2023 Grantees

This African Cultural Exchange will bring a group of students from USAP Community School in Zimbabwe to Gashora Girls School in Rwanda for an intercultural exchange program of traditional music and dance. USAP Community School is a residential 11th and 12th grade school that educates high-achieving, low-income students to excel at top universities and return to build society.

Rwanda and Zimbabwe share a history of colonialism and political violence. Rwanda was colonized by Germany and Belgium, while Zimbabwe was colonized by Britain. This context has produced classroom spaces in both countries where traditional performing arts are conspicuously absent. Many students do not practice traditional dances at all and often have negative attitudes towards their cultures.

This exchange will enable students to experience a different culture and learn to practice values like tolerance and curiosity. They will learn new dances and music; and the experience will help to unravel colonial-era ideas about African cultures by demonstrating to students the diversity of African innovations in music and dance.

Many of the students have never left their own communities or been out of the country. This experience will help them to see themselves as members of larger communities (as African and Zimbabwean), while learning how to represent their communities abroad.

While six students and two teachers from USAP community school will travel to Rwanda, the entire dance groups and full communities of both schools will benefit from the exchange by participating and witnessing the dances and learning from the intercultural experiences.

And, although the actual exchange will occur over one week, the project duration will span the year as the two schools continue the connection virtually. In addition to housing the Zimbabwean students, Gashora hopes to fundraise for a return leg to take student from Rwanda to Zimbabwe in the future.

This program is exciting because it exposes young people to collaboration and teamwork across countries on the African continent, giving students the opportunity to live with other Africans who speak different languages and have different backgrounds than themselves.

Because social media can have both positive and negative effects on young people, this project is designed to show young people how they can connect and use social media to engage in positive social interactions and promote intercultural communication. As a result, they will be better able to manage this new virtual civic space with a stronger respect for others’ cultures. The goal is to combat xenophobia, discrimination and bad behavior between youth of different cultures, particularly focusing on the issues and misunderstandings between anglophone and francophone youth.

To achieve these goals, the project will organize an intercultural workshop with about twenty well-known young bloggers and the president of the national youth council of the 10 regions of Cameroon, as well as ten representatives of famous communication platforms. Activities will be designed around intercultural understanding and respect, including a short video on how to use social media to foster positive cultural dialogue in Cameroon.

The project will also initiate communication with five local radio stations about the management of virtual civic space with respect to the promotion of cultural understanding and utilizing the language of peace. A YouTube link to the workshop video can be used to promote peace activities to a wider range of people online.

The project is an innovative one and will help contribute to peace building in Cameroon by promoting social media as a peace-making tool. If this pilot phase is successful, it will be integrated into the association workplan and further funding sought to sustain the event each year.

The Peace Leaders Program seeks to empower a diverse group of middle and high school students at two partner schools in Athens, Georgia, to serve as “peace leaders” within the school community. Students will be trained in leadership skills and restorative practices — strategies focused on building community and relationships and managing conflict and tensions in ways that treat humans with dignity and respect — to enable them to promote nonviolent conflict resolution and a culture of peace throughout the school community. In particular, Peace Leaders will work to promote dialogue throughout the student body with a goal of increasing opportunities for interpersonal communication and relationship building for all students, and particularly students that are in the midst of conflict.

The program will be part of a peer leadership class at both Clarke Central High and Clarke Middle School. These classes meet daily at each school. Participants reflect the racial and ethnic diversity in the schools and had to apply and be accepted to participate in this class. In addition to learning leadership, conflict resolution and life skills in the program, students will have opportunities to share what they learn with their peers, take on leadership opportunities in the school community and facilitate restorative processes to help their peers work through situations of conflict and harm.

Organizers will develop a Peace Leaders afterschool club at Clarke Central High School to facilitate participation by other students who are not in the Peer Leadership class. The plan for this afterschool club will be developed during the first semester of the school year and it will become an official club in 2023. The students will undertake much of the organizing and activities for the club.

