Help Our Peace Fellows to Serve and Learn!

Catalysts for Social Change

This report is going to 279 friends of The Advocacy Project who have donated $82,5610 to our fellowship program through GlobalGiving since 2015. This included $18,370 that reached us on Giving Tuesday (November 28) last year. We are enormously grateful.

This is the time of year when we start recruiting Fellows for the summer, so it might help if I explain our 2024 work plan and show how Fellows will contribute.

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This year we will again take on several very tough issues, including climate change and conflict in Northwest Kenya; pollution and food insecurity in the informal settlements of Nairobi; the struggle by Burma’s ethnic nationalities against dictatorship; a crisis of hygiene and enrolment in the primary schools of northern Uganda; malaria among tribal people in India; and the threat to girls in Zimbabwe from early marriage.

Challenges like these may seem daunting, but they can be overcome by communities that are motivated to produce change precisely because they are directly affected. Indeed, the pressure only spurs them to be more creative.

Our contribution at The Advocacy Project is to give these communities a nudge by providing friendship, start-up funding, ten weeks of support from a talented graduate student (Peace Fellow), and a vision for long-term change. Our initial investments are small - last year we transferred $54,000 to 13 partners from our core program. But if a start-up takes hold, as most do, we will raise funds for a program for up to five years.

We hope to support at least ten partners in 2024. Some projects will be new and take the form of start-ups. For example, we hope to launch a start-up for Badi women in Central Nepal who were condemned to prostitution by Nepal’s caste system. Caste is illegal in Nepal but the legacy of discrimination lives on. We also hope to work with Burma’s ethnic peoples for the first time.

Most of our 2024 programs, however, began as start-ups some years ago and are well known to us. They may even be familiar to you from appeals we have posted on their behalf on GlobalGiving. (If you donated, a double thanks!).

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I wan to single out five programs that are beginning to produce real change in their communities and have benefitted from the work of Peace Fellows:

* Early marriage in Zimbabwe: Over a third of all Zimbabwean girls marry early. Our 2018 Fellow Alex (Columbia University) showed that this was linked to poverty. The following year McLane (Fletcher School 2019) helped our partner come up with a practical solution and developed a start-up to help girls earn money from soap. Dawa (Texas A&M 2022) helped to turn the soap project into a business that now provides 98 girls with a monthly income of over $50. Not one has married under the legal age.

* Pollution and food insecurity in Kibera, Kenya: This program began in 2021 with a long-distance friendship between Stella, our partner in the Kibera settlement, and Delaney, a Peace Fellow at the University of Southern California. Together, they developed a composting start-up for single mothers. In 2023 the women composted over 4.2 tons of food waste, erected kitchen gardens from recycled jerry cans, and used the compost to grow vegetables. This year's Peace Fellow will help Stella take her composting model into schools.

* The WASH crisis in Ugandan schools: Our interest in WASH was piqued by a 2011 blog from Rebecca (University of Maryland) - "The inaccessible toilet: when nature calls and society hangs up” - which described what the lack of sanitary services means to Ugandans with a disability. Based on this, we raised funds to help the Gulu Disabled Persons Union install accessible toilets at a primary school. GDPU has since put a WASH package (accessible toilets, girls' changing rooms and hand-washing) into six schools with a population of over 10,000 students. Our 2024 Fellow will work at a seventh school this summer.

* The threat from malaria to tribal people in India: Blogs have also played a role in steering another successful program, run by Jeevan Rekha Parishad (Lifeline) in Odisha state, which protects pregnant tribal women against malaria. Rohit, our Peace Fellow in India, has written several fine blogs about the impact of traditional tribal practices on malaria. Some practices (like witchdraft) are dangerous, but others can help. For example, tribal people use oil from a local tree (the Neem) as a mosquito repellent. We will fund a start-up to help tribal women produce and sell the oil. We hope our 2024 Fellow will help.

