̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - volunteering

̽��ֱ��volunteers who went virtual but still delivered Christmas

cg605 — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 10:20:34 +0000

When Vanessa Chuang and Olivia Taylor became student volunteers, they had no idea they’d need to re-invent their activities as a virtual programme. Despite a turbulent year, they managed to keep supporting vulnerable clients in the local community – and to go ahead with their much-loved Christmas Present Campaign.

̽��ֱ��student linguist who started a pro-refugee fashion revolution

cg605 — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 17:15:08 +0000

Tiara Sahar Ataii has just been named Undergraduate of the Year for Impactful Social Action. She shares how her love of languages and exploration of her Iranian roots took her on unexpected paths, and led her to found a charity using fashion to fund legal aid for refugees.

A sewage system that ‘digests’ and ‘cooks’ human waste

lw355 — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 08:40:35 +0000

We are surrounded by friendly and welcoming people, but the language barrier makes communication monumentally challenging. We feel far from the immaculate lawns and gleaming stone of King’s Parade on a summer’s day. Navigating through a cluster of buildings in sweltering heat, even the smell is new. It has a sort of rawness: uncooked meat, unrefined exhaust fumes, untreated sewage.

This isn’t a quick and isolated visit. Instead, it will be the first of many over the next two months to Vingunguti, a densely populated part of Dar Es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania.

We are here as members of the student-led Cambridge Development Initiative (CDI), which runs several projects in the area. Ours focuses on engineering and, over the past three years, we have been designing and piloting an innovative sewage system to bring cheap and safe sanitation to households that are beyond the reach of the urban infrastructure.

Today we’re helping to lay pipes at shallow depths and gradients to expand our sewage network to 11 new houses, one of the aims on this trip. We’re helped along by the enthusiasm of members of the community, who are keen to have latrines that are connected to a sewage system.

Pit latrines are common here. Not only are they dangerous to empty, and frequently overflow in monsoon season, but these holes in the ground also contribute to the high incidence of water-borne diseases.

But it’s not just about cleaner toilets and streets. CDI’s innovation is the conversion of simplified sewage into useful products – fuel and fertiliser – using a system that has no net waste. ̽��ֱ��sewage flows into a ‘digester’ (designed by a SOWtech, a Cambridge-based company) that generates methane gas, which can then be used by households as a safer and cleaner alternative to charcoal for cooking. ̽��ֱ��effluent output of the digester is then ‘cooked’ using a solar-powered dryer (the EvapoDryer) to make fertiliser for agricultural purposes.

Once the new households are added, CDI will have managed to connect over 400 people to good-quality sanitation infrastructure, moving 1.9 tonnes of waste away from houses every day and generating products for the community that are either used in the households or sold by local entrepreneurs to establish an additional source of income.

On paper, this sounds great. But ensuring that it’s successful and sustainable in practice is tough. There are several case studies – even within Vingunguti – that highlight the dangers of not adequately including the community in projects that directly affect them. With its ethos of participatory development, the CDI model focuses on community organisation, financial ownership and targeted skills and knowledge training. Mobilising the community is a critical first step in the process.

After a community has identified the need for improved sanitation, a Sanitation Users Association (SUA) is established, bringing all the households together and giving them responsibility for managing construction and maintenance. In fact, the householders themselves finance and help to build the network. They are loaned the capital for their latrine construction and they pay this back through a microfinance scheme delivered by a Tanzanian NGO founded and run by a CDI alumnus.

Equally important is the involvement of students from universities in Dar Es Salaam, who are part of a complementary organisation (CDI Tanzania). We work alongside each other every day on all aspects of the project, from designing the network to facilitating community meetings. ̽��ֱ��Tanzanian students offer a unique and valuable perspective on the sanitation issues facing these areas – their insights are crucial to the success of the project.

To be sure that the project has a sustainable impact, we organise educational sessions for community members, delivered by our Tanzanian partners. One focus is health awareness sessions for women and children, covering topics like hand washing and malaria prevention. According to a recent survey, 97% of households agree that the project has improved the health of the community.

One local participant, Mr Mbetela, believes that the dangers of cholera and malaria have now been eliminated as a result of the CDI project. Fatima, another resident, says it has brought peace between neighbours because of the better conditions of the street. Ms Zacharia tells us that the new system has removed the embarrassment she used to feel when using exposed pit latrines.

As we prepare to return to Cambridge, we hear that the municipal water authority is looking to adopt our team’s sewage model, which could lead to 1,000 more people having access to safe, hygienic sanitation facilities in the coming years.

Meanwhile, CDI Cambridge and CDI Tanzania will carry on optimising the digester and cooker. Within 12 months, our goal is for there to be a fully functioning sanitation system, run and maintained by the community, removing human waste from households and turning it into essential products. ̽��ֱ��phrase ‘waste not, want not’ never seemed so apt.

Susannah is studying management at the Judge Business School, and Izhan has just graduated from the Department of Engineering.

Inset image: Susannah Duck and Izhan Khan; credit: Lloyd Mann.

To keep up to date with the latest stories about Cambridge’s engagement with Africa, follow #CamAfrica on Twitter.

Student volunteers Susannah Duck and Izhan Khan describe working with a Tanzanian community to install a system that turns sewage into essential products.

Equally important is the involvement of students from universities in Dar Es Salaam. We work alongside each other every day on all aspects of the project

Susannah Duck and Izhan Khan

Izhan Khan

Dar Es Salaam

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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‘Moral identity’ key to charitable time giving

sc604 — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 01:31:32 +0000

Charities have long wrestled with the issue of persuading people to donate their time to worthy causes. Many potential time-givers donate money instead due to the perceived psychological costs of giving their time – which is by definition limited.

But new research co-authored at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge finds that ‘moral identity’ can overcome time aversion because it affirms and reinforces this identity, especially when the cost of giving time rises – and charities can use this key insight in recruiting people for time-giving tasks.

Significantly, the study found that charities can issue 'moral cues' that trigger such moral identity and make people more likely to donate their time to good causes – a key practical finding for the charitable sector. Defining 'moral identity' around a set of nine traits including kindness, caring and generosity, the study found that moral identity can be activated by showing people images of 'moral exemplars' such as Gandhi and Mother Teresa, and quotations focused on the same idea such as: “Wherever there is a human being, there is a chance for kindness.”

According to the study, a strong moral identity may reduce time aversion not despite the higher cost of giving time, but rather because of it. Put another way, giving time more strongly reinforces the moral self, compared to giving money, according to the researchers, who call time aversion a ‘socio-psychological malady.’

̽��ֱ��study, entitled “I don’t want the money, I just want your time: how moral identity overcomes the aversion to giving time to pro-social causes”, has just been accepted for publication by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“ ̽��ֱ��study has significant implications for how charities and other good causes recruit volunteers for time-giving tasks,” says co-author Eric Levy, of Cambridge Judge Business School. “We found that there is a strong connection between moral identity and the willingness to donate time.”

One key finding was that when the cost of giving time rises, people with a high moral identity may be more motivated to give their time, and those with a low moral identity are more averse to giving their time. Conversely, in low-cost situations, those with a high moral identity are less apt to give their time than are people with low moral identity.

This suggests that charities need to consider levels of ‘moral salience’ in their promotional material and other outreach to potential time-givers.

According to the study, if charities wish to recruit volunteers for low-time-cost tasks they may be better off targeting individuals whose moral identities occupy a less central role within their self-concept. Conversely, if they wish to recruit volunteers for tasks with a high time cost they may do well to target individuals whose moral identities occupy a more central role in their self-concept.

̽��ֱ��research paper comprises four separate studies. ̽��ֱ��first finds that moral identity can make giving time appear less costly; the second and third find that a ‘moral cue’ reduces time aversion even in unpleasant situations (such as emptying dirty hospital bedpans) and when time appears to be scarce (by enhancing a perceived connection between the time-giver and the beneficiary of the time donation); the fourth accounts for the real costs of time, finding that the ‘chronic salience of moral identity’ especially lessens time aversion when giving time becomes increasingly costly.

̽��ֱ��study was co-authored by Americus Reed II of the Wharton School, ̽��ֱ�� of Pennsylvania; Adam Kay, a doctoral student at the ̽��ֱ�� of British Columbia; Stephanie Finnel, a marketing support services specialist at BAYADA Home Health Care; Karl Aquino of the Sauder School of Business at the ̽��ֱ�� of British Columbia; and Eric Levy of ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Judge Business School.

Adapted from a Cambridge Judge Business School story.

Charities want your time and not just your money: new study identifies factors that lessen ‘time aversion’ in charitable giving.

There is a strong connection between moral identity and the willingness to donate time

Eric Levy

Bio Blitz

Tony Smith, volunteer naturalist, talks to students from Brislington Enterprise College

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Attribution

̽��ֱ�� volunteers to carry Olympic torch

sjr81 — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 14:20:11 +0000

Members of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Officer Training Corps will also be taking part in the Torch’s arrival, providing a guard of honour as it travels through the city.

These students and recent graduates were nominated by Samsung, Olympic Torch presenting partner, and the ̽��ֱ��, in recognition of their inspiring charitable and volunteering activities.

