GAIA

About

• Open Source Skid Steer
• G-Dev, Urban Planning - AAP arch art and planning. XCollege - arch, urban planning. Find a program manager for the major or Urban and Regional Planning. See Global Development.
• Meet Becca and Sofia
• https://www.gaiacompetition.com/competition
• Budgets - materials. Reimburse. Grant money - community engagement grant for $15k.
• https://einhorn.cornell.edu/ - gave a grant to gaia
• Different department - guest talk - invited speaker. Global Development - AJs department. Can look into sustainable housing and.
• Complex systems - interdisciplinary systems - Systems Engineering - Operation Research - department.
• AJ - global dev and biological engineering. Food and dynamics and mechanics. Sofia - community recruiting.
• Collabotition - collaborate - Cornell didn't finish, UCSD came in to help finish.
• Release problem statement October-November. May finish timeline.
• UCSD, MIT, Cornell- 3-7 people each.
• GAIA is a registered student org at Cornell
• Cornell, UCSD, MIT teams - expand to 4-6 schools - VA Tech, Berkeley
• World Bike Relief - last year's project
• Competition for college - started at Cornell
• Startup on relevant problemsolving
• First year - peruvian NGO

Communication

Gaia Competition <gaiacompetition@gmail.com>	Mon, Aug 18, 7:01 AM (11 days ago)
to info@opensourceecology.org, me

To Whom It May Concern,

I hope this message finds you well! My name is AJ Villaruel, and I am the team lead for the Global Action Impact Association (GAIA), a mission-driven student organization based out of Cornell University. GAIA hosts an annual US-based national competition designed to empower college engineering teams to develop, design, and implement high-impact solutions for global sustainability and equity challenges by supporting organizations and nonprofits like yours.

During the 2024-2025 academic year, we successfully launched our second ever competition between Cornell, UCSD, and MIT, partnering with World Bike Relief to prototype new mechanical part designs for their bikes that they distribute to rural communities globally. This collaboration marked a significant step in expanding our impact, and we’re excited to build on this momentum.

As GAIA continues its commitment to delivering innovative, student-driven solutions that support global sustainability across diverse engineering disciplines, we are currently seeking a new partner for this academic year’s competition. We believe a collaboration with Open Source Ecology would be a powerful opportunity to advance your mission while engaging students in a real-world engineering challenge shaped by your organization’s needs. By tapping into the technical expertise of students from some of the strongest engineering programs in the U.S., this partnership would offer tangible, high-impact support at no cost to you. In light of growing budget constraints and an increasingly uncertain political climate, we are especially motivated to offer meaningful assistance to service and community-focused organizations like yours - helping you do more with fewer resources while providing students with a chance to contribute to work that matters.

If you would like to learn more, please feel free to check out our website. We look forward to your response and how we can work together to advance both our goals!

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Sincerely,The GAIA Team