A Cross-Campus Collaboration
The Ballard Center believes that one of the most effective techniques in social impact work is the ability to combine the knowledge and efforts of changemakers through collaboration. The Center strives to create a culture of collaboration that extends beyond internal teamwork and reaches across majors and disciplines.
This aim is reflected in the work of the Ballard Center’s strategic relations team. Kate Passey, team lead and marketing student at Brigham Young University, shared, “The strategic relations team's mission is to help students develop the faith and skills to solve social problems through relationships with external organizations and on-campus organizations, helping them receive real-world impact. . . . The vision of our team is to make BYU a social impact campus, help organizations “Do Good. Better.” and help the students learn how to do that through these [collaborations].”
The strategic relations team’s goal to integrate social impact across disciplines stems from the belief that each student at BYU has a special skill set that can contribute to human flourishing. Real impact occurs as students engage in opportunities that utilize their natural interests, passions, and skills to make a difference. To implement this belief, the strategic relations team recently facilitated the cross-collaboration of a variety of social impact organizations with BYU engineering capstone students. The projects built through these collaborations were presented during the 2026 Engineering Capstone Fair.
BYU Engineering Capstone: An Overview
What is the BYU engineering capstone? In simple terms, it is a culminating project that brings together students from the five engineering disciplines (mechanical, electrical, computer, manufacturing, cybersecurity) and connects them with real-world industries, companies, and organizations to solve system-level engineering problems.1 After a semester of working on their projects, these engineering students present their work at BYU’s Engineering Capstone Fair.
This year's Capstone fair increased its focus on social impact in honor of BYU’s 150th anniversary. The strategic relations team got involved by establishing collaborations between several nonprofit organizations and participating BYU engineering students and faculty.2
Clean Water for Odisha India
Stratton Baldwin, former Ballard Center employee and current BYU student, majoring in mechanical engineering and minoring in global and community impact, participated in the Clean Water for Odisha India project. He and his team partnered with Gram Vikas, an organization committed to providing infrastructure and development for rural villages across India, and developed a system to remove nitrate from the water tanks commonly used in these communities.3
One of the most rewarding aspects of the project, Baldwin noted, was the opportunity to work with Gram Vikas and contribute to meaningful change.
I'd been a little familiar with them in the past, . . . and I knew that their work is very impactful, very sustainable. So just knowing that this project could have a real impact in people's lives was the main draw for me. Also, learning about new systems and new ways to solve these unique problems—it's been really rewarding.
While conducting their own research, Gram Vikas discovered rising nitrate levels in the drinking water across rural Indian communities, largely caused by fertilizer runoff in commercial agriculture. To address this challenge, they designed an ion exchange process to remove the resin, a fairly standard procedure in water treatment. However, each village has different nitrate concentrations, meaning the design needed to be adjustable for each individual community. This led to the issue of scalability. Gram Vikas needed a solution that would be functional and effective in over 100 rural villages.
The combined efforts of the engineering capstone students and Gram Vikas resulted in a system that first removes the nitrate from the water and then fills up the tanks with clean water. Baldwin and his team specifically designed the water filtration system to be adjustable for villages with varying needs. Of the finished product, Baldwin said, “Our solution is going to be very adjustable . . . if one village has a different nitrate concentration than the other, our design can account for that and optimize the costs so that the village doesn't have to pay more than they really need to. Making that adjustable for them is something that I'm really proud of."
Reflecting on the project, Baldwin touched on how the Ballard Center’s guiding principle of loving the one affected his work and encouraged purposeful co-creation. He shared, “One of the biggest things that I've drawn from the Social Impact Cycle is the concept of co-designing and co-development with your stakeholders and with the people who are going to be using the product. Throughout the semester, I've been really intentional about trying to involve our sponsor, Gram Vikas, in the design of our product. We were meeting once a week to go over our concepts and designs and be intentional about making sure it's all going to be self-sustainable and operational by the villages.” Stratton’s work affirms the importance of building relationships and connecting with those who have an intimate understanding of the problem. He is reminded that those individuals are the experts of the situation and working with them to solve the problem often creates a more sustainable solution.
To read more about another capstone project, click here.
Moving Forward
The collaboration between the engineering capstone and the Ballard Center shows how combined efforts and skills sets can create real impact. When individuals across disciplines join together with a unified purpose, lasting change becomes possible, and when those efforts keep individuals at the heart of the design process, solutions become sustainable. This collaboration with BYU Engineering Capstone is hopefully the first of many productive projects yet to come.