The recipients of the initial Social Impact Awards are making great strides toward our goal of using this funding opportunity to support innovative solutions to pressing societal challenges. Follow the links below to read about their work.
2024: Enabling Thriving Communities
The 2024 CWP Impact Awards addressed the theme “Enabling Thriving Communities,” selecting three projects that support community well-being and resilience by advancing practices and policies that enable safe conditions for all.
- Healing Roots: An Evidence Map and Roadmap for Refugee Mental Health Interventions includes the development of a Mental Health Evidence Roadmap – an online, open-access, user-friendly, multi-component tool designed to organize and synthesize existing research on refugee mental health interventions.
- Strengthening Capacities and Civic Participation for Climate Resilient Communities in Chile seeks to support municipalities in Chile in addressing climate change by providing technical and planning support for the development and implementation of Local Climate Action Plans.
- Ubumwe 2.0: Integrating Arts for Education and Psychosocial Support with Children and Youth Affected by Displacement in Uganda aims to integrate culturally and contextually relevant arts education in schools for children and youth affected by displacement, and to support teachers in the uptake of arts-based practices that meaningfully support children.
2023: Supporting Generations
The first Social Impact Awards focused on the theme of “Supporting Generations”, supporting evidence-based, people-centered strategies specific to a particular stage of life. The call for proposals was widely shared across Columbia’s 19 schools, institutes, centers and affiliates, eliciting 38 proposals from 15 distinct disciplines across the university. Proposals were required to include faculty across disciplines, involve external partners, focus on fourth purpose work, demonstrate student engagement and plan for measurable outcome/impact.
- Piloting Ubumwe: Arts for Education and Psychosocial Support with Refugee Children and Youth aimed to bolster psychosocial and educational outcomes among refugee children and youth through the integration of arts in education and community spaces.
- Planting Stories: Seeds of Diaspora aims to further understanding of how plant-based knowledge can enhance high school students’ nutrition and health. The team will design and test a program that includes creative workshops, interviews with elders and foraging walks, as well as create an archive of students’ work to document learning.
- Project SHINE! Supporting Healthy Interaction, Nurturing, and Enrichment for Preschool Children aimed to develop and test “wraparound health services” for preschool children, to include a preschool-based health unit, household health visits, community health events, and a nutritional teaching garden, as well as linkage to community health facilities and nutrition support.