Grantee: DIY Girls – Pacoima, CA
Project Title: Making for Good
Grant Type: ecoSolution
The goal of the project is to instill a sense of environmental ethics in our students.
– Leticia Rodriguez, executive director of DIY Girls
Description: Homelessness can cause a lot of waste of various materials. In the San Fernando Valley, 7,100 residents are homeless – a 36% increase from the previous year. Seeing this epidemic, the DIY Girls decided to lend a helping hand with their Making for Good project.
Making for Good is a DIY Girls initiative that empowers underserved minority girls in middle and high school to identify and prototype technical solutions to issues they encounter in their communities. In the past, they have used this project to focus on issues related to health and clean air.
This project was made to help the participants understand how technology can be used to help the environment. In addition, working on this initiative helps girls feel more confident in using engineer design skills to create solutions.
For their recent project, the girls created a reusable tent that collapses into a backpack. Intended for displaced individuals, the backpack was designed to use minimal energy while providing a person with basic needs, such as power, air circulation, and UV lighting to sanitize the tent.
Continuous impact/Community engagement: The backpack is intended to be repeatedly used, saving the waste of different materials needed for shelter. More importantly, having shelter reduces the adverse human impact on a homeless individual’s health and well-being.
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