There’s a multiplier effect when Penn students combine their programming capabilities and commitment to social justice in order to help nonprofits further their mission.
“We have a vision for how we want social impact to be a focus for technology,” says Katie Jiang (CIS’20), co-director of Hack4Impact, a student-led club founded at Penn in 2014 that, together with partner chapters around the country, has helped nearly 40 nonprofits in Philadelphia and beyond. “We want to engage more students at Penn and at other universities in social impact to empower nonprofits with programming solutions that will help them grow, become more efficient and achieve their goals.”
Participants in Hack4Impact, a creative and dedicated cadre of 30 Penn students, spend 5 to 15 unpaid hours weekly developing web-based applications that help nonprofits access, share and analyze complicated, changing data sets. Choosing from dozens of nonprofit applications, they select five coding projects each semester, prioritizing opportunities to create broadly useful, replicable programs for nonprofits whose missions they are passionate about advancing.
Read more about Hack4Impact projects in the U.S. and around the world on the Penn Engineering blog.
Griffin Pitt, right, works with two other student researchers to test the conductivity, total dissolved solids, salinity, and temperature of water below a sand dam in Kenya.
Griffin Pitt’s upbringing made her passionate about water access and pollution, and Penn has given her the opportunity to explore these issues back home in North Carolina and abroad.
Rashi Sabherwal, a doctoral student in political science, explores how women engage politically in society in informal roles through her research in India.
Helping robots work together to explore the Moon and Mars
Penn Engineers, NASA, and five other universities tested robotic systems designed to help unmanned explorers cooperate in the dunes of White Sands, New Mexico, paving the way for Moon and Mars exploration.