Ed Roberts (Christ’s College) is a Junior Research Fellow and former doctoral student working on systemic effects of cancer development. Since 2005, he has been involved in Linkline, a student-run support phone-line for Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin ̽��ֱ�� students. He has been organisation co-ordinator as well as its public face. During his time with Linkline he implemented a constitution, re-wrote the training manual, recruited new volunteers and secured funding.

He has also been a volunteer for SexYOUality, a local lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) charity, since 2008, later becoming a Trustee. From 2009, Ed has volunteered for Cambridge and District Community Mediation Service (CDCMS), becoming part of a pilot project to expand the organisation’s homelessness mediation work, and researching into new areas of mediation required in the County. He has also been involved in numerous scientific outreach projects and volunteers for Centre 33, a Cambridgeshire youth charity, working with the Young Carers Project supporting 8-18 year olds looking after a family member.

Catherine Potterton (Wolfson College) graduated with a degree in Politics, Psychology and Sociology last year. In 2006 she became a Trustee of ̽��ֱ��Brittle Bone Society; a charity which supports those living with Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI), a condition which Catherine also has. Catherine worked to establish an annual event called VOICE which encourages young people with OI to work towards independent living through peer support, discussions and speeches from experts such as specialist doctors, Paralympic champions and TV personalities.

Mark Fliegauf (Emmanuel College), a PhD student at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), has played a key role in the creation of the not-for-profit organisation Aiducation International UK during his time at Cambridge. As Trustee and former Chief Operations Officer for the NGO, his aim was to help students in developing countries pursue secondary education through one-to-one scholarship from donors in the UK. Aiducation international UK has so far been able to award 24 scholarships, each worth approximately £1,400, to gifted Kenyan school students since 2009.

Up to 60 members of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Officer Training Corps (CUOTC) will line the Torch’s route in pairs, falling-in behind the Torch as it passes them by.

̽��ֱ��Torch reaches Parker’s Piece at around 6.50pm on Saturday 7 July, after a full day of cultural events including a Fun Lab for all ages organised by the ̽��ֱ��’s Public Engagement team.

CUOTC will have a presence at the Olympic Film Tent from 11am to 11pm on Parker’s Piece, where all-day screenings of short, feature length and community films from local film-makers will be screened.

On the morning of 8 July the Torch relay begins early with a private event in Great Court, Trinity College, before the torchbearer takes the flame on to a punt at 6.35am.

̽��ֱ��relay continues by punt down the river from Trinity towards Magdalene Bridge, where the torch route will continue up Castle Street, towards Huntingdon Road and out of the City.

Due to capacity and safety constraints, Trinity College regrets that it will not be possible for the public to view the run of the Olympic Torch around Great Court in Trinity College on the morning of Sunday 8 July, but the event will be broadcast live on BBC television.

Members of the public are welcome on the Backs to view the passage of the Torch down the river by punt from Trinity towards Magdalene Bridge.

Entry to the backs of Trinity College will be through the Avenue Gate from Queen's Road from 5am onwards. Entrance to the backs of St John’s College will be through the gates on Queen's Road only, from 5.45am onwards.

In both cases, numbers will be limited for safety reasons and viewing will be restricted of the passage of the Torch.

Attendees who are wheelchair users are asked to enter via the St John’s College gate on Queen’s Road.

There will be no access via other Cambridge college grounds or along bridges on the punt route.

More information on viewing points throughout the city is available here.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� will also be keeping the public updated on the latest viewing positions and Torch movements via the Twitter hashtag #london2012torchrelay

Three members of the ̽��ֱ�� who have excelled in volunteering activity: Ed Roberts, Catherine Potterton and Mark Fliegauf, will be among the Torchbearers when the Olympic flame arrives in Cambridge this weekend.

These students and recent graduates were nominated by Samsung, Olympic Torch presenting partner, and the ̽��ֱ��, in recognition of their inspiring charitable and volunteering activities.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge/Sir Cam

Sunday's procession will see the Olympic torch travel on the River Cam

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Open and transparent

amb206 — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:12:56 +0000

Data“Open

̽��ֱ��Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF), a venture co-founded by a Cambridge economist and committed to the sharing of knowledge from “sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata”, is playing a pioneering role in the movement to make more information available to the public and thus empower people to become involved in decision making, whether on a local, national or international level.

Last month OKF was awarded $750,000 to develop its activities over the next three years. ̽��ֱ��award, which comes from the Omidyar Network, will help the organisation to expand its financial transparency project, sustain and build working groups on open data, and establish offshoots in a growing number of countries round the world.

OKF was set up in 2004 by Rufus Pollock, with the mission of creating a worldwide ecosystem of good quality, reliable, searchable data, giving people the tools to be able to interpret that data and increasing data-literacy. Its overall aim is to empower people, both the average citizen and policy makers worldwide, to make better decisions based on the information which is available to them.

