Throughout her time at UCI, Caitlin Roque ’21 did what she could to help the community. She and fellow students launched a mobile dental clinic to visit underserved communities, and made care packages to distribute at homeless shelters. Roque wanted to do even more, but she and her classmates were limited by their own out-of-pocket funds. Then last fall, she came across the Small Change, Better World seed grant program.
“I’d never seen anything like this before. It offered students grants to pursue community service projects they otherwise would not have the opportunity to do because of lack of funds,” says Roque, who majored in biological sciences with minors in psychology and business management.
The Small Change, Better World model was developed by Richard Matthew, professor and director of the UCI Blum Center for Poverty Alleviation, along with two fellow academics and humanitarians.
“Working for the United Nations in Sierra Leone and Rwanda, I realized there are many small but very real challenges — a broken piece of equipment, a diagnostic test — that families or neighborhoods are not able to solve and that development programs miss but that could be addressed quite easily,” Matthew says. “To help fill this gap, I decided to create a program that would fund small but meaningful community projects that students could design and implement.”