UPDATE (July 6, 2009):

- We will be meeting with Irene Martinetti, the director of WFUNA's Geneva office, on July 22 at the UN.  Unfortunately, Fruzsina won't be able to make it to Geneva this time, but we'll keep her in the loop.

- Tian Qi from the Laogai Research Foundation will be coming in from Germany to talk with us July 21.

- We'll be meeting with Doug Hart and some teachers from Louisville via conference call.

- Martha Akawa will be talking with us in person August 4.

- We're still working on scheduling a meeting with a person from the Red Cross (ICRC); it looks promising.

- The DevInfo directors won't be able to meet in person, but we'll conference call with them, and meanwhile the GameWorks team and a DevInfo technical person will be on site.

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The first Geneva residency is fast approaching, and one of your major goals while you are there will be to form a project team that includes one or more of your classmates and a project partner organization.  With that in mind, we're posting this list so that you can't start thinking about potential partners and project ideas.  You don't have to make a commitment yet, but if there are one or more of particular interest, please respond to this post so we know.  It's possible, too, that a project might have more than one partner, or a partner might work with more than one project. Also, if you have a personal contact with an individual or group that you think might make a good partner, by all means let us know.

The basic idea behind a collaboration is this: The partner is doing some sort of important work that has an international scope but that is not widely known or understood.  Your job is to design a project (utilizing the web and/or other technologies as appropriate) which engages learners (which might be K-12 students, college students, other groups, or the general public) with ideas and issues important to the partner, and which also connects those issues to the learners' lives (and potentially to a school curriculum as well).

Our goal for the partner meetings this summer is to explore areas of mutual interest, learn about the partners' work, form project teams, and then come up with an initial project design and rough prototype for each partnership.

Between this summer and next summer, you will refine and pilot your projects, keeping in contact with the partner to a greater or lesser degree. The amount of contact may range anywhere from occasional electronic updates and consultations to fairly close collaborations -- that's something that you will work out as you go.

The following people and groups have committed to meeting with you and exploring partnership possibilities:

Organizational contacts

World Federation of United Nations Associations (WFUNA)

United Nations Associations (UNAs) are organizations based in a country or region that are dedicated to increasing awareness and dialog about the UN and its goals.  WFUNA is an umbrella organization for UNAs around the world, and they have offices in NYC and Geneva. We can imagine project possibilities on many different levels with this group and/or its affiliates.

Democratic Republic of the Congo UN Association

One of the projects from the first cohort was The Congo Cause, and our partner Cissa Wa Numbe, who leads the UN Association in the Congo, will be with us during the first few days of the residency, along with Paula Samal, a Global Program alum who is continuing to work with The Congo Cause.  The project had many great successes, but there are still many exciting possibilities for new development.

DevInfo

DevInfo is an organization that makes, distributes, and supports technology for accessing data related to the UN's Millennium Development Goals.  A team from the previous cohort developed a project now called "DevInfo GameWorks," which allows people to create and play games based on inquiry into these data.  DevInfo GameWorks is continuing its design and development work this year, thanks in part to a MacArthur-funded Digital Media and Learning grant.  The DevInfo directors and the GameWorks team will be in Geneva during the second week of the residency, and they're very interested in expanding the GameWorks idea in new directions, so there are plenty of project possibilities here, too.

International Labour Organization (ILO)

From the ILO website: "ILO is devoted to advancing opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity. Its main aims are to promote rights at work, encourage decent employment opportunities, enhance social protection and strengthen dialogue in handling work-related issues." 

Our contact, Sameer Khatiwada, works for the International Institute for Labour Studies within the ILO; we will meet with him during the residency at a date TBA.

The Laogai Research Foundation (LRF)

From the LRF website: "LRF was established in 1992 by Laogai survivor Harry Wu in order to gather information on and raise public awareness of the Laogai—China’s extensive system of forced-labor prison camps.  LRF also works to document and publicize other systemic human rights violations in China, including executions and the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners, the coercive enforcement of China's 'one-child' population control policy, and Internet censorship and surveillance."

Jaime Chao (a Global Program alum) will be bringing us this connection, and we hope to bring in one of the group's staff, who is currently working in Germany.

NGO Management School

Marco Kirschbaum is the director of the NGO Management School, which provides training and support to non-governmental organizations of many kinds, and he may also be able to introduce us to contacts at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).  Needless to say, lots of possibilities here as well.

Museum and Parks of Cozumel; AVACO (Quintana Roo, Mexico)

Over the past few years our contacts in Cozumel have allowed us access to information about Cultural Heritage related to the islands' Museums and Parks and also an NGO organization entitled AVACO-whose primary purpose is dedicated to improving the lives of those with visual impairments.  In forming these two partnerships, the partners themselves have also identified a partner at the Punta Sur Ecological Preserve whose work involves educating the public about marine wildlife with a primary focus on the hatching of Sea Turtles.  Thanks to a grant entitled Global Community and Classroom Engagement: Using Hypermedia to Share Learning Experiences Across Cultures we have support for Global Program students' travel to Cozumel. Additionally, we've also received a grant to bring a partner from Mexico to Geneva-likely during summer 2 with video conference collaboration during summer 1 and a site visit during the Fall/Winter.

Individuals

Tulin Sener is our official "Global Program International Consulting Scholar," and she is a professor at Ankara University in Turkey.  Her research focuses on the civic engagement of young people, children’s rights and children’s culture.  She will be joining us July 24 - 29.

Krizstian Gal is a young Hungarian who just graduated college with a degree in political science, which included internships in WFUNA's NYC office (see above) and in Spain.  While still in high school, he was part of a short-lived initiative called the Global Student Congress, and he's still very interested in youth voice and civic engagement.  He will be joining us July 29 - Aug. 2.

Martha Akawa is from Namibia and is finishing her Ph.D. at the Namibia Resource Center in Basel, which has the largest archive of Namibian historical documents outside Namibia itself. She is very interested in grassroots local histories and history education, and though she is feverishly working on finishing her thesis, she may be able to take a day off and visit us to see where our interests might cross.

Doug Hart is a long-time friend and collaborator who is currently teaching social studies in Jefferson County (Louisville), Kentucky.  He is a former Michigan state representative (where he started an initiative called The Civics Institute) and has recently taught in Slovakia and in Ramallah (where his students made a film version of Romeo and Juliet set in Palestine, as well as this website: http://www.lifebehindthewall.com/).  He is working on putting together a group of teachers from his district who, among other things, may be interested in piloting some of your projects.  We're working on getting Doug to come to Geneva, but if it doesn't work out, we'll do a video conference with him.

And furthermore:

-  Oakland Community College (Oakland County, Michigan) is interested in partnering to develop a student portfolio package that is more meaningful than resume/storage; if you want to know more, give Gary a shout.

- It's worth keeping in mind that many times, new partners come up while we're in Geneva, and the John Knox Center itself is a crossroads of NGO activity: not only do various individuals and groups stay and meet there, but there are several NGO offices on site, including the Fair Labor Organization, one of our partners from the first cohort.


Whew!  We think this is a really exciting lineup, with the potential for a pretty broad range of project topics and approaches, but we'd welcome any comments or thoughts you might have.