A shining example of a new kind of hybrid not-for-profit enterprise, with both a virtual and online presence, the organisation has mushroomed into a multi-stranded enterprise – from writing the software behind national data catalogues such as the UK’s data.gov.uk to educating scientists about the importance of publishing their work in open-access journals, from increasing understanding of rights to re-use Public Domain Works to developing a set of key principles which guide decision-makers in government about how to run an open-data policy.

Its core activities are building tools and communities around an ecosystem of open-data and the guiding principle and core theme in all OKF projects is the Open Definition. According to the Open Definition: “A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.”

OKF’s next major event takes place at the end of this month. ̽��ֱ��Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw is expected to attract members of government and civil society from all over the world. Activities will include: building consensus around core open data principles and values; building community by expanding and strengthening the international open data community; sharing ideas on the future of open data and how we can do things better; and making things, from starting projects and making plans to writing code.

̽��ֱ��camp is the second of its kind and is expected to be the largest Open Data Event in the world to date with participants from over 40 different countries. This year, a special focus will be given to drafting a set of Open Government Data principles to guide decision-makers all over the globe on how to effectively implement an open-data policy. Participants will share their experiences of implementing an open-data policy in their own countries and benefit from workshops, sessions and discussions on best-practices for governments wishing to publish their data.

With its headquarters in Cambridge, OKF has a growing number of offshoots internationally. ‘Chapters’ are already established in Germany and Austria and talks are in progress about setting up chapters or partnerships in Finland, Brazil and Kenya. ̽��ֱ��flexible structure as a largely volunteer-based organisation means that people can opt in and out of its activities according to their time-constraints. Pollock remains at its helm as a director and the organisation maintains strong links with Cambridge. Pollock is affiliated to the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law and Peter Murray-Rust of the Department Chemistry is a key proponent of the Open-Science movement. Many key players in OKF’s Cultural Heritage projects such as have come from Cambridge’s arts and humanities faculties.

OKF works by developing standards, tools and projects, all of which are breaking new ground in the way in which they give people access to information and the opportunity to participate in building tools and forming policies. Indeed, members of the community are encouraged to set up and run their own projects and are often given infrastructure and support to do so by the Foundation.

Its tools include AnnotateIt which allows users to annotate any web page simply by incorporating two lines of JavaScript into their site or by running OKF’s bookmarklet. While some projects are targeted at the general public, and offer ways of accessing information on government spending, for example, others focus on learning. Open Shakespeare, for example is designed as a tool to allow users to explore and discover Shakespeare’s works through discovering other peoples’ perspective and commentary with tools such as AnnotateIt.

Embedded in OKF’s youthful and inclusive culture are the Principles ”, guidelines drawn up by various members, including Peter Murray-Rust in a local pub, the Panton Arms. These set out in robust terms OKF’s beliefs in the arena of open-science and include guidelines such as: “When publishing data make an explicit and robust statement of your wishes” [with regard to how you wish them to be used] and “If you want your data to be effectively used and added to by others it should be open as defined by the Open Knowledge – in particular non-commercial and other restrictive clauses should not be used.”

Pollock is currently Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at Cambridge. He has worked extensively as a scholar and developer on the social, legal and technological issues related to the creation and sharing of knowledge. In a recent interview with the Guardian he described “vast silos of data that is not shared” and, while he acknowledged the role of technologies such as wikis, he emphasised that these were the exceptions not the rule and that a huge amount remained to be done in opening up of data. In science, for example, most research is still published in non-open journals and access is restricted to those who can afford to pay a premium for it; this is despite the fact that much of the research behind the data was publicly funded, so most readers will already have ‘paid’ for it once through their taxes.

̽��ֱ��work of OKF and others is vital in challenging our passive acceptance of the status quo, on one hand, and the obfuscation of institutions in their management of data sharing, on the other. As countries such as the UK and Germany take a lead in transparency, so others will be under pressure to follow suit. In this way OKF and similar organisations are making a valuable contribution to the sharing of data that empowers us to participate in decision-making processes, on both macro and micro levels and locally, nationally and internationally.

̽��ֱ��Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunities for people to improve their lives. It was established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam. ̽��ֱ��network has since committed almost $450 million to for-profit and not-for-profit companies that foster economic advancement and individual participation.

An exciting venture dedicated to the sharing of knowledge and information, the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is creating a worldwide ecosystem of searchable data and the tools to interpret that data. Founded by Cambridge economist Rufus Pollock, OKF has big ambitions in fields that range from sonnets to statistics.

Embedded in OKF’s youthful and inclusive culture are the “Pantonprinciples”, guidelines drawn up in its local pub, the Panton Arms.

Open Knowledge Foundation

Rufus Pollock

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