in the community.”

Isaac Miller
Youth Poetry and City Creation in Detroit

Once the fourth largest city in the United States, Detroit has lost more than one million people since the 1950s. The school dropout rate among African American students is nearly 75 percent and unemployment is estimated to be as high as 50 percent.

Isaac Miller’s prize-winning project will coincide with a major city redevelopment event this summer, when thousands of activists will convene in Detroit for the second U.S. Social Forum. Miller plans to focus on youth as a potential force in the Detroit’s redevelopment by organizing workshops on poetry, community organizing, and participatory urban planning. His goal: to empower youth as leaders in confronting their city’s many problems.

“There is a connection between community-based arts programs and youth empowerment,” Miller writes. “This novel combination of fields will allow young people to participate in an educational space that values their experiences of the city and their visions of what Detroit could become, while giving them concrete tools to put those ideas into action.”

Jacob Seigel-Boettner
With My Own Two Wheels

Jacob Seigel-Boettner’s documentary film project will capture the impact of the bicycle on global development projects, from the coffee fields of Rwanda, to the remote farms of Guatemala, to students in India’s rural villages who live miles from the nearest school.

The idea for the film My Own Two Wheels was born when Seigel-Boettner partnered with Project Rwanda, a California-based project that designs cargo bikes for Rwandan coffee farmers to transport their harvest. While many in America use bicycles as a lifestyle choice, in the developing world the bicycle is an affordable mode of transport that can lift farmers, students and workers out of poverty.

The film will feature the stories of Mirriam, a bike mechanic in Ghana, whose job has allowed her to support herself in spite of her disabilities; a young woman in rural India who is able to commute to secondary school since receiving a donated bike; a Guatemalan farmer who uses bicycle-powered pumps and mills to process his crops; and two young men in Santa Barbara, California who use donated bikes to get to a distant school.

In addition to helping produce the film, Seigel-Boettner’s Stronach Prize funds will help launch a program aimed at involving students in a bicycle “adoption” or loan program.

“Unlike many more complex development tools, the bicycle is something that every student can understand,” Seigel-Boettner writes. “By empowering others with something so familiar, students will be likewise empowered by the realization that they can make a difference on a global scale.”

For more information about the Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize, visit http://research.berkeley.edu/stronach/.