In 2019, 50 Cornell undergraduate students received $400 each to fund their ideas.
Call it a contribution. In fact, call it The Contribution Project. And it’s happening again.
This time, The Contribution Project, led by Department of Psychology professor and Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research Director Anthony Burrow, will fund 100 ideas with $400 each. Students can submit their ideas at the project’s website by Feb. 28.
The first iteration of the Contribution Project was spurred by the Engaged Scholar Prize Burrow won in January 2019. This year, the project is funded by HopeLab – a social innovation lab that supports research and services that promote youth thriving. Partnering together, Cornell’s Contribution Project team and HopeLab will support students’ ideas for contributions with an eye toward learning about the kinds of issues and communities to which students most want to contribute and how the process of doing so might impact the contributors’ wellbeing.
“What is most exciting about this project is that it begins with two clear benefits to our campus,” Burrow said. “First, students are afforded the chance to contribute in ways that they’ve articulated as mattering to themselves or others. Second, it will teach those who watch the contributions being made about what students notice about their world and what role they see for themselves in it.”
The selected projects will be chosen at random, and the students will be notified in early March. Burrow and his team will be reviewing the submissions for their feasibility and safety. Some ideas won’t be considered for selection if they can’t be carried out safely or completed in a reasonable time frame, although the submitted project can be a step towards a larger goal if that is specified in the application.
“Any student has as good a chance of having their idea selected as anyone else,” said Kristen Elmore, community-engaged learning coordinator for the College of Human Ecology and part of The Contribution Project team. “For our team, the decision to randomly select ideas reflects our belief that anyone can contribute and any idea can be meaningful.”
In one project selected in 2019, Melodie Cuevas-Gonzáles ‘21 created a small library to help low-income high school students in her neighborhood of South Los Angeles navigate the college admissions process. Cuevas-Gonzáles said that although the project “will not erase the systemic barriers that persist in american academia, it will create a direct alleviation for this upcoming class so that they are not alone in the process. Accessibility matters and this is the aim of such project.”
Some of the other projects selected included one by Eric Kohut ’22 to help create a network helping Spanish-speaking parents in New Jersey navigate the disability diagnosis system for their children, and another by Nisa Burns ’21 to hire an illustrator for a book she had already written in the Kickapoo language designed to teach the language to a younger generation.
The complete FAQ about The Contribution Project can be found on the website, and you can follow the project on Twitter.
