Starr Fellows

introducing the 2009 Starr Fellows…

Emma Anselin ’11

Project HEALTH Summer Institute for Community Action

We propose the creation of a ten-week summer program for Brown undergraduates to engage in community service in Providence. Six program participants and two coordinators will live in Plantations House. The program will start June 1 and end August 8. We have also developed a three year plan to move towards a summer program that supports ten participants and does not rely on funding from Brown student fellowships.  Participants will volunteer at Project HEALTH’s Family Help Desk in Hasbro Children’s Hospital, which mobilizes undergraduate volunteers to help low-income families navigate the existing network of resources and service providers in Rhode Island. Participants will also serve in part-time internships with local community organizations. The Summer Institute will enable Project HEALTH to fully and continuously staff the Family Help Desk during the summer by providing program participants with housing and stipends. It will also enrich our knowledge of the organizations we work with and the social and economic issues we address.

Colette DeJong ’11

Muso Keneya Be Muso Seya: Healthy Women Are Powerful Women

In Sikoroni, a slum of Mali’s capital crippled by child mortality and women’s subjugation, community leaders are designing a revolutionary initiative to create a cycle of healthcare and women’s empowerment. Their pilot program is Muso Keneya Be Muso Seya: “Healthy Women Are Powerful Women.” This summer, working through Brown’s Mali Health Organizing Project (MHOP), I will help Sikoroni to set up an evaluation system to quantify and interpret their results. This system will enable Sikoroni’s leaders to revise the program as it unfolds, and to share their findings with other communities inspired to recreate their success.

Sophie Elsner ’10

Owning the Issues: Rewriting the Rhode Island Urban Debate League Curriculum

The mission of the Rhode Island Urban Debate League (RIUDL) is to increase academic engagement and civic involvement among local high school students through participation in competitive and challenging debate activities. With a legacy of success but substantial room for improvement, the RIUDL needs reform from within, not the creation of a new organization. RIUDL leaders are seeking to assess how to best build research and communication skills and include more students in the activity. The proposed reform includes rewriting a yearlong curriculum through work with high school students, coaches, teachers and league directors nationally. To make the RIUDL more sustainable, student leaders must dedicate the next year to this project.

Matthew Grimes ’10

Owning the Issues: Rewriting the Rhode Island Urban Debate League Curriculum

The mission of the Rhode Island Urban Debate League (RIUDL) is to increase academic engagement and civic involvement among local high school students through participation in competitive and challenging debate activities. With a legacy of success but substantial room for improvement, the RIUDL needs reform from within, not the creation of a new organization. RIUDL leaders are seeking to assess how to best build research and communication skills and include more students in the activity. The proposed reform includes rewriting a yearlong curriculum through work with high school students, coaches, teachers and league directors nationally. To make the RIUDL more sustainable, student leaders must dedicate the next year to this project.

Nabeel Gillani ’12

Capital Good for Providence

The title of my project is Capital Good for Providence. The goal of this project is to develop the Capital Good Fund, a microfinance organization started by Brown students that will begin making small business loans and loans to finance change of legal status procedures beginning in February of 2009. My time in Providence in the summer will be devoted to evaluating the lending operation’s performance, researching how to scale the organization, investigating how to make the lending structure financially and organizationally sustainable, and building relationships with our community partnering organizations and local financial institutions to develop a long term strategy for extending credit to the working poor of Providence.

Charles Harding ’09.5

Asset Map Uganda

Assetmap Foundation and Assetmap Inc. together are a joint partnership for-profit / non-profit collaboration. Assetmap is built upon the Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) theory of grassroots mobilization developed at Northwestern. As its principal philosophy, Assetmap believes that that all individuals, communities and institutions have core assets that can be leveraged for effective collaboration in create value, and meaning. Due to an information gap and lack of communication in development settings, so often these assets are duplicated, or overlooked. As organizations are pressured into duplicative fundraising and programming, so often more energy is spent on bureaucracy then on serving the needs of communities.

Assetmap Uganda is creating directory tool software to aggregate assets and content from development agencies, NGOs, CBOs, and civil society in Uganda. Assetmap Uganda will smooth the flow of information and encourage communication and collaboration between discrete communities on an open online portal. This pilot project will instigate further exploration into the interface between online and offline communities in other locations.

Chaney Harrison ’11

Nossa Capoeira

In collaboration with the Brazilian non-profit Capoeira Cidadã and under the guidance of Brown University faculty I will conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of Capoeira Cidadã’s achievements to date. I will also produce a program evaluation that will allow Capoeira Cidadã to more effectively adapt to its community, deepening its impact within the community of Cidade de Deus. Additionally, I will work with Capoeira Cidadã to develop business plans for the creation and growth their youth training programs that will allow them to become a sustainable enterprise that is independent from outside funding.

