AID-Boston

Description: Association for India’s Development (AID) is a voluntary non-profit organization committed to promoting sustainable, equitable and just development in India. Working with grassroots organizations and movements, AID supports and initiates efforts in various interconnected arenas such as education, livelihood generation, conservation of natural resources, public health, women’s empowerment and social justice. The Boston Chapter based at MIT funded eleven projects last year.

Participation: Open to people interested in helping people help themselves with enthusiasm, willingness to learn, and ability to listen to multiple perspectives.

Alliance for Global Sustainability (AGS)

Description: The AGS is an international partnership of four leading science and technology universities: MIT, ETH-Zurich, University of Tokyo, and Chalmers University, Goteborg. AGS brings together hundreds of university scientists, engineers, and social scientists to address the complex issues at the intersection of environmental, economic, and social goals. In partnership with universities and governments around the world, AGS works towards better scientific understanding of global environmental challenges, development of technology and policy tools to help societies reconcile ecological and economic concern, education of a new generation of leaders committed to sustainable development. The AGS is a program of the MIT Laboratory for Energy and the Environment.

Participation: Faculty and researchers from the partner schools submit proposals for collaborative work each year. Students participate through specific AGS research projects, fellowship programs (such as the Martin Family Society for Fellows for Sustainability at MIT), curriculum based on AGS output, and the AGS sponsored Youth Encounter on Sustainability (YES), a two-week summer institute combining lectures and workshops on the environment, with field experience in the form of a group case study.

Amnesty International

Description: Amnesty International is a non-governmental, non-partisan organization working for the protection of human rights. As one of the largest human rights organizations in the world (over 1 million members in 45 countries), Amnesty International uses its broad international membership to publicise cases of human rights abuse and try to bring international pressure to bear on the governments in question, thereby aiding the development of a system of political and human rights around the world.

Participation: Chapter meetings, held every other Wednesday evening at 8pm in 4-253 are open to all interested persons.

Carroll L. Wilson Award

Description: The Carroll L. Wilson Award is a grant for up to $5,000 awarded to graduate students, in any MIT department, who wish to pursue exciting and challenging research opportunities abroad. The aim of the Wilson awards is to provide opportunities for MIT graduate students to explore a program of research and/or study of an important societal problem with international dimensions. The award enables students to spend around 6 weeks in a foreign country, pursuing a project that would have excited the interest and enthusiasm of Wilson himself. These awards have been established as a memorial to the late Carroll L. Wilson ('32) in honor of his career achievements and long-standing legacy.

Participation: For MIT graduate students, in any MIT department. Four to five graduate students receive $5,000 awards each year, after a competitive evaluation of proposals by the Carroll Wilson Award Selection Committee.

CEE Master of Engineering Program

Description: The Cvivl & Environmental Engineering department's Master of Engineering program sends masters level graduate students to work on water and sanitation projects in developing countries (Nepal, Haiti, Nicaragua, Brazil). Throughout the 9-month academic year, students work in teams of 3-5 students on the design of treatment systems, emphasizing appropriate design and sustainable operation, and travel to the site during IAP. The students' masters thesis is usually derived from their group project work.

Participation: Most participants are enrolled in the department's 9-month Master of Engineering Program, but a few undergraduate and non-MEng graduate students have also participated.

Center for Bits and Atoms @ Media Lab

Description:FAB LABS are hands on laboratories that provide the technology to let people build just about anything from inexpensice and readily available materials. Rather than bringing information technology to the masses, the fab labs bring information technology development to the masses. Each fab lab comes equipped with about $20K of computer-controlled fabrication tools, open-source computer-aided design and manufacturing software, and associated electronic components and test equipment. Together, these tools make accessible engineering in space down to microns, and in time down to microseconds. So far fab labs have been deployed in Ghana, Costa Rica, Norway, India and the US. The NSF funded Center for Bits and Atoms is looking at how to inspire and enable local development and entrepreneurship. Projects include: wire mesh networks, solar power, and cooling systems for refrigeration.

Participation: Students who are interested in training and project deveploment for fab labs are encouraged to contact us.

D-Lab

Description: D-lab is a four-part series of courses and field trips that focus on international development, appropriate technologies, and sustainable solutions for communities in developing countries. In the fall, students learn about international development and appropriate technology through case studies, guest speakers and hands-on laboratory experiences. During IAP, students work on site with partner organizations to implement projects and identify further technical challenges on which to collaborate. An extensive language and cultural training program prepares students for the trip. Next, students can take a spring design seminar to develop solutions to the problems identified during the IAP field trip. Finally, students can return to their host communities over the summer to test their designs and get feedback to refine their solutions.