This year, the program will focus on 7th graders at Clarke Middle School and 9th graders at Clarke Central High School with a goal of building student capacity for peacebuilding and nonviolent conflict resolution that can be sustained at each school. Students from Clarke Middle School feed into Clarke Central High School, so the program is expected to impact school culture at both schools for years to come.

“The Principle to Practice: Co-designing the Cooperative Sector of the Future” workshop series will explore some of the key systemic barriers to diversity, equity and inclusion in co-ops. The Ontario Cooperative Association recognizes the current lack of proportionate representation of Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQ+ and disabled communities among owners, membership, staff and board of directors of co-ops. 

These three online workshops aim to provide cooperative organizations with the tools and knowledge to evaluate, analyze and amend their current policies and practices so they can create more inclusive organizations within the co-op sector; identify barriers for those wanting to develop existing or new co-op businesses and for ownership, membership, employment, accessibility and leadership within the sector, and share ideas on how to overcome these barriers. 

Utilizing three consultants who work within these diverse communities, the workshops will provide a safe space for participants to discuss their experiences in a way that allows everyone to learn and grow. This project will advance social justice by creating cooperative opportunities for marginalized groups to address social or economic issues within their communities. The development of the practice will be shared with co-ops around the world to create a more equitable and inclusive sector and to adopt diversity, equity and inclusion as the eighth co-op principle and make it a global standard for our sector.

Shirkat is an Urdu word that means participation, partnership and company; it has come to represent social cohesion and refers to an ideology where people of different faiths, backgrounds, cultures and sects sit together for a common purpose of laughing, sharing, learning and interacting. 

District Nankana Sahib is a well-known tourist place for the Sikh community. This project seeks to promote joint dialogue, joint celebrations, joint trainings, joint exposures and joint social cohesion efforts among the diverse faith communities of the region. 

The goal of the project is twofold: First, to create an inclusive society for peaceful coexistence by initiating sustainable social cohesion models all over Pakistan. A key objective will be to create 10 Shirkat events that bring together people of diverse faiths and create social cohesion committees. The second objective is to train 50 young peace activists from diverse faiths, religions and sects to become light bearers for peace by building their skills in conflict resolution, collective thinking and improve their social media engagement to enable them to spread the peace message more broadly.

This project will bring together scholars from around Lahore, Pakistan to develop the first indigenous peace studies curriculum in Urdu and English to educate university students about pluralism through their cultural and historical context and in dialogue with their experiences. 

It is a critical first step in getting to the ultimate objective of developing a peace studies course in Pakistan by having students explore the pre-Islamic history of the country and learn about its contemporary religious, ethnic and sectarian diversity to create a multicultural Pakistani society through higher education. 

The meetings will take place in-person in Lahore, Pakistan as well as virtually with the Center for Teaching and Learning at Florida International University. The project will work with 10 professors from 10 universities in Lahore led by Prof. Iqbal Akhtar, associate professor of religious studies and politics & international relations at Florida International University. The output will be a new textbook, curriculum and teacher training for a localized peace studies curriculum that can be piloted in the city and expanded into a national course in public universities. Professors, students, and the larger public will benefit from this pioneering work in developing peace studies in Pakistan. Sessions will be on Zoom and in-person and will cover the challenges/objectives for peace in Pakistan, literature review, lessons learned from history of the Pakistani conflict, indigenous religious peace traditions and the creation of an active learning syllabus. 

A major objective is to connect Muslims and non-Muslims on the project to rethink the idea of Pakistan as an inclusive and multicultural society. The project will eventually include university students from diverse ethnic, religious and class backgrounds to learn from each other and understand how to develop a more harmonious society. One of the goals is to develop a culture of interfaith and intra-faith dialogue in Lahore, where it is largely absent in the public space. The development of dialogue communities can help to lessen future political and civil conflict in the city by strengthening civil society institutions.