* Reducing conflict and building resiliency against climate change among pastoralists in Northwest Kenya: This year we will again work with Children Peace Initiative Kenya (CPIK), a partner since 2015. Five Fellows have volunteered at CPIK and made incredible contributions. Talley (George Washington, 2017) visited the villages and helped to secure a generous grant from Germany. Julia (George Washington University 2022, top photo) helped to launch two start-ups for warriors and women from the Pokot and Samburu tribes. Our 2024 Fellow will pick up on one of Julia's ideas and help warriors share pasture land during drought.

I want to finish this review of our Fellows by acknowledging the expanding role of undergraduate and high school Fellows here in the US. Three Fellows currently lead composting teams at their schools. Another three produce and sell soap to support the education of the girls in Zimbabwe. High school students bring excitement, spontaneity and unpredictability to our work and keep us all on our toes!

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It goes without saying that our fellowships are not be easy. This is why we need people who can work effectively in a tough environment, adapt to the unexpected, be innovative, get deep into communities and make friends easily. This last may be the most important, because all of our partnerships are based on strong friendships. We offer some examples in the accompanying photos.

Those who take the plunge gain invaluable experience. Working in Kibera (Kenya) last year was Caitlin’s first experience of Africa. On return she applied to join the Peace Corps. Julia, who preceded Caitlin in Kenya in 2022, recently joined USAID. Dawa (Zimbabwe 2022) will shortly take up a position at USAID.

Four former Fellows sit on our Board and make sure we remain invested in our fellowship program. We also stay in touch with many past Fellows - and some even donate to our appeals on behalf of their former hosts.

We are proud of them all!

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I end with the terrible conflict under way in the Middle East. Between 2003 and 2015 we sent 16 Fellows to work with partners in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel. Our goal was to support civil society on both sides of a highly polarized conflict. Finding middle ground was difficult back then and is of course a lot more difficult today.

You can find the blogs of our Fellows here on our website. For the most part they make depressing reading, but they also show people who are brave, determined and resourceful in both Israel and Palestine. When this current crisis abates, as it will, civil society will emerge as one of the best hopes for a sustained peace. We salute our former partners and the students who worked at their side.

Our next report is due in May, at which time our summer Fellows will be packing their bags to leave. Our deepest thanks to you all for making it possible!

Iain and the AP team.

This report is going to 263 friends of The Advocacy Project who have donated $69,000 to our fellowship program through GlobalGiving. Your generosity has helped us to recruit 86 students from over 30 universities since we posted this appeal in 2015. Thank you!

As noted in our last report, we have made significant changes in the program during the pandemic. But our original goals remain the same: first, to provide friendship and support to our partners; second, give students the experience of working for social justice on the front lines.

How have we done so far this year?

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This year’s Fellows are supporting 14 projects in ten countries.

First, there are start-ups. These begin with bold ideas from our partners. We offer $1,000 from our own funds and a Peace Fellow to help shape them into projects.

If the project meets its goals after a year, we will invest for up to three more years. One current example is a campaign by our Indian partner Jeevan Rehka Parisad ("Lifeline") to empower tribal people against malaria in the state of Odisha. We are also deeply committed to a composting campaign by Shield of Faith, a group of largely single mothers who compost food waste and manage kitchen gardens in the informal settlement of Kibera, Nairobi.

Phase 2 projects like these require serious funds, and in this we are helped by GlobalGiving. We have posted 49 appeals for partners on GlobalGiving since 2015 and the resulting donations from well-wishers like you have given partners a strong incentive to develop their own network of supporters. Peace Fellows have helped to raise funds for most of these appeals.

A project reaches the level of Phase 3 when it achieves self-sufficiency. One of our favorites, by Women Advocacy Project in Zimbabwe, helps girls to make and sell soap so as to resist early marriage. The girls (who number 98) hope to sell over 50,000 bottles of soap this year and not one has married under the legal age of 18 since 2018. Four Peace Fellows have worked on this program in Zimbabwe.

Another successful Phase 3 program, by Children Peace Initiative Kenya, promotes peace among pastoralists in Northern Kenya. CPIK recently received funds from a large German donor to take its peace-building into the troubled region of Baragoi, thus expanding an initiative that has been sustained by donations through GlobalGiving and the efforts of four Peace Fellows since 2016.

