The College of Human Ecology held its second HumEcathon, a hackathon-style design challenge, on Nov. 16. Organized by the Dean’s Undergraduate Advisory Council, the event is structured to bring together students from across the College’s disciplines to leverage their individual knowledge and address multifaceted solutions to a pressing social issue.

Teams of students, comprised from at least two different Human Ecology majors, were presented a real-world problem and challenged to purpose a solution to an aspect of the issue through the perspective of their multidisciplinary focus areas. This HumEcathon’s challenge was the global climate crisis.

“In order to address climate change, it’s not enough to just have policymakers or nutritionists; it’s not enough to have fashion designers or doctors; it’s necessary for everyone to work together to address the problem from all of these different avenues,” said Bella Harnick PAM ’21, co-organizer of HumEcathon. “The problems that the HumEcathon seeks to solve are so large that they truly demand a multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving in order to adequately address the many facets of the issues at hand.”

Ten teams and a total of 49 students took part, surpassing last year’s inaugural event.

“We reached our maximum capacity and had to limit the signups,” said Sakshi Vasiu HBHS ’20, who also co-organized the event. “Moreover, there was an even distribution of students from all HumEc majors and many freshmen got involved this year. I think they were excited about an event that fits Human Ecology’s mission.”

Two teams were chosen as winners, one by a panel of faculty judges, and the other by student peers.

The Judge's Choice winning team included Hayley Austin Timmons (PAM) '20, Nicole Cunningham (GPHS) '20, Elizabeth Farkouh (HD) '21, Joan Esmie (HBHS) '21, Maura McLaughlin (HD) '21. Their solution focused on farming and agriculture in the promotion of local foods, increasing composting systems, and providing vouchers to increased access to more sustainable groceries.

The team further outlined plans to finance the solution through taxing food that arrives to the state from more than 200 miles away, taxing companies that use carbon-emitting transportation methods to bring food into the county, and expanding existing grants and funding streams already used by Cornell Cooperative Extension.

Student's Choice winners included Catherine Ryberg (PAM) '21, Boonakij Palipatana (InfoSci) '21, Emily Chan (InfoSci) '21, Dana Gong (PAM) '22, Vivian Shiu (DEA) '21. Their proposal focused on decreasing meat consumption through greener school lunches, sustainable shopping aisles and apps to track personal personnel meat intake. Further, they discussed bridging the gap in responsibility of climate change between the elderly and younger generations, and pushing for greener textiles in the fashion industry.

“It was so amazing to see the variety of ideas that came out of the event, and it highlighted the value of including a variety of perspectives when addressing a problem,” Harnick said. “The importance and success of the College is demonstrated through the ideas presented: Almost every team came up with a presentation that included information inspired from each major within Human Ecology.”

Because there were so many interesting and creative ideas worthy of continued exploration and dispersal, the organizers said, they wanted to create additional avenues to ensure that the problem solving did not stop at the close of the event. Participants have the opportunity to continue working on their ideas alongside a professor and present them to key alumni at the Dean’s Alumni Lunch in the Spring.

“In the end, we are striving for a HumEc education to be equipped with interdisciplinary problem solving skills to make a positive impact on the community,” Vasiu said. “Events like HumEcathon, that bring students from all majors to work together, re-instills the mission of the College and why we all chose to be here.”