Rachel Levenson ’10

Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment (BRYTE)

Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment (BRYTE) is a student-run organization that works in collaboration with the International Institute of Rhode Island to facilitate the tutoring and mentoring of recently resettled refugees by Brown University students. A young and rapidly growing organization, BRYTE is in need of a significant re-evaluation of its user-interests, methodology and structure. Over the course of the summer, I will conduct multi-faceted, user-based research as part of an extensive overhaul of BRYTE’s current design. The culmination of this research will be the writing of a strategic plan and the development of a BRYTE website.

Sophia Li ’11

Project HEALTH Summer Institute for Community Action

We propose the creation of a ten-week summer program for Brown undergraduates to engage in community service in Providence. Six program participants and two coordinators will live in Plantations House. The program will start June 1 and end August 8. We have also developed a three year plan to move towards a summer program that supports ten participants and does not rely on funding from Brown student fellowships.  Participants will volunteer at Project HEALTH’s Family Help Desk in Hasbro Children’s Hospital, which mobilizes undergraduate volunteers to help low-income families navigate the existing network of resources and service providers in Rhode Island. Participants will also serve in part-time internships with local community organizations. The Summer Institute will enable Project HEALTH to fully and continuously staff the Family Help Desk during the summer by providing program participants with housing and stipends. It will also enrich our knowledge of the organizations we work with and the social and economic issues we address.

Farrukh Hussein Malik ’11

Networks for Peace: The India-Pakistan Dialogue Project

We hope to create a platform for policy-oriented discussion and conflict resolution between university students from India and Pakistan. Our project is built on innovative models such as the Strait Talk Symposium. We will first set up an internet-based forum where students can discuss the issues most relevant to achieving peace in South Asia. These forums will organically evolve into agendas for a physical conference, which will take place at Brown. By institutionalizing the relationships created online through the conference, we will create a project that is sustainable and expandable over time, and will develop momentum to grow.

Katharine Sachi Okamoto ’09

New England Fish Forum: Sea Change

The New England Fish Forum is a commercial fisheries community-generated conversation and database between fishing industry members, scientists and regional managers. Currently, the fisheries management conversation is characterized by conflict, miscommunication, stakeholder distrust, lack of knowledge-sharing, and differing expectations for the process. The Fish Forum’s goal is to change how the management conversation takes place by providing a centralized space for a new kind of dialogue that fosters mutual respect and trust, decision-making transparency, information- and goal sharing, and conceptual pluralism. The Fish Forum includes a remote (online) central portal (the “Fish Forum”) that will be complemented by in-person conversations and seminars (“Face-To-Face”).

Meghna Philip ’11

Networks for Peace: The India-Pakistan Dialogue Project

We hope to create a platform for policy-oriented discussion and conflict resolution between university students from India and Pakistan. Our project is built on innovative models such as the Strait Talk Symposium. We will first set up an internet-based forum where students can discuss the issues most relevant to achieving peace in South Asia. These forums will organically evolve into agendas for a physical conference, which will take place at Brown. By institutionalizing the relationships created online through the conference, we will create a project that is sustainable and expandable over time, and will develop momentum to grow.

David Schwartz ’09.5

The Real Food Challenge

What if changing the way we eat could not only improve the health of our bodies, but of our communities, our society, and our environment as well? It is clear that our global food system has gotten off track, and young people can be the ones to fix it. The Real Food Challenge, a new national student-driven organization, is doing just that-inspiring young people to help build a real food economy. As students concerned with the crisis in our food system, we are calling on our colleges and universities to invest today in a truly just and sustainable food economy. As a co-founder of the Challenge, and soon-to-be-graduating student, this summer I will devote myself to building the organizations’ capacity in critically needed areas, facilitating new opportunities for growth, connection and leadership development.

Julie Siwicki ’10

Coalition-Building through Microfinance:

The poor, urban population in Providence, RI, has little access to credit, keeping many stuck in a severe cycle of poverty and unemployment. Over the past several decades, microfinance institutions have proven their ability to break this trap. I will work with the Capital Good Fund, a new microfinance initiative in Providence, to bring small loans to the city’s low-income neighborhoods. As Community Partners Coordinator, I will use the proven tool of coalition-building to strengthen its partnerships. My project will establish the organization in the non-profit community, allowing it to challenge Providence’s inequalities in a sustainable manner.