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As well as supporting such individual programs, this year's Peace Fellows have also enriched two of the services that we offer to all partners and projects. One helps partners to use embroidery. The other connects them with new allies in the Global North, particularly schools.

Embroidery: As many of you will know, we have helped partners to tell their story through embroidery and advocacy quilting for several years. Our aim is to help women express themselves in the company of friends and this has proved to be especially therapeutic during the pandemic. Earlier this year we also opened an online store, Southern Stitchers, to sell their embroidery. The store was built by Abby, who joined our team as a Fellow in 2021. The store has earned over $2,500 for the artists so far this year.

Much to our delight, stitching is also inspiring social change. Many of the artists who started with us by learning embroidery have stayed together to campaign for better services in their neighborhoods. One example is the Shield of Faith association in Kibera, referred to earlier. The group still produces fine embroidery for our online store, but its members have also decided to take up composting in an effort to reduce pollution and grow vegetables.

Both activities – embroidery and composting – have given these women an important outlet for their energy and skills, as I saw during a recent visit. I was accompanied by Stella, the group coordinator, and by our Peace Fellow Caitlin, a graduate student at George Washington University who worked with Stella this past summer. (Top photo).

Connecting North and South: One of Stella’s goals is to take composting into Kibera schools, which produce a prodigious amount of food waste. Helped by Caitlin, she took an important first step this past summer by striking up a partnership with Project Elimu, an after-school program that attracts hundreds of children in Kibera. This should allow Stella to reach out to individual schools.

Stella is also changing the direction of our fellowship program here in the US. Inspired by her composting heroics, one of our 2023 Fellows Liam, 17, has persuaded other students at his school in Ardmore (Pennsylvania) to demand composting in the school kitchen and cafeteria. We helped Liam's team to secure a grant for $20,000 from a local foundation and composting will hopefully start soon.

It has not stopped there. In an effort to help Liam learn from others, we recruited three more high school Fellows in Rhode Island - Bella, Maggie and Emma – who have initiated composting into their own schools and are shown cleaning up a beach in the photo below. The three have described their experience through excellent blogs that will inform Liam's team and hopefully other school projects.

As this composting campaign gathers momentum, we also hope to connect the students in Kenya and the US through Zoom, and maybe eventually even in person. Although a visit may be far off, we have been inspired to think big by Fellows at two other American high schools who are making and selling soap in Arlington and Atlanta in support of the soap-making girls in Zimbabwe. Thanks to this year's Fellows, such North-South connections will now be central to our support for partners.

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As we come to the end of 2023 there are, or course, important lessons to be learned. On the positive side, Caitlin showed in Nairobi that Fellows offer a combination of skills and friendship that can be deeply empowering. We will be looking for such people skills in future Fellows!

This year has also underscored the value of blogs, photos and video footage, which help us to promote the work of partners. Caitlin produced ten fine blogs and many photos that we will use for months to come. I would particularly recommend her sensitive description of life in Kibera and other settlements. Caitlin summed up her own experience as "an experience I will never forget.”

We also have high expectations from Rohit, a graduate student in India, who has joined our partner Lifeline to fight malaria. Rohit is only the second Fellow we have recruited from the South and he showed his skills in his first blog ("Cry of the Crashing Metals") about the horrific June 3 train accident at the Odisha railway station. Impressed by Rohit, we will shortly make an offer to a talented student in Nairobi to support Stella’s composting initiative. Hopefully, this is the beginning of another new trend!

But some things have not worked so well. In recruiting this year we invited applicants to help us design their fellowships in an effort to attract self-starters. This produced fewer applications than in the past and suggested that students welcome direction. We will take note next year. We will also increase the stipend we offer to offset the rising cost of air travel, and reach out to universities that are not rich in resources but brimming with talent. These could include schools like Howard University here in Washington.

Based on this summer we also hope to build more partnerships between high school students in the North and South. But at the same time, we understand that teenagers live busy lives. We will rely on motivated students like Liam to take the initiative.

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Again, we thank you for making it possible to work with these inspiring people! Please consider supporting our appeal again on November 28 – GivingTuesday – when we will be seeking funds for our 2024 fellowship program.

In gratitude

Iain and the AP team