The Berkeley Project

The Berkeley Project is a student organization at the University of California, Berkeley. Started in the spring of 2006, our group came together with a common goal to make the Cal student body an instrumental group who contributes to the betterment of our city. To this end, our foremost endeavor is to organize an annual event for thousands of Cal students unite and volunteer in a network of service projects throughout the City of Berkeley.

This fall, we will hold the second annual Berkeley Project Day on Saturday, October 27, 2007. We are currently partnering with organizations throughout the city to arrange for a wide-range of service projects for student volunteers. Our goal is to have 1500 volunteers—1,300 students from the Berkeley campus and 200 resident members of the local community. We have already secured the cooperation of both former and new community organizations for project planning.

Project mission:

Our purpose is to achieve three objectives. First, we hope that the many hours of volunteer labor will tangibly enhance the city residents’ quality of life and physically improve the city itself. Second, this event will help to forge a more positive relationship between students and city residents. Lastly, our goal is to increase the number of UC Berkeley who consistently partake in community service or volunteer work. We are confident our efforts already have and will continue to build a sense of community pride in Cal students and serve as a gesture of goodwill to bridge the gap between our campus and the community.

Potential impact:

In our first year, we were proudly able to meet our goal of one thousand student volunteers despite intermittent rain and an early wake-up time. The main groups that we worked with were students, residents, and community organizations. Members from all three groups filled out surveys giving the Berkeley Project great feedback and very positive reviews. The City of Berkeley valued our work in the downtown area alone at more than $75,000. And last, but not least, we helped bridge the gap between the transient student population and the general population of Berkeley. We hope to improve and expand on our efforts this year to ensure the Berkeley Project can continue to serve the community for years to come.

The immediate impact will be the physical effects of the individual projects themselves. Less tangible but equally important will be the personal interactions between student volunteers and Berkeley residents which will hopefully foster positive relationships and an atmosphere that encourages service-learning. The BP has worked with more than forty community organizations and various departments of the City of Berkeley. Students have already worked a variety of projects, including playground construction, trail maintenance, and street clean-ups, to working with senior citizens, and working on computer skills with disabled children.

Required resources:

1. Total project needs: $20,000
2. In-kind contribution needs: bottled water, lunch materials, photo copying capabilities, trees for planting

Project page URL:

• http://bp.berkeley.edu
• http://thecaltvproject.com/v3/2007/10/31/caltv-journalism-the-berkeley-project

Additional info:

BP Day 2006: The Results

Berkeley Project began this year as a giant, one-day service event held on Saturday, November 11th. Over 1000 students gathered from all over Cal to work together with our community partners at 43 service project sites all over the City of Berkeley. The day was a huge success. Students, clad in their brown BP shirts and bright orange safety vests, engaged in projects ranging from Downtown clean-ups and fire prevention in the Oakland Hills, to refurbishing the Berkeley Free Clinic and Alzheimer’s Services of the East Bay center, among others. For a complete list of this year’s projects please see the Project List for 2006. After this first annual BP Day, we received overwhelmingly positive feedback from Cal students and community partners alike. Many students indicated that though formerly uninvolved they have now taken significant interest in future service activities, while our community partners have expressed great interest in cooperating in similar efforts next year.