A communication tool for people with speech or language impairments has won the sixth annual Greater Good Challenge, hosted by the Columbia School of Professional Studies Career Design Lab (CDL). The winning team, Monarch AAC, composed of Emily Long, Stephanie Chen, and Erin Burke—students in Columbia’s M.S. in Information & Knowledge Strategy (IKNS) program—impressed the judges with their assisted communication app that offers users a quicker and more expressive alternative to current products on the market.
For Long, Monarch AAC’s work is personal. Presenting on behalf of the team, Long explained that her three-year-old daughter has a speech delay and uses an AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) device to communicate.
“As a UX designer and a mom, I was shocked by how unintuitive these tools are. They’re dense, intimidating, and super confusing,” she said. “That’s why we’re building Monarch, an assistive communication app that blends modern UX, adaptive AI, and research-backed learning to make communication faster and more expressive for those who need it most.”
What sets Monarch’s tool apart is the option for users to express tone and emotional nuance, and its AI-based adaptive vocabulary model that offers the right words based on context. The team took home a $10,000 prize, which will fund training data, model development, and testing for their emotional tone engine. As the team’s coach, Mary Palmieri—a tech entrepreneur and IKNS lecturer and alumna—said, “I think they’re building something super impactful.”
The Greater Good Challenge is an annual competition organized by CDL that serves as a platform to showcase innovative business solutions that address pressing global challenges—with the ultimate goal of advancing the greater good. Each year, students and alumni from around the world team up, submit proposals, and work with a coach from within the SPS community to prepare their formal pitches. The top 10 teams face off during the Challenge. One or two representatives from each team have three minutes to present their proposals, after which, the full team then engages in a five-minute Q&A session with an esteemed judge.
In second place, earning an award of $6,000, was Nusaloop—a modular biodigester system that helps hotels turn food waste into renewable energy in the form of bio-slurry, an organic fertilizer for local farmers. Compared with existing waste solutions, Nusaloop takes up less space and is offered as a subscription-based service for hotels. With a pilot partnership already underway at Merusaka Nusa Dua hotel, the team plans to scale across Indonesia in the coming years.
The third-place winner was Navi, an AI productivity tool that assists blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals in the workplace by helping them navigate spreadsheets and other productivity apps. After a fellow SPS student with a visual impairment’s experience demonstrated the weaknesses of existing tools, the team set out to offer a solution. Navi scans the workbook (for example, via Google Sheets, Excel, or another application) to identify tables, charts, key data points, and formulas and then provides a spoken summary of the layout and content. Users can navigate using voice commands or a chat interface to navigate cells, summarize charts, extract insights, and make edits.
Sango took home the audience award for their investment-based platform that works with African communities to restore degraded forest land. Users of the Sango app can invest in real reforestation projects that align with their impact and return profiles. “Your capital flows through vetted local partners into seedlings, soil preparation, and community jobs on the ground. Over the next eight years, that forest grows,” explained Sango presenter Yaseen Ahmid, noting that revenues generated from timber and other forest products can either be cashed out or reinvested.
“The Greater Good Challenge really represents the very best that Columbia has to offer,” said Amanda Carlson, associate dean of admissions at SPS, in her closing remarks. “You’ve heard today from these bright minds. You’ve heard their innovative thinking—the eye they bring, the lens that they bring for creating societal good. If you are a prospective student, I’m hopeful to see you here on the screen next year as a participant for the seventh annual Greater Good Challenge.
