A Voice For the Voiceless

MISSION

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

Summer Interns 2005

Reflections...

In the summer of 2005 The Advocacy Project sent 13 graduate students and one volunteer from nine different universities to intern with partner organizations abroad. The internships have provided a way for the students to address some of the world’s most important human rights issues directly from the frontlines. The interns have worked on a variety of projects with their partner organizations. To read the profile of each intern’s work, please follow the links on the right side of this page. While in the field, each participant also maintained their own blog. The views expressed by the interns are not necessarily those of The Advocacy Project nor of its partner organizations.

Recruitment

The recruitment started early in January 2005 with a rigorously competitive application process. Over 60 students from leading US and European universities applied for internships with AP partner organizations. During the selection stage, Evelina Gueorguieva, the Internship Coordinator of The Advocacy Project, matched the interns’ individual interests and skills with the needs of the partners. By the beginning of April 2005, AP had selected 13 graduate interns and one volunteer from Georgetown, Tufts, NYU, Cornell, Fordham, Yale, UC Berkeley, and the University of Edinburgh who were paired with 13 partner organizations.

Training

In May 2005, prior to the interns' departure, AP staff organized an intensive training workshop at its DC office. Iain Guest, AP Executive Director, discussed the intern-partner relationship and specifics of each project. The Internship Coordinator Evelina Gueorguieva covered communications with the DC office and security issues. Teresa Crawford, former Advocacy Project IT Director and current board member, trained the interns in SWAT analysis. Moira Ballard, Web Developer, conducted a session on how to use the blogging portal.

Blogs

One of the main features of the Interns Without Borders program is the weekly online diaries (web logs, or blogs) interns post on AP's website. The blogs describe the intern's work and daily experiences. Interns Without Borders is the first global internship program to employ blogs in this innovative way, and AP encouraged the interns to post as many blogs as possible.

The AP staff drew on the intern blogs to create weekly updates for AP's email subscribers, which were distributed to the AP list. The interns’ blogs have also been featured at a variety of outside websites including:

• One World Network
• Wagner School, New York University
• Georgetown University MBA program
• Eurolounge
• Collective Campaign for Peace

Donors

In 2005, each intern raised funds to cover the cost of his or her trip. The Advocacy Project would like to acknowledge the generous support of the interns’ universities who made it possible. In addition, our students have been the recipients of many prestigious scholarships to support their work abroad:

• Altria Foundation (Carrie Hasselback)
• Coca Cola World Fund (Margaret Swink)
• Matteo Ricci Scholarship (Anne Finnan)
• Net Impact Fund (MacKenzie Frady)
• One Small Step Foundation (Shirin Sahani)
• Public Interest Law Fund (Eun Ha Kim)
• Sergio de Mello Award (Sarosh Syed)

Intern Projects:

