Overview

For us, inclusivity is a guiding principle of our team. We believe inclusivity shapes the way we work together and how we engage with others. We divided inclusivity into 2 sections: internal inclusivity and external inclusivity. Separating inclusivity into these two aspects emphasizes how inclusivity works in practice. The internal inclusivity ensures that members who are not strongly interested in STEM can also contribute meaningfully to our project. This is the truly interdisciplinary nature of synthetic biology and creates opportunities for members to grow in unfamiliar fields. The external inclusivity is promoting synthetic biology and our project to different age and minority groups and ensuring they can access and benefit from it.

Internal Inclusivity

Team inclusivity

• Why is this important for inclusivity?

Team inclusivity means each member in the group has a chance to contribute to the project, regardless of their ability, background, or personality. For us, inclusivity is not only gathering students from STEM fields but also embracing members interested in design and education. These diverse voices in our team ensure that the team reflects the interdisciplinary nature of synthetic biology itself. Moreover, this variety of groups can bring more creative solutions due to the different perspectives of each person.

• What did we do?

To practice inclusivity, we divided each member into roles in the team and emphasized the importance of everyone in our project. For example, we have divided our group into lab, human practice, design, and website. The lab group focuses on experiments. The human practice group is responsible for designing education plans and connecting with different stakeholders and professors. The design group did all the wiki design, promotion video, and social media management. For the website group, they have no prior knowledge on coding. However, we believe that in the STEM field, the most important thing is passion and learning. We have decided to give them the chance to self-learn and be responsible for our wiki.


To organize the team, we have set up regular team meetings every Saturday. Each group will present updates, ensuring that technical results, design progress, and education outcomes are covered. The meeting facilitators will be our team leader, as it is convenient for our leader to integrate everyone's progress. Furthermore, we held the cross-team workshops where STEM members explained scientific concepts to other members, while design members taught lab group members how to simplify complex experiment processes into engaging visuals. This exchange reinforced mutual respect and reduced knowledge barriers between the groups. In this way, we reached a balance in our team, where even members without lab experience could see their unique impact, and lab-focused members recognized the value of communication and creativity.

Team building

• Why is this important for inclusivity?

Team building activities are especially important for our team because our team is composed of teammates with different interests. In a diverse team like ours, communication styles and skill sets differ widely. In this situation, we had many misunderstandings and miscommunications. This team building is a chance for us to establish a bridge between each other. Our communication efficiency and information correction rate will increase after people get used to each other and become familiar with each other's way of thinking and personality.

• What did we do?

From August 1st to 3rd, we organized a three-day team-building activity at a villa. Since the landscape is near the beach, we held a small iGEM Q&A competition on the beach. We also distributed the team members randomly into 2 teams to promote interaction and collaboration between each other. Furthermore, we held storytelling sessions where each member shared their motivation for joining iGEM and their reflections until now. These personal stories helped us understand each other, creating empathy and appreciation. These team building activities also include a small workshop, in which the lab group introduces the experimental protocol and the human practice group shares their concepts when they are designing their education plan. The design team shared the methods they used when they were creating our figure. These discussions bring us more creative thought and make us understand everyone's different ways of thinking. To ensure equal participation, we rotated leadership roles so every member had opportunities to guide group activities. Evening reflection sessions encouraged members to share what they learned about others, reinforcing the message that every background brought unique value to the team. By the end of the camp, we had not only built trust but also created a shared identity as a cohesive group.

This activity transformed how we collaborated with each other in the future assignments. Previously, members only interacted with other groups because of the necessary needs. Now we are asking more questions and offering input more openly. The lab group gained new knowledge for creative problem solving, and design and human practice members felt empowered to contribute to scientific discussions. As a result, our efficiency obviously increases with fewer communication gaps and more innovative solutions. Most importantly, the experience cultivated a sense of belonging to our own team. Every member realized that inclusivity was not symbolic but truly between us. Trust and unity are being carried forward into all the project stages.

External Inclusivity

Vietnam

Food insecurity is a global challenge that occurs every day across countries and communities. Some areas deal with a lot of leftovers, while others face shortages in daily life. We, LarVase, aim to tackle food insecurity directly, expanding the inclusivity of our project beyond the lab and even Taiwan, with the hope of sharing our vision with other countries.

