MIE Student Ben Schaffer Wins CLACLS Undergraduate Community Project Award

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The UMass Amherst Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS) has awarded Ben Schaffer of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department its $500 First Prize in the Undergraduate Community Project Award competition. Schaffer won the award for an engineering collaboration that he is helping to conduct for the campus student chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) with a grassroots urban farm in Holyoke, Massachusetts. See CLACLS Announces Winners of Inaugural Undergraduate Community.

According to the CLACLS website, “These awards are designed to support and recognize student initiatives that engage with Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino communities. Through this initiative, CLACLS honors the spirit of Hispanic Heritage Month by celebrating both community engagement and scholarly research, and the awards are open to students across all academic majors. This was our first undergraduate-focused award, and we were delighted by the strong participation: 14 proposals from 12 majors and five colleges.”

The CLACLS adds that “We are especially pleased to share that Benjamin Schaffer, a Mechanical Engineering major from the Riccio College of Engineering, received the first-place recognition for the project titled: Biogas-heating system to sustainably warm one of the Nuestras Raíces organization’s greenhouses.”

Schaffer,whose hometown is Westford, Massachusetts, says that “I’m grateful to have been awarded First Place in the CLACLS Community Project Award at UMass Amherst. While the award is presented to me, it reflects the collective effort of our [EWB] team and partners. Together, our project is working with a local farm to build a biogas heater for one greenhouse and repair another greenhouse, projects designed to strengthen sustainability and resilience in a low‑income, underprivileged community.” 

Schaffer’s $500 CLACLS award will help support EWB’s cooperative project with Nuestras Raíces (Spanish for “our roots”), a nonprofit organization championing Holyoke’s vibrant Puerto Rican and Latinx agricultural community. According to Nuestras Raíces, “Our mission is to create healthy environments, celebrate ‘agri-culture,’ harness our collective energy, and to advance our vision of a just and sustainable future.” See Home - Nuestras Raíces.

As Schaffer explains, “Our project’s primary goal is to design and implement a biogas-heating system to sustainably warm one of the organization’s greenhouses, thereby extending the growing season while reducing reliance on fossil fuels.” 

Schaffer adds that “Our engineering team is conducting feasibility studies, system modeling, and prototype testing through weekly [EWB] meetings to create a reliable, low-cost biogas unit that converts organic farm waste into heat energy.” 

Schaffer concludes that “Successful deployment of our project will reduce heating costs, lower greenhouse-gas emissions, and improve year-round crop yields for the local farmers. Beyond the metrics, our project has a deeper, human-centered mission: empowering a community through hands-on involvement and creating inspiring opportunities for youth education in renewable energy and sustainability.” 

According to the EWB website, the UMass Amherst chapter of EWB, which was founded in 2005, is a student-led organization in which members take the lead on engineering projects that address critical infrastructure and sustainability challenges for local communities worldwide. These projects range from improving water systems in rural Ghana and Kenya to supporting the urban-agriculture initiative in Holyoke. See EWB UMass Amherst site.