SEEDS Fund supports 30 Service-Learning Projects

The Office of the Assistant Vice President for Social and Environmental Engagement for Development and Sustainability (OAVP-SEEDS) supported thirty (30) service-learning projects using the SEEDS Fund in the second semester of School Year 2024-2025. These included five (5) projects from the Ateneo Senior High School and twenty-five (25) from the college. A total of P285,301.24 was disbursed for these projects.

The Ateneo de Manila University promotes Service-Learning as a method for formation, research, and community engagement. Service-Learning is a course-based, credit-bearing educational approach that merges academic instruction and research with hands-on community engagement. OAVP-SEEDS established the SEEDS Fund in order to help students with the expenses associated with service-learning projects and to help them ensure the delivery of quality projects and research work with social impact.

Students from the Ateneo Senior High School (ASHS) and college students from the Gokongwei Brothers School of Education and Learning Design (GBSEALD), School of Humanities (SOH), John Gokongwei School of Management (JGSOM), School of Science and Engineering (SOSE), and School of Social Sciences (SOSS) can request for a subsidy amount of up to Php 5,000.00 per service-learning project, capstone project, or thesis.

Higher Education Graduate Students from GBSEALD, SOH, JGSOM, SOSE, and SOSS as well as those coming from the Ateneo Graduate School of Business (AGSB), the Ateneo School of Government (ASOG), the Ateneo Law School (ALS), and the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health (ASMPH) can request for a subsidy amount of up to Php 10,000.00 per service-learning project, capstone project, thesis, or dissertation. Unfortunately, no graduate student availed of the SEEDS Fund last semester.

Since there were extra funds by the end of the school year, some projects were given additional subsidies. Including the following:

• A three-semester project by eight groups of BS Computer Science and BS Management Information Systems students to automate the monitoring of vehicular and pedestrian entry into the Loyola campus which will help establish baselines for future mobility initiatives.
• A project by a group of Biology students to compare methods of assessing Schistosoma Japonicum Infections in a particular locality.
• A project by a group of Environmental Science students to measure boron levels in soil within one cultivation period of yellow corn in a particular locality.
• An Interdisciplinary Studies thesis which helped Lokalpedia develop a website platform for their social media archives on Philippine ingredients and gastronomy.
   

The following table shows the breakdown of disbursements: