A Voice For the Voiceless

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The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

31 Peace Fellows Deploy to 18 Countries

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AdvocacyNet
News Bulletin 99
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June 7, 2007, Washington, DC: Thirty-one university students will shortly be deploying to volunteer with community-based advocacy groups in 18 countries, including Afghanistan, Nepal, Bosnia, Bangladesh, Guatemala and the United Kingdom.

The students have been recruited under Fellows for Peace, the fellowship program of The Advocacy Project (AP), which supports advocates for social justice and human rights around the world. The fellows completed three days of training in Washington last week. 

This year's fellows were recruited from over 170 applicants and are almost double the number that were recruited last year.
 
"They really are ambassadors for peace," said Scott Allen, a former investment banker who serves on AP's board. "They bring a fine combination of
enthusiasm, credibility and professionalism to our overseas partners."

This year, as in the past, fellows will be posting weekly blogs, and most will be working with long-standing AP partners. But eight organizations will be taking fellows for the first time, including the Blind Education and Rehabilitation Development Organization (BERDO), which advocates for the blind in Bangladesh; the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL) in Peshawar, Pakistan; Undugu, which works for street children in Nairobi; and the Dale Farm Travelers in the UK, who face imminent eviction from their land. 

Four fellows will work in the Middle East, with the Alternative Information Center (AIC) and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) in Jerusalem, as well as the Women's Affairs Technical Committee (WATC) and the Democracy and Workers' Rights Center (DWRC) in Ramallah. 

Two fellows will work with Supporting Kids in Peru (SKIP), a group which helps poor families to secure primary education for their children in the poor neighborhoods of Trujillo, Peru.

Also for the first time this year, four fellows are being deployed throughout Nepal with the Collective Campaign for Peace (COCAP), a network that will be organizing its local members for constituent elections later this year. 

All fellows are also being asked to find an outreach partner in the United States that will follow their blogs and promote the work of their hosts. Devin Greenleaf (American University) and Ted Samuel (Georgetown University) will be sending back information about caste discrimination from the Jagaran Media Center (JMC) in Nepal to the Nepali-American Society for Oppressed Community (NASO Community), a Dalit advocacy group in Arlington, Virginia.

Alison Morse (Tufts University) will be working from Bosnia to help her host organization, Bosfam, participate at a commemoration of the Srebrenica massacre in St. Louis on July 11. The event will be organized by the Bosnian diaspora. 

Jennifer Hollinger (Georgetown), will be working in Albania for the group Churches Alert to Sex Trafficking Across Europe (CHASTE), while Leslie Ibeanusi (George Washington University) and Michelle Lanspa (Georgetown) will be supporting the anti-trafficking work of Transnational AIDS Prevention among Migrant Prostitutes in Europe Project (TAMPEP) in Turin.

As well as building bridges between civil society in Italy and Albania, the three fellows will also report back to their outreach partner, the Zonta Women's Club in Washington, which is seeking to learn about innovative anti-trafficking initiatives.

Ten individuals or small foundations have agreed to sponsor fellowships, thus providing fellows with a stipend and offsetting some program costs. They include the actor Kevin Bacon, whose online initiative SixDegrees enabled AP to raise $5,000 in donations.

AP is also using the fellowship program to partner with others who share AP's commitment to supporting community-based civil society. The Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) in Vermont is recruiting two Peace Fellows to help Macedonian partners use information in their advocacy. AP has also recruited students from the universities of Tufts, Columbia and American, which have partnership agreements with AP.   

• Read the 2007 fellows and their blogs
• For more information about the fellows, email our Fellows Coordinator, Amy Burrows.
• Sponsor a fellow