1. OVERVIEW: Briefly describe your Commitment to Action. What need does your Commitment to Action address and why is it significant? What goal(s) do you hope to achieve through your commitment? What strategies and actions will you take to achieve those goals?.
Project Pyramid is a student run curricular course and co-curricular program at Vanderbilt University focused broadly on enterprise as a mechanism for poverty alleviation. Through course work, consultancy in the Nashville community and cross-cultural service learning, students involved with Project Pyramid are challenged to imaginatively address real world development issues in a sustainable manner. Project Pyramid is uniquely designed to take on these complicated challenges because of its inter-disciplinary make up.
Over the last year Project Pyramid has developed a partnership with students from Dhaka University and the village community of Baroipotol in Northwest Bangladesh with the goal of fostering sustainable development in Baroipotol. We are currently collaborating on community based projects in the areas of education, health, economic development, sanitation, and energy.
Over the past year, Project Pyramid students at Vanderbilt have worked to generate ideas for sustainable development projects in the five key areas of focus. Groups of Vanderbilt students have traveled to Bangladesh three times to work with experts and university students in Dhaka to enhance these project ideas and to test their feasibility in the Baroipotol community. Based on this field research, two projects are seen as ready to take into the implementation stage if the proper funding can be secured. This action stage will be a new step altogether, what we are calling Project Pyramid 2.0.
The first action of Project Pyramid 2.0 is to encourage stronger educational outcomes in secondary education in Baroipotol. The current science program at Baroipotol High School suffers from rote instructional methods, a lack of science equipment and materials, and the lack of resources to support the teachers in making the material relevant to students. To address these issues, we will implement an experiential science program that will improve the quality and relevance of teaching and learning. Through a partnership with Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education, we will create a number of supplements to the general science curriculum that will include hands-on science activities to demonstrate how science can be used in everyday life. As the Bangladesh Ministry of Education is currently in the process of training teachers in participatory, student-centered learning pedagogy, this Project Pyramid 2.0 will help to reinforce what teachers learn by creating a model student-centered learning space that will allow these techniques to be fully utilized. This space will promote the practices of group activities through flexible seating and will allow adjustable chalkboards and visual aids to be visible throughout the classroom.
The second action of Project Pyramid 2.0 is a series of biogas demonstration sites that will fill the central need in the community for sustainable off-grid energy. These will serve as an energy generator for the village and will be a valuable teaching tool for the students as the study of the science and engineering at the biogas site will be incorporated into the supplemental curriculum. Both the science program and the biogas sites will be able to act as demonstration sites for neighboring communities who wish to replicate these activities.
2. TARGET POPULATION AND KEY STAKEHOLDERS: Who are the key stakeholders in your Commitment to Action? How will you involve them in the development and implementation of your commitment? How will you ensure that your commitment responds to their needs?
The key stakeholders in the Project Pyramid 2.0 experiential science program and biogas facility include Baroipotol High School (BHS) students, Baroipotol High School teachers and administrators, Baroipotol community members, university students from Dhaka, and Vanderbilt students. Extensive work has been done with BHS teachers and administrators and the Baroipotol Village Council in all stages of project ideation and design. These projects are truly collaborative efforts that have come from the unique partnership that has been developed. A continued focus on collaboration and openness will ensure that all stakeholders will be involved in implementation and will ensure key needs are met.
3. PARTNERSHIPS: What relationships have you developed, on and off campus, to advance your Commitment to Action?
Project Pyramid has carefully cultivated a number of key partnerships at domestically and in Bangladesh. At Vanderbilt, Project Pyramid has institutional support through a broad array of faculty across schools, the Dean at the Owen Business School, The Center for Business and Society, and the Office of Active Citizenship and Service. In the Nashville community Project Pyramid has support from private donors, non-profits, and business. In Bangladesh the program has relationships with decision makers at Dhaka University, the Teacher Quality Initiative, BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), and Grameen Bank, along with key leaders in the Baroipotol community and school system.
4. EXPERIENCE: If your Commitment to Action is a group commitment, please briefly describe the mission and organization of your group and tell us why your group is qualified to complete this Commitment to Action. If your Commitment to Action is an individual commitment, please share the specific experience(s) you have had, in or out of the classroom, to prepare you to effectively implement your commitment.
Project Pyramid is unique in that it is a student driven, graduate level, inter-disciplinary program focused on innovative solutions to poverty through cross-cultural service learning. Our mission is to build entrepreneurial partnerships for the purpose of learning about and fostering sustainable development. Our group includes graduate students from the schools of Management, Education and Human Development, Medicine, Divinity, Law, and the Graduate School. Through class work along with local and international service work, students form an understanding of the multi-dimensionality of poverty and then take action to alleviate it, which is the cornerstone of Project Pyramid 2.0.
Section III: Outstanding Commitment Awards Criteria In 150 words or less, please describe how your Commitment to Action addresses each of the awards criteria: sustainability, impact, innovation, potential for replication, and leveraging available resources. Consider the questions in italics below in addressing the criteria. Please note that these questions are intended as prompts and may not be applicable to all commitments. It is not necessary to address each question individually.