• Alternative Information Center: AIC is a Palestinian-Israeli organization that disseminates information, research and political analysis from the Palestinian and Israeli peace movements. Nitzan Goldberger of UC Berkeley worked as a writer in the Jerusalem office of AIC. Some of her articles are reproduced on her blog page.
• Afghan Women’s Network: AWN is a non-partisan network with offices in Kabul, Peshawar and Pakistan that seeks to empower Afghan women and ensure their equal participation in Afghan society. Carrie Hasselback of the Wagner School at New York University worked with AWN, focusing primarily on grant-writing and help with the various workshops and training that the organization runs. In collaboration with AP’s intern to Omid Shirin Sahani, Carrie launched the Afghan Women’s Independent Advocacy Commission.
• BOSFAM: BOSFAM is a women’s organization in Eastern Bosnia that teaches women to weave traditional Bosnian carpets as a means of income and support. MacKenzie Frady of Georgetown University’s School of Business worked in Bosnia this summer to help update BOSFAM’s website and develop strong marketing and business plans to increase the sales of their woven goods. She was joined by volunteer Chiara Zerunian of the University of Edinburgh who helped develop the outline for a knitting program for BOSFAM.
• Butterflies: Butterflies is a new prospective partner for AP. It is a small NGO in New Delhi, India that works on empowering street children. Butterflies provides children with a variety of services including health care, education and training opportunities. Karen Adler from Cornell University Medical Center worked with Butterflies this summer. As a third year medical student, she accompanied the mobile health units on their daily trips providing much needed care to suffering children.
• Collective Campaign for Peace: COCAP is a network of nearly 40 Nepalese grassroots organizations and community groups that are working for peace and human rights. Anne Finnan of Fordham University’s International Political and Economy Development Program worked with COCAP this summer. She wrote and edited COCAP’s annual report for 2004 as well as some smaller pieces. Anne also collected on the ground information for a communications project that COCAP and AP are working to implement next year.
• Dzeno Association: Dzeno is a news agency for Roma news and information in Eastern Europe, based in Prague, Czech Republic. Margaret Swink, of Yale University, worked with Dzeno to improve the organization’s exposure and influence in Roma issues, and assist with written and spoken English news material. She has also contributed to strengthening Dzeno’s international partnerships, most particularly helping to write a comparative report on evictions of Roma minorities all across Europe.
• Forum of Srebrenica NGOs: The Forum is a network of seven Bosnian NGOs which was formed to help refugees and displaced Bosnians return to their homes in Srebrenica. Sabri Ben-Achour of Georgetown University worked with the Forum and one of its members, the organization Drina, to establish a communications strategy for the network. He also assisted with fundraising and the planning of events around the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.
• Home for Human Rights: HHR is a human rights organization in Columbo, Sri Lanka. Sarosh Syed, a student at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, work ed with HHR, overseeing their joint project with AP for rebuilding after the tsunami that hit in December of 2004. Sarosh traveled extensively through the Batticoala region of Eastern Sri Lanka to meet with community stakeholders in distant villages. He also created HHR’s new website.
• Omid Learning Center: Omid (now Oruj) specializes in the education of girls in Afghanistan building and supporting schools in remote village areas. Omid works with four girls’ schools in the provinces of Wardak and Jalalabad. Shirin Sahani of Georgetown University traveled to Afghanistan to conduct an assessment of the four schools, develop quality indicators for the educational programs and refine the M&E tools for the project.
• Refugee Law Project: RLP is a research, service, and advocacy organization that focuses on the protection of refugees and internally displaced persons in Uganda. Eun Ha Kim of Georgetown University Law School worked in Uganda to conduct research on further exploration of the topic of urban refugees, an area in which the RLP has previously published. In particular, she spent the summer focusing on the plight of female, urban refugees and their access to legal aid.
• Rights Action/ADIVIMA: A human rights organization in Guatemala, Rights Action works on a variety of campaigns and the promotion of social and economic rights. Paula of Georgetown University School of Foreign Service spent the summer working directly with one of Rights Action’s local partners, ADIVIMA, a women’s organization in the province of Rabinal. She assisted with ADVIMA’s campaigns to establish the fate of “disappeared” relatives after the 1982 massacre, to raise awareness of conscientious objection, and to support people displaced as a consequence of the internal armed conflict.
• The Transnational AIDS Prevention Among Migrant Prostitutes in Europe Project (TAMPEP): The Turin branch of TAMPEP works on many fronts, providing social and medical support for victims of human trafficking, and helping foreign sex workers in Turin to receive legal aid and enter the labor market and society. Ewa Sobczynska, a graduate student from Georgetown University’s program in European Studies, worked with TAMPEP on completing a report to the European Commission. She also accompanied TAMPEP’s outreach units in their trips to provide assistance to the victims of trafficking.
• The Women’s Consortium of Nigeria: WOCON works for women’s rights and the empowerment of women and girls, focusing especially on victims of trafficking and child slaves. Malia Mayson of the Fletcher School at Tufts University worked with WOCON this summer. Her duties included redesigning WOCON’s website, producing articles for the content of the new site, and accompanying WOCON’s staff on their field trips.

2005 is the third year of internship programs for The Advocacy Project. A summary report of the internships from the previous two summers are available on the AP Summer Interns 2004 and AP Summer Interns 2003 pages.