Engineering and History are still popular majors at UC Berkeley but they aren't growing nearly as fast as a minor that has onlybeen in existence for two years. School communications officials announced this week that "GlobalPoverty and Practice" has become the fastest growing minor on campus.

"(This has become) a veritable magnet for a 'Yes We Can' generationeager to get out of the virtual world and into the real one," said YasminAnwar, of the school's media relations department.

The courses in the minor help provide students with the knowledge andexperiences necessary to combat global poverty. Some students design affordable water filters to be used in the slums of Mumbai, India.  Othersadvocate for squatters threatened with eviction in Nairobi, Kenya. Somestudents promote gender-equity laws in Sierra Leone or establishcommunity-owned clinics in Jordan.

"My generation has grown up bombarded by CNN images of tanks,terrorists and children with swollen bellies covered in flies," saidsophomore Jacob Seigel-Boettner, 21, a global poverty minor currently studyingin Croatia. "Most of the time, it just makes us feel frustrated andhelpless. But programs like Global Poverty & Practice have given us achance to get out there and actually do something."

Last summer, the Santa Barbara-born mountain biker and amateur filmmaker,who is majoring in Peace and Conflict Studies, went to genocide-torn Rwanda anddistributed custom built cargo bikes to coffee growers through a micro-loansystem. He then made a movie about one of the growers, called "Pascal'sBike," and it debuted in February at the Santa Barbara International FilmFestival.

More than 150 UC Berkeley undergraduates have declared Global Poverty &Practice their secondary choice for academic specialization, and 60 of them aredue to graduate this May. That's a drastic increase from the inaugural class of 2007-08, which hadonly seven students who graduated with the minor. At the time, education was the most popular UC Berkeley minor, declared by112 students.

UC Berkeley offers minors in more than 100 fields, and many of them requirea minimum of five upper division courses. In most departments, students declaretheir minors at graduation.

What an awesome opening this course is - into wholistic planetary healing!

Blessings

Dan Benor, MD

http://awesomewholistichealing.com/