1. Sustainability: Commitments to Action should integrate principles of sustainability broadly defined broadly to include environmental, social, and economic components. Additionally, all commitments should be structured so as to ensure their long-term efficacy, taking into account changing circumstances, personnel turnover, and potential resource instability. Will your Commitment to Action advance environmental efforts on your campus or in the community? If so, how? If your Commitment to Action is not directly addressing the environment, does it still take such concerns into account? Will your Commitment to Action empower members of the community being served so that they can take action to further your commitment’s objectives even after you or your group’s current leadership leaves campus? Will the commitment be able to financially sustain itself over time?
Both of the Project Pyramid 2.0 action steps are locally appropriate and environmentally and economically sustainable. By teaching students and demonstrating to community members useful real-world processes, such as testing water for arsenic during chemistry or explaining the need for hand-washing through biology, Project Pyramid 2.0 will empower Baroipotol citizens to address environmental and social issues relevant to the community. The biogas facility will also allow community members to take cow dung and use it to create renewable energy for cooking and lighting. These projects have minimal long-terms costs and use locally available natural resources for both science experiments and biogas generation. Due to the partnerships with university students from Dhaka and the village council, local management of the programs will be built into the project implementation. Project Pyramid has also created a strategic plan for student leadership succession and established an advisory board to assure sustainability.
2. Impact: Commitments to Action should have a measurable and lasting impact on pressing challenges.
What are the tangible outcomes your commitment will produce, and how will you measure your progress? What feedback and/or evaluation procedures are in place to ensure the efficacy of your Commitment to Action? What metrics will you use to measure the impact of your Commitment to Action? (Please see the CGI U Progress Report for potential metrics).
This commitment will improve the quality and relevance of teaching and learning at the high school level and increase the number of students pursuing the science track in upper secondary school. It will also increase the access of members of the Baroipotol community to sustainable, reliable electricity and gas for cooking, which will increase the number of hours available for studying and household work and reduce household fuel costs.
Through evaluations by university students from Dhaka, teacher and school administrator reports, and Vanderbilt students’ on-site visits, we will be able to collect information on the number of:
· teachers trained on the new science modules and materials
· university mentors and mentoring visits
· new members engaged in Project Pyramid
· supplemental science projects incorporated into lesson plans
· students accessing experiential learning space
· community members involved in biogas demonstrations
· demonstration events for visiting educators, students
3. Innovation: Commitments to Action should approach challenges, both global and local, in unique and/or novel ways.
In what ways is your Commitment to Action innovative? How does your approach differ from or build upon the approach of others, and why is it more effective? How have you adapted your model to the specific content and/or community in which you will be working?
Project Pyramid is innovative in its inter-disciplinary approach to learning and its partnering approach to community development. This Commitment is unique in that it has grown out of collaborative dialogue with the community; these two projects not only address critical needs identified by Baroipotol but they have also been designed with direct input from local leaders. Grassroots insight is leveraged with myriad perspectives from the Vanderbilt and Dhaka university students from numerous disciplines to create a team and a project that is flexible and relevant. For instance, while one of Project Pyramid’s primary foci is on how enterprise can drive development, many of the poor in Baroipotol are highly risk-adverse and are reluctant to adopt new methods they are not certain will be an improvement. Therefore, we decided together to first develop ‘demonstration’ projects that educate the community on the benefits and feasibility of biogas before we address large-scale adoption.
4. Potential for Replication: Commitments to Action should be replicable and/or scalable.
Please describe the potential for scaling-up your Commitment to Action on other campuses or in new locations. How will you make information regarding your Commitment to Action available to other students who might wish to replicate your model? Is there potential for involving additional campuses, communities, or organizations to expand the impact of your commitment over time (at a reasonable cost)?
Project Pyramid has tangible potential for replication and scale-up and has already identified places to explore in this regard. Domestically, other universities have contacted the group to ask for information about our unique program. Group members have recently presented at the Comparative and International Education Society to network with other universities. Participants have held numerous information sessions for students in various colleges within Vanderbilt, key faculty across disciplines, and appropriate members of the administration. The program has also produced videos, blogs, and a website detailing our experiences. In Bangladesh, partnering university students are now from three different universities, and interest continues to grow. Each site visit has yielded more local partners in sectors such as micro-finance, development/aid, and private business. New site partners have also emerged, as Vanderbilt’s Institute for Global Health has strong connections in Guatemala and Mozambique, where there is strong potential to scale-up Project Pyramid’s work.
5. Leveraging Available Resources: Commitments to Action should leverage resources available on both university campuses and in the broader community. What institutional resources will you use to complete your Commitment to Action? How is the implementation of this commitment uniquely suited for a university setting? How are you effectively involving the members of your university community or the community you wish to serve in the implementation of your commitment
The natural and human resources in the Baroipotol community are some of the main points of leverage for these projects, as the Commitment has been designed in conjunction with and will be implemented in collaboration with community leaders there. The sustainable development needs of Baroipotol will be supported by the newly acquired capacities of its own citizens. Additionally, leaders of the community have agreed to provide land and a new building to house the science program. The unique interdisciplinary nature of Project Pyramid gives this group an invaluable variety of perspectives and expertise to complement the Dhaka University and Baroipotol insights. A CGI award would leverage the progress made thus far with Project Pyramid, which has been supported by funds from an alumnus’s private donation and forward this planning stage into action with the community of Baroipotol in Project Pyramid 2.0.
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