Howard Chen is a fourth-year Computer Science major at UC Berkeley. Howard joined Blueprint in 2013 and has been an active part of our vision and impact ever since.
1. When did you feel your impact most?
The strongest memory I have of creating impact in Blueprint is our work with Project Homeless Connect (PHC). PHC was one of our partners last year, and my team my team helped create a secure app to efficiently record and store service requests for the nonprofit’s volunteer days.
As a project leader, I really felt the impact my team was making when I saw our app in use at one of these volunteer events. We saw over 1000 people get checked in through the app! The volunteers I met appreciated that our app was simple to use and had features to make their work easier, which showed that our product was positively impacting our community.
More importantly, coming to this event also allowed my team to see firsthand the great work PHC does for the community and how our work fit into this larger picture.
2. What goals do you have for Blueprint this fall?
We are beginning 5 new projects this fall, which means that there’s going to be a lot of exciting new development. We want to not only keep building stable products for our partners, but also grow our club internally.
My personal focuses are to:
- Ensure project success: In the past, we have struggled with deploying our apps under tight schedules. Since we have moved our current projects to longer timelines, it is crucial that we give our development teams enough resources to get working prototypes finished by the end of the semester.
- Scale the organization: There is a lot of general interest in what Blueprint does, but not enough resources for us to scale the club vertically while maintaining quality projects. Hopefully throughout the year, we can devise ways to expand our services horizontally to engage other clubs and campuses in what we do.
- Engage our community outside of our core technology focus: Even though technology is our primary avenue for creating solutions, technology can’t solve everything. One of our goals is to try to engage with both the campus and the local community through new events and partnerships.
3. How can the community help nonprofits more effectively?
I think students need to be more aware about our local community’s needs. It’s very easy to get isolated in the college environment and lose track of what is happening in the world around us, especially considering students’ hectic schedules.
The important thing for students to do is to recognize that they can make an impact by prioritizing giving back.
4. How do you see the social impact space evolving with technology?
I’m very excited about the intersection between technology and nonprofits outside of Blueprint. Nonprofits are getting increasing traction and visibility in the technology space. New social ventures are started every week, and nonprofits going through large accelerators like YCombinator just shows that there is increasing interest in the field.
Not only are there nonprofits pursuing incredible missions, but there are also organizations like Exygy and YCore that are using new technologies to help existing nonprofits. Overall, there’s a lot of innovation that’s happening within the nonprofit space.
5. Biggest takeaway from Blueprint?
One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that technology doesn’t contain all the answers. The primary issue for nonprofits is usually not a lack of engineering ability. Instead, it’s more about finding products that supplements our partners’ needs. There is a huge human factor that is involved in bettering our community. For a given problem, technology can be used as a vehicle to get to the solution.
