ADVOCACYNET 408, June 5, 2024
Peace Fellows Will Take on Climate in Africa, Conflict in Asia and More
Peace Fellow Adin Becker is helping Jeevan Rekha Parishad, an AP partner in Odisha State, India, to develop a Neem oil start-up for use in the fight against malaria. From the left: Surajita Sahu, Runubala Behara, Adin, Manu Mishra, and Biraj Krishna.
The Advocacy Project is pleased to introduce our 2024 summer Peace Fellows.
The seven students profiled below will spend the next ten weeks volunteering with our community-based partners in Nepal, Thailand, India, Kenya, Uganda and the UK. We have deployed 347 Fellows since launching the fellowship program in 2003. This year’s cohort will be the largest since 2018.
Olivia Landau (Fletcher School, Tufts University) is the latest of several talented Fellows to work at Children Peace Initiative Kenya. Olivia will help CPIK to develop “cow camps” aimed at strengthening climate resilience among pastoralists in the Northwest. Olivia’s first blog describes her warm welcome in Kenya.
The Raven McGurll (George Washington University) will support Shield of Faith, the inspiring association of single mothers who use composting and kitchen gardens to reduce pollution and strengthen food security in the settlements of Nairobi. The Raven is experienced with social media and hopes to help her hosts find new international supporters.
Adin Becker (Harvard University), top photo, will work on a new start-up to produce mosquito repellent from Neem trees in tribal villages of Odisha State, India. This project is run by Jeevan Rekha Parishad and is central to JRP’s impressive malaria program, although Adin’s first challenge could well be the weather. Odisha is currently suffering from extreme heat and will shortly enter the Monsoon season, which Adin wrote about in his first blog.
Annie Levy (Fletcher School, Tufts University) will work at Backward Society Education (BASE) in Tulsipor, central Nepal. BASE has been an AP partner since 2008 and we worked together to end the practice of forcing girls (known as kamlaris) into domestic slavery. Annie will draw from that campaign in developing a start-up for former Badi women who were born into prostitution through caste.
Madeleine Schneider, a student of conflict resolution at Georgetown University, will work with Burmese advocates from Chiang Mai in Thailand. The conflict in Burma is at a boiling point but Maddie’s first blog finds it has been overshadowed by the Middle East and Ukraine. She hopes to change this by profiling Burmese activists challenging conscription and environmental degradation. Maddy will also introduce her hosts to the Alliance for Peacebuilding in Washington, an international network of over 200 community-based advocates.
Julia Davatzes (George Washington University) has a background in environmental engineering and will help the Gulu Disabled Persons Union install a WASH package at the Kulu Opal primary school in Northern Uganda. The work is not easy, as we showed in this recent profile of Emma the project leader, but Julia is undaunted! In addition to Kulu Opal, she will help Emma to monitor WASH in 14 other schools and make Clean Wash soap for the schools.
Julia will also help a second AP partner in Uganda, Women in Action for Women, to produce embroidered butterflies for a new Sister Artists quilt challenge.
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We have made some changes to the fellowship program to back up this strong team.
Support for Fellows: We doubled the stipend offered to Fellows and began recruiting earlier. This has given everyone time to get well prepared and fully absorb our new security protocols.
Social media: We hope to help partners expand their use of social media. While the choice is obviously theirs, we are suggesting that they use at least four platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and Linkedin – and post at least once a week. Fellows will then help their host organizations to share all of the posts. Our seventh Fellow Madeleine Pound (University of York, UK) will coordinate.
Virtual office: Also this year, Fellows will help their hosts to use our Google Drive as a virtual office. Every partner will have a page on the Drive where they can edit documents, record expenses, post photos, and upload data to an “output tracker” for use in reports. All of this builds the organizational capacity of partners and of AP.
South to South collaboration: We will encourage Fellows to explore collaboration between their hosts. For example, Adin’s host in India has developed a successful model for preventing malaria. Malaria is a growing scourge in northern Uganda, where Julia will be deployed. Hopefully, Julia and Adin can start building bridges.
AP Board: We are asking our board of directors to follow the blogs of Fellows as our board is becoming increasingly representative of our network. Seven board members (out of 12) are women. Five are former Peace Fellows. Two are expert quilters. Our newest board member, Stella Makena, is the first AP board member to head a partner organization in Africa (Shield of Faith in Nairobi). Hopefully, she will not be the last!
Click here to donate to Fellows for Peace.
Learn about our 2024 Fellowships.
Learn about our 2024 projects and partnerships.
Read the blogs of past Fellows.
