Melissa Ho has been named the 2008 FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I Yamashita Prize winner for 2008. The $2,500 prize honors the unsung heroes of advocacy organizations whose knowledge, insight, expertise and work establish the foundation for meaningful social change. Lina Hu and Yvette Mari Robles both received Honorable Mention.

ISSC will honor Melissa, Lina and Yvette at an award ceremony and reception on Thursday, May 22, from 4:00-6:00 p.m. in the Lounge at the Women's Faculty Club, UC Berkeley. The ceremony will be immediately followed by a catered reception. If you would like to join us for this celebration, please RSVP to Le Bui: lebui@berkeley.edu. For more information call Janice Tanigawa at (510) 642-0813.

Melissa Ho is a Ph.D. student at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information, where she has been engaged in research on Information Communication Technologies for Developing Regions (ICTD) and social entrepreneurship for the past four years. Melissa develops innovative information technologies that can be used to help the world's poor and to improve the delivery of health care in developing regions of the world. For example, in 2004, she worked at Intel Research Berkeley helping to develop a delay-tolerant technology vital for getting internet connectivity to villagers in rural India. While in India, she helped set up remote eye care clinics for Aravind Eye Hospital. She then traveled to Mexico while working on a class project to set up low-cost Linux-based computers for schoolchildren. In 2005, she worked on building high-bandwidth connections between the universities in Ghana in order to foster dialog, the sharing of information, and improved education in those communities. In 2006, she began to focus on improving healthcare delivery to Sub-Saharan Africa and began working on the Ghana Consultation Network. This project links a network of 80 doctors in 4 hospitals with their diasporic counterparts around the world. This network allows doctors to contribute significantly to improvements in continuing medical education which is critical for building the capacity and quality of doctors trained in Africa. While at Berkeley, Melissa has organized ICTD reading groups and seminars to identify and inspire students interested in this field of work. Her research focuses on identifying the real needs of the world's poorest and the ways innovative network technologies can be used to significantly address these needs, in addition to understanding the combination of institutional, political, and cultural factors necessary to create truly sustainable solutions.

Lina Hu comes from the industrial city of Wuhan, situated in the heart of China. In Baigou, three hours from Beijing, Lina established a night school where she and fellow students taught English, computer skills and labor law to young migrant workers from rural China. She then invited migrant workers to Tsinghua University where she organized conversations between these workers and students to encourage better understanding among students of what it means to be a migrant and to publicly affirm the contributions of migrant workers to the university community. She also collaborated with a labor organization in Beijing, "Facilitator," to host a photo exhibition of migrant worker struggles at Tsinghua University. Lina brought members of "Facilitator," many of whom were originally migrant workers, into dialog with students, which initiated a deeper discussion of the responsibilities of relatively privileged students to the wider community. Lina is currently a graduate student in Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, where she continues to practice and write about sociological interventions.

Yvette Mari Robles is Director of the Bayview Hunters Point Mobilization for Adolescent Growth in our Communities (B-MAGIC). B-MAGIC is a youth violence prevention collaborative comprised of 50 community-based organizations and stakeholders in the Bayview/Hunters Point communities of San Francisco. B-MAGIC seeks to support the communities most highly impacted by crime by creating and maintaining a unified roadmap to social change that advances the educational, economic, and juvenile justice of underserved youth and their families in the Bayview/Hunter Point communities. As Director of B-MAGIC, Yvette has helped to build the capacity of community-based organizations, for example, by providing a series of trainings on fundraising, financial and personnel management, outreach and organizing, and strategic planning, and by leading the effort to design, fund, recruit and staff a new Computer Technology Center at the local YMCA. She also launched a ground breaking new program, "Direct Connect," inside the Youth Guidance Center (San Francisco's juvenile detention center), with detained boys and young men from the Bayview/Hunters Point communities. A 2004 graduate of San Francisco State University (with high honors), Yvette is working with colleagues at UCSF to spearhead development of metrics for evaluating collaborative work such as B-MAGIC.

For more information about the FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize and how you can nominate a candidate or contribute to the Prize, go to: http://issc.berkeley.edu/give.html.

In "Raising the Profile of Immigration Studies," (19 March, 2008) UC Berkeley Public Affairs Officer Cathy Cockrell profiles the groundbreaking research of Assistant Sociology Professor Irene Bloemraad, who is Principal Investigator of ISSC's Immigrant Family Political Socialization Project. The article also features Kimberly Hoang, who is a graduate student researcher on Bloemraad's project and whose dissertation research focuses on sex workers in Vietnam; Ming Hsu Chen, who is also a graduate student researcher on Bloemraad's project and who is writing a dissertation on the impact of US civil rights policy on recent immigrants; and Juan Herrera, who is an ISSC Graduate Fellow and who is analyzing the experiences of Latino immigrant day laborers in Oakland.
To read the article, click here.

In "Single Women and the US Women's Movement: Insights from India," Professor Emerita of Women's and Gender Studies at Sonoma State University and ISSC Visiting Scholar E. Kay Trimberger writes about her study of single women in India and the lessons that Indian feminism holds for the US women's movement. Below is an excerpt from Trimberger's article:

"I expected to find feminist organizing of Indian widows, since their plight has been widely publicized. Nor was I surprised to find that the long-standing, large, and diverse Indian women's movement focused on issues such as marriage/family reform and ending violence against women (including rape, wife-beating and wife-burning), as well as addressing women's poverty, and caste and class differences. I was startled, however, to discover concrete examples of Indian feminists bringing together diverse groups of single women (e.g., the never-married, divorced, deserted wives and widows), agitating for recognition of their common interests as singles. In America, our women's movement has never done so. In reflecting on the possible reasons why Indian feminists have organized singles while we in the U.S. have not, I gained insights into how our women's movement could initiate a new campaign to address the needs of U.S. women who spend an increasing percentage of their life span single."

To read the entire article, click here.

In "Migrating to El Norte," UC Berkeley City and Regional Planning PhD student Alvaro Huerta, who was ISSC's 2007 Yamashita Prize winner and who was recently awarded the Chancellor's 2007-2008 Public Service Award, offers a tribute to hard-working Mexican immigrants. Below is an excerpt from his article:

"When things go bad, many Americans commonly blame someone else for their problems. Historically, immigrants have been convenient scapegoats: They not only 'take away' jobs from 'hard-working' American citizens and deplete the country's resources, the argument goes, they are criminals who have entered this country illegally and must be punished with jail or deportation. There is nothing like a presidential election to raise the volume on this xenophobic rhetoric. Television talk-show hosts and politicians quickly jump at the opportunity to bash Mexican immigrants like a piñata at a kid's birthday party, especially in a time of political and economic crisis. These same voices suffer from selective amnesia, purposely forgetting the contributions Mexican immigrants have made to this country, both historically and in the present, and focusing instead on the 'costs' associated with our presence here."

To read the entire article, click here.

To read Alvaro Huerta's short story, "La Pistola," click here.