Student Meeting: Design for America Team Meeting  10/1/2021

Present: Pooja Tetali, Ananya Barman, Kosh Raghavarapu, Anisha Narain, Meredith Moore, Eric Greene, Stacy Gloss

About DFA:

Design for America is national nonprofit and a campus RSO that meets on Sundays to talk about Design Thinking principals. This is one DFA Team out of 5 Teams part of the RSO.  There are 30-ish people w/ a 6 person exec board locally. Exec board helps keep track and teaches design thinking. Interviewing skills. Ideation.  One project was: Racism Un-taught, working with professor to interview RSOs about a standard/playbook/rule book to minimize racism within RSOs. Another was working with Illinois Department of Health App for breastfeeding people. Projects vary between technical and research.

This team meets once a week. They are happy to meet once a week or every 2 weeks. They have a couple hours to respond to emails and put together documents, so a few hours a week each. DFA projects typically last 1 year, academic year through May.

The topics they are interested in are environmental racism, campus/community relations, campus/university effect/impact on communities, environmental science, collection action & collaboration. Two members worked on transportation system mapping in US previously and had been connected to iCAP goals / campus transportation goals.

Potential Project Opportunities:

Initial Research for Environmental Justice Planning.

The initial research will help to inform the planning that goes into developing an Environmental Justice Plan. The project will eventually lead to a road map or planning document to guide the campus EJP.

1. Funding for EJPlans and Implementation
2. What Universities have Environmental Justice Plans?
3. What community EJP’s exist that would be a resource or model for a campus-lead EJP?
4. What Universities initiated Environmental Justice Plans in or for their communities? What are or were the barriers and opportunities for collaboration with their communities?

Green Infrastructure Mapping:

1. Green infrastructure mapping as part of the Green Infrastructure Resilience Goal

Tasks:

Schedule a follow-up meeting and communicate via email between meetings. Students will need to select the project they are interested in and report how they feel they can best contribute to the project(s).