The USC Global Impact program empowers USC students to use innovation and entrepreneurship to develop and implement solutions to social issues in communities around the world.

The program provides USC students an opportunity to develop skills for a life of innovation and social engagement, and at the same time provides support for the communities we work with.

USC Global Impact supports the implementation of social projects in India by offering a travel and project-expense paid trip to teams of up to four (4) USC student innovators. Students participating in the USC Global Impact program form interdisciplinary teams, and work closely with Indian non-profits to develop innovative, sustainable and scalable solutions, to problems in the areas of Agriculture, Education, Health, or Microcredit / Livelihoods. The teams travel to India during the summer (2 months) and execute their project ideas in the local communities.

Check out the video from the 2009 USC Global Impact teams, click here.

Questions? Interested in the program?  For more information about this program and how to get involved, please contact Christina Hodel (hodel@usc.edu, 213.821.6074).

Up to 12 students will be selected to participate in the USC Global Impact Program each year. Students will apply to the program during the fall semesters and will be selected in January of the following year. Students will then be put together in teams and encouraged to identify a partner Indian NGO and a specific project.  During the spring semester, the students will participate in a series of workshops in preparation for their trip to India. The Global Impact Program students will focus on implementing and adapting social projects in the Deshpande Foundation's "Sandbox", which is a geographically defined area of Northwestern Karnataka in India.

Projects should address major challenges in any of these four areas.

Agriculture:
Focus areas include crop cultivation techniques, irrigation, soil remediation, and farmer education. We seek agricultural and environmental sustainability.

Education:
Educational programs focused on experiential learning, internet connectivity and training, teacher training, education for disabled children, civic awareness, English language training, and scholarship programs.

Health:
Focus areas include school lunch programs, community based rehabilitation, medical waste reduction, prosthetic limbs, health education and training, nutrition, educational entertainment, and orphan rescue programs.

Microcredit / Livelihoods:
Focus areas include entrepreneurial training, women's training programs, watershed restoration programs, recycling, and jaggery production.

For information about the Northwestern Karnataka region, please see the “Hubli-Dharwad Description Sheet" here.

For information about some of the NGOs that you could be partnered with, please see the “Deshpande Funded NGOs Sheet" here.

QUESTIONS?
Click here to read the frequently asked questions about the USC Global Impact program.

As a requirement for the trip, students teams are asked to digitally record their experiences through pictures, soundbites, videos and blogs - telling the daily story of what it’s like, what they’ve learned, who they’ve met, and what their experiences have been.

The USC Stevens Institute supports this portion of the project by providing students with the multimedia equipment and sources to meet these requirements. Each member of the student team is required to blog about their experience at least once a week with pictures to represent what they are developing during their time oversees. Each team is required to post one video per week to their blog.

Check out there blogs here:

• Crowdsourcing Deshpande Challenges
• Jaalaka
• SendHealth