This is only a preview. Your vote will not be recorded.
Instructions
We are using a ranked-choice voting system to determine which projects to support. Please:
- Select the projects you would most like to support. You can vote for up to 5 projects.
- Each project has a short summary listed, as well as a link to their full proposal. If time permits, please review the full proposal, as it contains valuable information on each project.
- Click the "Submit My Vote" button when you're ready to submit. At this point, you will be asked to rank the projects in order of preference.
Our goal is to fund as many projects as possible, based on the GSD-wide vote. After voting concludes, we will take the top-ranked projects and attempt to find additional funding beyond the $5,000 we have currently been allocated. Therefore, as much as possible, please choose the projects you think most advance health equity for the GSD, regardless of funding required.
Note: These projects are arranged in a random order.
Standing for Health
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
GSD students spend many sedentary hours hunched at their desks, toiling away at their computers and models. Standing for Health proposes adding freely accessible, shared standing desk options throughout Gund, Loeb Library, and 485 Broadway to mitigate the poor health effects of prolonged sitting. Standing desks will be available to all GSD students and community members – not just those with assigned desks and the means to augment them.
HOW THIS PROJECT CENTERS HEALTH EQUITY:
This project seeks to increase health equity by making standing desk options available to all students and increasing feelings of belonging for those students without assigned desks through studio.
Full Project Application
Estimated Cost: $3,600
Happier Periods, Safer Sex
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
This project seeks to support women’s health and to promote healthy sexual practices at the GSD through providing free pads, tampons, and condoms in GSD bathrooms. This is an exciting opportunity to dispense free health promotion products to the broader GSD community in the name of menstrual advocacy and safe sex.
HOW THIS PROJECT CENTERS HEALTH EQUITY:
By centering reproductive health, this project seeks to advance gender equity within the GSD. This gender equity lens is particularly important as the GSD historically was and continues to be an unsupportive environment for women, femmes, gender-queer, and trans people. We hope this project supports the culture change work already underway to make the GSD welcoming and comfortable for all bodies.
Full Project Application
Estimated Cost: $3,220
The First-Generation Scholar-Practitioner Series
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
The First-Generation Scholar-Practitioner Series will promote the wellbeing, leadership, academic and professional success of first-generation students. Who are we? First-generation students are the first in their families to attend a higher education institution in the USA; many of whom come from working-class families and communities of color that have experienced systemic oppression. Why join us? Supporting first-generation students will have a rippling effect: it will help erode the systemic oppression that produces health inequity in our communities. This makes all of us healthier. This proposal was authored by two first generation POC queer women.
HOW THIS PROJECT CENTERS HEALTH EQUITY:
Why join us? Supporting first-generation students will have a rippling effect: it will help erode the systemic oppression that produces health inequalities in our communities. This makes all of us healthier.
Full Project Application
Estimated Cost: $5,000
Green-in: Spaces for Plants and People
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
We propose the creation of three pilot spaces that impact community health using plants and experiential design. Each space has different elements, but all contribute to school wellbeing through their attention to space and life – both of people and plants. The spaces would range from a secluded room for people to reflect and plants to grow, a social passageway with seating and communal plant-caretaking materials, and an informational installation for passersby of plants with air quality sensors and interactive lighting.
HOW THIS PROJECT CENTERS HEALTH EQUITY:
In the GSD, most spaces are allocated to work – by designing intentional non-working spaces to decrease stress and increase restful interactions, we hope to expand the ways that those who spend most of their time in the school can find health.
Full Project Application
Estimated Cost: $3,724
Increasing Exercise Opportunities at the GSD
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
The $230 Harvard gym membership fee is an elective, unknown cost to most GSD students when they are budgeting for school, and one of the first discretionary costs they cut to make ends meet. Our proposal seeks to increase access to free exercise opportunities for GSD students by bringing an additional fitness option directly to them. Building on the success of the GSD’s free yoga classes, we propose adding a resistance training class one day a week, based on a mix of bodyweight, free weight, and resistance band exercises.
HOW THIS PROJECT CENTERS HEALTH EQUITY:
We seek to promote health equity by increasing free, convenient fitness options open to any GSD student.
Full Project Application
Estimated Cost: $1,264
Racial Justice Workshop
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Where does racism come from, why does it persist, and how can it be taken apart? How can we make the GSD anti-racist? This training (by a leading racial justice organization) will encourage participants to reflect on their personal stories, values and identities to recognize the ways in which they contribute to a dominant culture that creates racial hierarchy. By creating a space of sharing and vulnerability, it will invite participants to see intimately the ways systemic racism pervades their own lived experience, in order to develop deep personal commitments to antiracism.
HOW THIS PROJECT CENTERS HEALTH EQUITY:
By guiding 40 students from across degree programs to bring antiracism to their work, this project seeks to make the school environment less harmful to students of color, and ultimately to push anti-racist design pedagogy into the GSD curriculum.
Full Project Application
Estimated Cost: $5,000
Outdoor Working, Learning, and Socializing (OWLS): Inspiring and facilitating behavioral health in partnership with the natural environment
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
OWLS is a cluster of transformable outdoor structures for working, learning, and playing such as outdoor standing and cycle desks that invite interaction and transformation into a variety of configurations to serve meetings, classes, social events, play, and relaxation, even sleep! OWLS inspires co-creation, re-connection, and oneness with the natural environment which facilitates human behavioral health and wellbeing in partnership with the natural environment. OWLS is made out of non-toxic, local, renewable, and compostable and re-usable materials, such as cedar, natural finishes, stainless steel screws, and recycled bicycle parts.
HOW THIS PROJECT CENTERS HEALTH EQUITY:
By its nature, OWLS is free for anyone in the Harvard community to use, including building staff, administrators, students, faculty, and guests.
Full Project Application
Estimated Cost: $4,500
Ensō: Screening for Psychological Distress at the GSD
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
We endeavor to work with graduate students at the GSD to test Ensō, a web-app which is designed to screen individuals for psychological distress and deliver tailored resources as needed. This data would accumulate to provide timely reports to users, which reflect both personal development and overall health of the given studio section or department. This overall health data would be spatially represented as a “heat map,” showing the stress conditions of areas of Gund and how they change over the semester. We believe Ensō will serve to prevent the stresses of the GSD environment from building into more serious psychological harms, as well as provide resources for additional help on an institutional level.
HOW THIS PROJECT CENTERS HEALTH EQUITY:
This project centers health equity by giving all students access to needed mental health resources, fostering a peer-based network for support and self-reflection, and using accumulated health data to advocate for needed structural changes to design school culture.
Full Project Application
Estimated Cost: $2,348
Fostering Financial Wellness at the GSD
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Money can be stressful—so let's start a dialogue about financial wellness and transparency at the GSD. The aim of this project is to provide tools for students to improve their financial wellness during their time as graduate students and as professionals entering the design fields. Through in-person loan counseling, salary negotiation and financial literacy workshops, a round table conversation focused on intergenerational financial knowledge and gaps in knowledge, and a panel discussion made up of GSD alumni from a range of backgrounds, students can challenge the taboo around discussing money, and be better equipped to navigate the investment that is a graduate education.
HOW THIS PROJECT CENTERS HEALTH EQUITY:
Financial stress impacts mental health and the ability to maintain a healthy lifestyle; the goal of this project is to lessen the burden of financial stress, especially for students who face additional financial barriers—those from low-income backgrounds, female students, and students of color.
Full Project Application
Estimated Cost: $660
