Introducing Our Projects for 2021–2022

Jen Hoang
Blueprint
Published in
4 min readSep 3, 2021

Cal Blueprint is proud to introduce our 4 nonprofit partnerships, with causes ranging from immigration casework to fighting food insecurity. Read on to learn more about our partners’ stories and the technology we’re building to expand their missions. If you’re interested in joining us, visit our website to learn more!

Friends of Alemany Farm

Friends of Alemany Farm grows food security and educates San Francisco residents about how they can become their own food producers. They strive to increase ecological knowledge and habitat value in order to sow the seeds for economic and environmental justice.

The project involves building a mobile application that provides visibility into orchard care and maintenance as well as making orchard analytics and environmental education readily available. This project will support Friends of Alemany Farm in their mission to bolster food security and health.

Features:

  • Allowing orchard staff and volunteers to record and view a tree’s location and history through a mobile app so that they can better provide for the community
  • Creating visualizations on past yield, rainfall, and maintenance to provide deep insights
  • Providing the community with accessibility to orchard plants and education

SIREN

Services, Immigration Rights & Education Network’s mission is to empower low-income immigrants and refugees through legal services and community education. They take immigration cases and work towards meaningful policy change at the local and federal level.

Our project goal is to build a multilingual mobile application that allows immigrant and refugees to upload and access their legal information. The project seeks to support the day to day operations of SIREN staff and attorneys for handling potential clients.

Features:

  • Creating a platform that tracks the case status of a potential SIREN client so that no immigrant or refugee gets left behind
  • Enabling potential clients to easily submit documents and schedule consultations with attorneys
  • Providing accessible legal and educational resources with multilingual capability

Sunday Friends

Sunday Friends is an organization that seeks to end the generational cycle of poverty through a unique educational model. They seek to connect and educate communities through lessons and activities, where families can gain credits from participating. These credits can then be redeemed for necessities.

The project will be a mobile and web app — mobile for families, web for admins. The mobile app will allow families to see their credit balance, transaction history, and redeem necessities. The web app will allow employees of Sunday Friends to give credits and see what necessities families have ordered. Admins can also input more inventory of specific necessities.

Features:

  • Creating an intuitive interface where credits can be provided or redeemed for necessities
  • Providing language/translation support to increase accessibility and increase knowledge

UC Berkeley Data Science Education Program

UC Berkeley DSUS (Data Science Undergraduate Studies) is an educational nonprofit focused on providing students with comprehensive data science courses, as well as supporting better access to educational curriculum and tools. The team consists of a group of passionate professors and students working to apply Berkeley’s Data Science Education Program to universities across many different states with a variety of backgrounds.

The project contributes to making powerful educational tools more accessible and manageable for other courses, universities, and educators. This includes improving Otter Grader, a CLI tool used to grade Jupyter notebooks for Data Science courses at Berkeley, and eventually, beyond.

  • Building an admin dashboard for instructors to monitor student progress for each question and improve test quality and coverage
  • Researching and adapting the existing codebase to the needs of various other platforms/college courses that want to use the auto-grader
  • Integrating auto-grader tool with a fully online Data 8 course currently delivered through EdX

If any of these causes excite you, come join us! We are currently recruiting for developer, designer, and external (content creation/event planning) positions. To learn more about us and our projects, visit our website and follow us on our Facebook page.

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