In Southeast Asia, food insecurity is often experienced from disasters like typhoons and floods that damage crops and the fishing industry. At the same time, low-income families that live in high-cost-of-living areas struggle with rising food prices and often depend on cheap meals that are unhealthy. Thus, we created a rice donation program in Southeast Asia countries like Vietnam to help vulnerable communities.

"A Little for You, A Lot for Them"

To make this happen, we shared our vision with the Taiwanese community and showed them how they could join this international project by donating a little bit of money. This led to strong support for our initiative. With these resources, our team can donate rice to families and community kitchens that need it.

Before the event started, we reached out to their local company, ChauThanhDat, which generously offered storage space for the rice and a place for us to rest. We also reached out to local government officials to estimate how many rice bags we needed to prepare. Other than that, the local government also supported us by announcing and promoting this rice donation project. We prepared more than 100 large sacks of rice and distributed them across nearly 80 neighborhoods where families struggled to have stable meals. We reached those most in need, including the blind, disabled, and elderly individuals.

Additionally, we donated 8 sacks of rice to a local charity kitchen that provides meals for children battling cancer.. According to the founder, she had devoted all she had to these kids; all of their parents could not afford the high cost of medication in Vietnam, leaving them alone. One unforgettable moment was witnessing the unsanitary conditions of the kitchen. The kitchen is an open cooking area, and all the ingredients were placed on the ground without packages. The children were lining up to have some lunch outside the kitchen area, quietly waiting for fried rice that contained simply eggs and ham.

Through the rice donation project, we supported over 120 individuals, including families and residents relying on community kitchens. Families expressed relief at receiving staple food that eased their financial strain, while volunteers at the kitchen said our rice helped them prepare more consistent meals for marginalized groups. The impact on local people was significant; they appreciated that youth from another country recognized their struggles. For the first time, we're really diving into the issues that affect people. For our team, this experience showed the different aspects of food insecurity, triggered our sense of responsibility, and reinforced that inclusivity involves a promise to address real needs.

Rather than a one-time activity, we see the rice donation project as the beginning of our outreach.. In the future, we aim to collaborate with NGOs to provide support for vulnerable communities across the world. By documenting our efforts, we hope to inspire other iGEM teams to do projects that truly make an impact on people, ensuring that inclusivity continues to grow in both technology and society.

Sri Lanka

Aside from informing more people about synthetic biology, another mission of our team is to prioritize inclusivity. To be able to do that, we want to design and deliver a lecture where everyone can understand what is going on without being confused or intimidated by complex terms. We also wanted to make the process of knowledge delivery fun because who would enjoy a boring lecture without sleeping out?

With these factors in mind, we first list out all the potential concepts that we can deliver to our target audience. Through extensive choosing and ruling out all those unfit, eventually we found the perfect topics–basic biology terms, biodiversity, and the food chain. These concepts are neither too hard nor too easy, and through content adaptation, where we simplify scientific terms, they can process the information more efficiently. We also wanted them to work in teams, as through collaboration, they can learn from each other and make the learning process more interactive instead of static.


In addition to implementing and taking care of those small details in the lecture, we also encourage students to speak up during the lecture. No matter if they are right or wrong, hearing their voice is a crucial part of inclusivity, as being one of the global citizens, we value contribution more for contribution than intelligence. We wanted to facilitate a safe environment that emphasizes curiosity, not correctness. As a result, more students feel empowered and no longer see science as an unapproachable field, rather, they see it as a field that is actively part of life.

Reflecting on this experience in Sri Lanka, we feel lucky to have the opportunity to be able to educate them and probably open their future to a new domain. However, with the delivery of the lecture in mind, there are still many things that could be improved on. First, although visuals and accessible language support the concepts that we are trying to deliver, there are still some who are unable to keep up the pace and do not understand what we are trying to say. Given this issue, we suggest future iGEM teams who are about to do the same things as we are to provide the learning materials to be bilingual. On the other hand, we also noticed that while the majority of the students were enthusiastic, there were still some quieter participants who were less vocal. Realizing that introverted people are also an important part of the community, we suggest that lecturers provide them with more assistance and guidance to accommodate and adjust to their needs to further inclusivity.