Peace Fellows Inspire Action for Social Justice
Each year, The Advocacy Project recruits graduate students to volunteer with our partner organizations. This is the only fellowship program that matches the passion and skills of graduates with the needs of community-based advocates. We have recruited 340 Fellows from over 60 academic programs since 2003. In 2021 we recruited 19 Fellows. Three worked in Uganda, Liberia and Senegal. The rest provided support remotely from the US.
What Fellows Do
Peace Fellows help partners to acquire the necessary tools – like website creation and micro-fincance – to grow a start-up organization. We recruit Fellows for their skills and then provide training before deployment. Ai Hoang (Columbia University) fled Vietnam as a child and returned in 2016 as an AP Peace Fellow to work with Agent Orange victims at the Association for the Empowerment of Persons with Disability.
How Fellows Live
AP fellowships offer a once in a lifetime experience and we get to hear about it in real time! Peace Fellow Charlotte Bourdillon (Tufts University) spent much of 2011 in western Kenya, where she helped to run a pioneering boarding school for underprivileged girls whose families agreed to forego genital mutilation. The school’s founder, Dr Kakenya Ntaiya, was named a top CNN hero in 2013. Charlotte went on to work in the health field in Rwanda.
How Fellows Are Affected
We expect our fellowships to build character and prepare Fellows for a career in peace and human rights. We continue to follow the professional achievements of past Fellows with pride and have helped several to find challenging jobs. Ash Kosiewicz (Georgetown University) developed a passion for video blogging while serving as a Peace Fellow in Peru in 2008 and went on to produce podcasts about hunger for the UN World Food Program. Photo: WFP/Guido Dingemans.
Ambassadors for Multiculturalism
Peace Fellows have come from 45 different countries including Syria, Belarus, Mongolia, and Saudi Arabia, and help to bridge the cultural divide. This photo shows Corey Black from Canada, Chantal Uwizera (Rwanda and the US) and Mealanny Purwaningrum from Indonesia. All served as Fellows in Nepal in 2011. Mealanny, our first Fellow from Indonesia, now works for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in northeast Nigeria. She wrote: “AP has been very instrumental in shaping my career path and I will never thank them enough for that!”