Participation: Students who register and take the class, or international student groups that would like to host a field site.

De Barrio a Playa

Description: De Barrio a Playa is a environmental leadership workshop for youth in a low-income community in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The week-long workshop combines an educational retreat with a neighborhood improvement project. During the retreat, participants engage in educational, problem-solving team activities. Participants return home for the second part of the workshop, where they actively address a challenge facing their communities. De Barrio a Playa gives youth confidence, new ideas, and the leadership skills necessary to create change.

Participation: Anyone excited about carrying this project forward. We completed our first workshop this summer, and we are in the process of following up and figuring out what's next. If you are excited about teaching leadership and teamwork skills to youth or working with youth in disadvantaged communities, please talk to us! Proficiency in Spanish a plus.

Design that Matters

Description: Design that Matters (DtM) supports student projects that serve marginalized communities in developing countries and here in the U.S. We plan events to raise awareness of social problems and opportunities to help and facilitate student projects as part of the academic program and as independent projects. Many student projects through DtM have received significant financial support and resulted in field work in developing countries.

Participation: Everyone is invited to participate and bring their enthusiasm, unique skills, and desire to make a difference to the table in the effort to provide solutions to the problems of underserved communities.

Digital Nations Consortium

Description: Digital Nations aims to address major social challenges (improving education, enhancing health care, supporting community development) through the innovative design and use of new technologies. The consortium's ultimate goal is to empower people in all walks of life to invent new opportunities for themselves and their societies. The consortium focuses especially on populations with the greatest needs: children and seniors, underserved communities, and developing nations.

Participation: Primarily UROPs and graduate students supported by Digital Nations Research Assistantships. Requires permission of associated faculty member.

Earth System Initiative

Description: The Earth System Initiative is a research and educational enterprise that cuts across environmentally-oriented disciplines such as geology, atmospheric science, oceanography, biology, chemistry and environmental engineering. In the tradition of innovation that characterizes MIT, this Initiative provides a fertile ground for a new kind of Earth exploration--one that will marshal revolutionary tools and technologies to answer fundamental questions about life on Earth. Furthermore it will develop ways to effectively disseminate this knowledge to the citizens, policy-makers and corporate decision makers whose actions determine how the Earth's resources are managed.

Participation: Any faculty, staff or students who are involved with environmental research or engineering at MIT

Emerging Markets Initiative

Description: Emerging Markets Initiative is an MIT wide effort to develop, enhance and utilize management expertise to face challenges associated with the emerging economies. It is our firm belief that management and technology together, as disciplines, can be very potent tools to solve business and development problems.

Participation: Anyone!

Expediting Access to Standard Education (EASE)

Description: EASE is an effective system for sponsoring the education of needy children in Africa at the middle school and high school level.

Participation: Volunteers, funders, organizers from the MIT community and general Boston area who are committed to service.

Engineers Without Frontiers

Description: Engineers Without Frontiers is a world-wide non-profit organization, which seeks to bring appropriate technology to developing countries. Students in EWF design and develop projects from NGOs through EWF-USA. EWF also offers summer internships for students who want to implement the projects in the corresponding country.

Participation: Open

Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD)

Description: The Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD) is an adaptive and evolving, multi-lingual and multi-national, distributed and quality-controlled, global knowledge system dedicated to sustainable development based on knowledge networking principles and practices. Designed to help identify and develop innovative best-practices, enabling technologies, as well as new institutional, financial and regulatory mechanisms, the GSSD domain spans over the complex dimensions of the sustainability challenges - at all levels and all parts of the world. A set of knowledge management, search, and navigation functionalities allow users to customize their own site inputs into the system and/or to tailor specific retrieval queries over the GSSD knowledge base. Please see http://gssd.mit.edu to learn more about research taking place at the GSSD Lab or email gssd@mit.edu.

Participation: Anyone

Habitat for Humanity

Description: Habitat for Humanity is an international organization devoted to eliminating poverty housing and homelessness. Volunteers can work with individual chapters to build houses for the prospective families. MIT Habitat has funded and built one house and regularly builds at other sites with local affiliates. Our other goals include raising awareness on campus of poverty housing and homelessness issues, and fundraising.

Participation: Anyone. Some building sites have an age requirement that all volunteers be over the age of 14. However, youth programs exist to enable younger people to participate and there are plenty of other ways to get involved without building.

