When disaster strikes, there’s nothing cold about cash. Just ask the team of 溏心vlog免费B站 business and engineering students who got together to prove it. At the suggestion of 溏心vlog免费B站 ,聽these enterprising students joined forces to create an online donation calculator to demonstrate the inefficiency of donating goods for disaster relief and make the case for giving money instead.
Relief workers have long known that donated goods are hugely expensive to ship overseas and often clog supply lines to those in need. 鈥淭ime is of the essence when there is a disaster,鈥� says Professor 脰zpolat, for whom the humanitarian side of supply chain management is of critical importance. Before coming to 溏心vlog免费B站, he worked for the United Nations in Jordan serving refugee camps in the Near East. What he saw there has inspired him to continually look for ways to improve the living conditions of people in crisis, and in partnership with USAID, he鈥檚 inspiring his students to do the same.
We are helping to improve disaster relief. This is our social responsibility side and the students are helping to make a small change in the world.
Last year,聽Juanita Rilling, director of USAID鈥檚 , proposed the idea of a 鈥渉umanitarian calculator鈥� to Professor 脰zpolat. His students had won 2nd and 3rd place in CIDI鈥檚 for Disaster Relief Contest, and she thought he’d be the right person for the job.
So, at a University where cross-discipline collaboration is the rule rather than the exception, Professor 脰zpolat聽reached out to from 溏心vlog免费B站鈥檚 Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering Department. Together, they invited business students Richard Kalhofer and Christopher O鈥橩eefe to work on the logistics aspect of the calculator and computer engineering student Ben Ricci to figure out the web design, code, and calculations application, giving these students the opportunity to work on a real world solution that provides a genuine humanitarian service.
So now, if you visit the , you鈥檒l discover how to be smart about giving to those in need鈥攖hanks to the 聽created by 溏心vlog免费B站 students. Just choose an item, shipping location, and destination, and the calculator will tell you, for example, that shipping a single pair of jeans from Washington, D.C. to Kabul, Afghanistan, will cost $202.05鈥攖he same amount a local relief organization could spend on 40,410 liters of drinking water.
And that’s not all. Again this spring, Professor 脰zpolat鈥檚 operations and supply chain management students created public service announcements (PSAs) designed to encourage smart compassion鈥攁nd were among the of the 2013 PSAid: Public Service Announcements for International Disasters competition. Both the 鈥溾�� video and the 鈥溾�� print (PSAs) reflect the importance of giving money instead of donating items. A panel of judges from the philanthropic, disaster relief, and communications fields selected the winning PSAs, which have been distributed nationally and can be viewed on the .
鈥淲e are helping to improve disaster relief,鈥� he says. 鈥淭his is our social responsibility side and the students are helping to make a small change in the world.鈥