B@B Gives

Over the last several months, COVID-19 has reached nearly every corner of the world and has impacted the lives of everyone. It has caused families and communities to grieve, forced many into a WFH environment, and displaced millions of jobs and businesses. Now more than ever, we have seen communities working together to rebuild and limit the impact.

As a community-built organization, Blockchain at Berkeley is committed to giving back to the Bay Area during this difficult time.

First, we are making all of our educational content completely free for the UC Berkeley community to allow people to continue to learn from home (LFH). We are reallocating our budget to provide much-needed PPE to doctors risking their lives on the front lines, as well as to support the restaurant industry where many are struggling to pay for their basic essentials:

• Shield the Bay: Created by our very own Gillian Chu, former head of education, Shield the Bay is producing face shields for the Bay Area county and donating them to hospitals and emergency response teams in need as we face our region’s COVID-19 surge. It’s a team of researchers, professors, and designers who have gotten together and standardized a design that hospitals can accept, based on feedback from stakeholders. (https://www.gofundme.com/f/shield-the-bay)
• Off Their Plate: Off Their Plate is a COVID-19 relief effort that buys meals from local restaurants and donates them to frontline healthcare workers in an effort to support both the threatened restaurant industry as well as overworked healthcare staff. (https://offtheirplate.org/)

We are proud to stand by many other companies that are fortunate enough to be donating during this difficult time and to maximize our impact, Blockchain at Berkeley is donating $8,000 between the two organizations above, in addition to another $2,100 donated by our members. As an organization that started as a grassroots movement, we believe that now more than ever, we must stand united to help each other and put the basic needs of those less fortunate above the privileges we normally experience.

In addition to monetary contributions, we have partnered with edX as part of the Open Remote Access Program to make our professional certificate in Blockchain Fundamentals freely available through June 30th, 2020 for UC Berkeley affiliates. Launched in the summer of 2018, we have seen over 125,000 students take the course. As part of our mission to prioritize learning over profits, the course has always been free, but for a limited time, all UC Berkeley students, faculty, and alumni can also get the certificate for free as well (normally $178) by emailing our education team. Additionally, all of our course content from the classes taught on UC Berkeley’s campus can be found on our website’s syllabus which is updated every week.

With an ever-changing outlook, we are now distributed across 8 timezones, but our commitment to providing a quality education and place to learn has not and will not change. Our Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator has recently started a new batch with 18 amazing teams from around the world, we will be revamping and updating our educational content throughout the semester, and we are planning our consulting engagements for the Fall.

If you’d like to engage with us, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Stay up to date on our twitter and through our newsletter, as we will continue to provide virtual meetups and events.

Blockchain at Berkeley drives innovation in the blockchain industry by building an ecosystem that empowers students to make an impact through practical education, consulting for enterprise companies, and conducting open-source research.

Blockchain at Berkeley is a university-based organization out of UC Berkeley dedicated to serving the crypto and blockchain communities. Our members comprise of 60+ active undergraduate and graduate students from Berkeley Engineering, Haas, and Berkeley Law, and a wealth of advisors from both industry and academia.

Feel free to contact us at external@blockchain.berkeley.edu with any comments, questions, or concerns.