Funding News!

Breaking News/Funding News

“I want to use my 100th birthday to help young people launch some immediate initiatives - things that they can do during the summer of 2007 – that will bring new thinking to the prospects of peace in the world.” – Kathryn Wasserman Davis.

In November 2008, I and fellow Master of Arts Degree in Applied Community Change and Conservation, tenable from the Future Generations Graduate School headquartered in WV, USA met in Peru, South America for the Third face-to-face residential-based studies. As students, we get an opportunity to interact together with our professors as well as get exposed to rural development technologies since all of work with communities back home in our respective countries. We are students from 10 different countries all over the world namely Uganda, Mozambique, Bhutan, Tibet Autonomous Region of China, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Peru, India, Afghanistan and USA. Our good professors and administrative staff at Future Generations gave us the motivation to prove our leadership qualities by submitting proposals for the Davis Peace competition. The review committee reached the decision that the winner is Joy's proposal ‘Peace Building and Natural Resource Management in SW Uganda’ and the runner-up was Gil's proposal Urban Violence: Rechanneling Angry Energy for Peace Building in Mozambique. This implies that I am guaranteed the $10,000 to implement my project this summer, and Gil's proposal enters into a competition with the other runners-up, though it did not succeed but all the same was worth trying.

I was energized by the message I got from Christie Hand, the Future Generations Graduate School Registrar that “the committee was impressed by the quality and care reflected in each of the proposals. Evaluating proposals for funding is always difficult and this was no exception. Writing proposals is part of leadership development. Generally, a person will be successful 20% to 30% of the time; you won't always win, but if you don't try you have no chance. Congratulations to Joy. Gil is now in a pool where almost 10% more will receive an award.”

Christie added the following being the criteria which the review committee used in judging the proposals: 1) identification of the problem and proposal of an appropriate solution and action plan; 2) creativity and innovation; 3) feasibility for immediate implementation; 4) evidence that the local community was engaged and committed to the project; 5) clarity and scope of the project; and 6) a budget that is in line with both Davis requirements and the proposed work.

As Team Leader for BCRD-Uganda, I am overjoyed that I won the competition, a sign of growing in leadership and confident that, in future, I can win bigger projects to benefit the critically impoverished communities in this lovely part of the world with very nice receptive people, the Bafumbira, who despite the hard life and harsh conditions characterized by food insecurity, abject poverty, disease, political insecurity emanating from the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo and all other characteristics associated with a remote area, are able to wear beaming smiles on their faces.

Note: The Davis Projects for Peace is an undergraduates at the American colleges and universities in the Davis United World Scholars Program to design grassroots projects for implementation during summer. The projects judged to be the most promising and do-able are funded each year. The objective is to encourage and support today’s motivated youth to create their own ideas for building peace. The Davis Projects for Peace is made possible by Kathryn Wasserman Davis, an accomplished internationalist and philanthropist. The many marvelous achievements by the students in the summer of 2007 motivated Mrs. Davis to continue supporting the Davis Projects for Peace in the summer of 2008. For more information, please log on to www.kwd100projectsforpeace.org/