SEED enters national competition finals

MHCC student Glenda Maribel Alfaro Salmeron’s composting project moved Thursday into the final round of a national competition and she now awaits her chance in the spotlight with Bill Clinton and Stephen Colbert in St. Louis Saturday night.

The competition and conference is sponsored by The Clinton Global Initiative University (CGIU). According to the CGIU website, the annual conference is a meeting place for students, organizations and topic experts to discuss global issues and develop innovative solutions.

Public voting for the final round will close at 11 a.m. Saturday, Portland time. According to MHCC Director of Communications Maggie Huffman, people can vote multiple times from computers, smartphones and tablets.

Salmeron is a second-year Scholarship for Education and Economic Development (SEED) student from Jardines de la Nueva, El Salvador. Her project, Compost Methods to Improve Soil Fertility (CMISF), is based on composting and is designed to help her native community’s soil.

Her project now goes head-to-head with DREAMzone, a project from Arizona State University advocating for tuition equality for undocumented students and educating prospective allies for tuition equality.

The winner of the event will be announced Saturday night and the project’s developer will join Clinton and Colbert onstage for the closing session.

Salmeron said composting is rare in El Salvador, “especially in my community. As Nikki (Gillis, SEED coordinator) said, we are a community of 100 people. It’s a very rural community, very small, so we are not acquainted with it.”

Salmeron’s project gained more Internet votes to beat out a project from Columbia University in the first round, bested another project from Johnson C. Smith University in the second round, and on Thursday defeated University of Oklahoma to advance to the finals.

Salmeron said the composting project would help the soil in her village, which has a claylike texture that creates more puddles than allows it to absorb water in the rain and then cracks in the heat, to better grow fresh produce and crops.

Salmeron is one of eight students from the MHCC SEED program who entered commitment-to-action projects into the CGIU Challenge competition, part of the larger Clinton-Global Initiatives annual conference. Each project falls into one of four categories: education; peace, human rights and public health; poverty alleviation; and environment and climate change. According to the CGIU, the projects should take place in the schools or communities of the students or around the world, in the case of international students.

Gillis said the projects must be both “something new and needed” in the communities they would take place.

Salmeron added that the projects need to innovate, as well. She said that the CMISF project will “provide bins to 12 families in my community so they can start composting. I intend to use the concept of composting because it’s still new in my country.” She added that to measure the success of her project, she will make a survey of the results.

The CGIU determined the best 16 projects and organized them into a “Sweet 16” Internet voting bracket, similar to the NCAA’s “March Madness” basketball tournament.

Salmeron said this would be the first composting project in her community and the success of her project could lead to similar undertaking elsewhere in El Salvador.

Gillis will not attend the events in St. Louis.

“Nope, it’s just for students. I would like to, it’s a pretty amazing conference. The people that are facilitating the different sessions come from all over the world,” Gillis said.

She said different topics discussed at the conference include leadership, women’s issues and marketing.

“Every student that applies to the Clinton conference, no matter what school they’re at, has to make a commitment to action and come up with a pretty significant proposal including a budget, a timeline and measureable outcomes,” Gillis said. “So, our students, using the projects they’ve been developing in the SEED program and here at Mt. Hood, use that project model to apply for this conference.”

The CGIU prohibits using scripts/bots for mass Internet voting. If discovered, the project receiving such votes could be disqualified.

developing in the SEED program and here at Mt. Hood, use that project model to apply for this conference,” said Gillis. She added that every student at the conference has a commitment to action.

The CGIU prohibits using scripts/bots for voting and if found, the project receiving the votes could be disqualified.