International Development and Regional Planning (IDRP)

Description: The International Development and Regional Planning (IDRP) group is the longest standing and largest graduate program within a U.S. planning school devoted specifically to the developing world. IDRP faculty and students conduct research on local, regional, and global issues concerning Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, and South America. IDRP faculty believe that effective planners working in today's world must acquire an institutional and integrated view of economic, physical, political, and social factors that influence development. They have, therefore, designed the program to provide this view and strive to prepare students for careers in local, state, and national government, in universities and other research institutions, and in nongovernmental organizations and international agencies here and abroad.

Participation: Any faculty, student, and/or staff member in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. For talks and presentations, any person at MIT or outside MIT may attend, subject to space availability and individual faculty restrictions.

Laboratory for Energy and the Environment

Description: The Laboratory for Energy and the Environment (LFEE) includes projects and programs the sustainable development of all aspects of the environment, with a special focus on the sources and uses of energy. LFEE supports research, education, and out-reach programs designed to encourage the interdisciplinary study of sustainability-related issues in both the developed and developing worlds.

LINC

Description: Developing countries have millions of bright, motivated people reaching college age each year and, with few exceptions, limited opportunities for them to receive quality college education (4%, in contrast to 40+% in Western industrialized countries). These young people represent a way to achieve better lives for themselves and for their fellow citizens, yet even if universities were built, the limiting constraint is the lack of qualified teachers. Technology via e-learning and similar innovations can leverage a few good teachers to reach far more students as Mexico's Virtual University, ITESM, at Monterrey Tech exemplifies <http://www.ruv.itesm.mx/>. LINC aims at becoming the premier community of scholars and practitioners who are focused on technology-leveraged higher education in emerging countries. LINC will share information, help make professional connections, foster innovative programmatic initiatives, and otherwise support scholarship and practical results. A new project is a global collaborative learning community focusing on urban and regional operational problems in developing countries.

Participation: We welcome students, faculty and staff as volunteers.

Mexico City Program

Description: Mexico City Project, led by Dr. Luisa and Mario Molina, is an interdisciplinary approach to understand complex scientific issues such as air pollution in an integrated manner. The project is aimed at identifying, developing and implementing policies to reduce air pollution in the Mexico mega-city. Stakeholder participation in the decision-making process, and capacity-building in the local population are two of the chief objectives of the project. The integrated methodology developed as part of the program may also provide a transportable framework to address complex issues involving conflicting requirements of development and pollution in other developing societies across the globe.

Migration and Development Working Group

Description: The MIT Working Group on Migration and Development sponsors working papers and speaker series on current issues of how international migration effects the economic development of migrants' countries of origin.

Participation: Seminars are open to the public. For other participation guidelines, contact the programs.

MIT-Africa Internet Technology Initiative (MIT-AITI)

Description: MIT-AITI is an innovative program started by MIT students to integrate computers and Internet technology into the education of students in African schools. The program uses innovations such as cutting-edge programming tools and free open-source systems to introduce students in Africa to the Internet, and to equip them with skills that encourage them to be creative and resourceful. Given that information technology carries the potential to empower people around the globe with knowledge, African students need to be equipped with the tools and skills needed for the development of information technology. MIT-AITI also aspires to create change beyond the classroom: students have succeeded in getting jobs in their local IT industry and have been involved in web development for local community initiatives. The program aims to serve a wide audience across gender and income levels. MIT-AITI has succeeded in improving the quality of education at the schools by teaching African teachers, thus enabling sustainable development of the curriculum at each school.

Participation: All MIT students, both graduates and undergraduates, with strong interest, passion, dedication; faculty can be advisors; offices can sponsor MIT students.

MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition

Description: The MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition is designed to encourage students and researchers in the MIT community to act on their talent,

ideas and energy to produce tomorrow's leading firms. Now in its 15th year, the Competition has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and business startup services to outstanding teams of student entrepreneurs who submitted business plans for new ventures showing significant business potential in areas ranging from cutting edge technology to social, economic and environmental development.

Participation: All teams must have at least one MIT student to be eligible.

MIT Haitian Alliance

Description: The MIT Haitian Alliance is proud to be a part of D-Lab <http://web.mit.edu/d-lab> by teaching culture, development and language material to MIT students interested in doing development work. We are currently organizing appropriate community based projects in water quality, agriculture, alternative fuels, electrification and computer projects for Haiti. In addition, plan to develop a wind turbine construction seminar where interested student groups can make wind turbines for their dorms or elsewhere.

Participation: We welcome faculty, staff and students for input, advice and physical assistance on the wind turbine seminar with interest in development, sustainability, appropriate technologies, field practice, design and prototyping.

MIT Humanitarian Demining

Description: Humanitarian demining is the process of detecting, removing and disposing of landmines. Millions of landmines are buried in more than 70 countries resulting in 20,000 civilian victims every year. MIT Humanitarian Demining is run as an informal, project-based design course. Students learn about demining while they design and build a device to aid the demining community. Course work is informed by guest speaker presentations and a class field trip. Past students have worked on probes, shears, metal detectors, shields, flails, and grapples.

Participation: The course is open to students from all class levels and departments.

MIT IDEAS Competition

Description: The MIT IDEAS Competition provides teams with the opportunity to develop their creative ideas for projects that make a positive change in the world. With over $20,000 in awards, as well as additional development grants, teams can take an effective step towards resolving pressing community needs. Projects are judged for their innovation, feasibility and impact.

Participation: Each team must be at least 1/3 MIT students; anyone can join the IDEAS staff.

MIT Program on Human Rights and Justice

Description: The MIT Program on Human Rights and Justice (PHRJ) is a collaborative effort between the Center for International Studies and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. The Program creates a cutting-edge inter-disciplinary environment for research, teaching, curricular development and real-world application in human rights, especially relating to the global economy, science and technology. It is the first human rights program in a leading technology school and the first in the world with a specific focus on the human rights aspects of economic, scientific and technological developments. Cross-cultural dimensions of human welfare, security and dignity animate all the activities of the Program. Offerings include speaker series, workshops, conferences, research projects including through partnership with NGOs and international organizations, student internships, a fellowship program and a working paper series.

Participation: There are no prerequisites, but applicants interested in getting academic credit for human rights-related work should contact the Program.

MIT Public Service Center

Description: The MIT Public Service Center facilitates community service efforts by the MIT community to assist local, regional, national, and international communities. For international projects, we offer planning assistance, grants, and independent and international Fellowships. With the Edgerton Center, we also support service learning classes, including Public Service Design Seminars, and the IDEAS Competition, which celebrates and supports innovative designs that meet community needs worldwide.

Participation: Fellowships are reserved for MIT undergraduates and graduate students; grants and planning assistance are available to anyone in the MIT community for projects that involve MIT students in community service projects. Faculty and alumni are needed as project mentors or IDEAS team members. Faculty and student grants are available for service learning class projects.

Setu

Description: Setu is a student group at MIT founded in 2002 to promote sustainable development in South Asia through social action projects with a focus on technology-based solutions. In the past year, Setu successfully implemented a Computer Training Center and Women's Empowerment Center in rural India and is currently in the process of launching several new projects.

Participation: Anyone who is interested in social development in South Asia.

Special Interest Group in Urban Settlement

Description: SIGUS explores methods for promoting affordable, equitable and efficient housing for low income communities, with focus in developing countries. It champions participatory technique through short workshops and courses, and undertakes research on innovative approaches in support of the low-income. It concentrates on the new professionalism emerging for designers, architects, and planners demanding a shift in practice and teaching. SIGUS has over 10 years of experience in Action-Learning workshops. It has lead programs in Peru, Ecuador, Poland, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, India, Bhutan, Syria, and Ethiopia; hosted by governments, development agencies, or NGOs, with local university counterparts.

Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies of Developing Areas (SPURS)

Description: SPURS, which is part of the IDRP group, is a one-year program for mid-career planning professionals from developing countries. Over the 36 years of the program, SPURS has hosted Fellows from over 83 countries with a broad range of experiences in the field of international development.

Student Pugwash

Description: Student Pugwash promotes the socially responsible application of science and technology, by raising awareness, fostering balanced discussion, and encouraging people to assess the roles their work and research play in society.

Participation: Anyone

Students for Global Sustainability (SfGS)

Description: SfGS is committed to promoting the basic tenets of sustainable development through a combination of education and action. As part of the World Student Community for Sustainable Development (WSC-SD, <www.wscsd.org>) we are a local student chapter that acts on a local and regional scale. Some recent projects that we are currently involved with include a partnership with the City of Cambridge to aid in the implementation of the Cambridge Climate Protection Plan, working with the MIT Solar Power initiative, reducing waste on campus with "Sustainable Containers," and organizing a Seminar Series on Sustainable Development.

Participation: Anyone who is interested, with good ideas and a strong commitment.

Students for Labor Justice

Description: SLJ is dedicated to the struggle for workers' rights and economic justice on our campus, in our local community and around the world. We're currently working on two campaigns: the Fair Trade Coffee Campaign will spread the word about fair trade products and ensure fairly traded coffee is available in all campus dining establishments, and the Anti-Sweatshop Initiative will build demand for "sweat-free" apparel on campus and monitor the Institute's progress on its commitment to fair labor standards for workers making MIT-licensed products.

Participation: Open