DukeEngage Executive Director Eric Mlyn contributes to two publications
Eric Mlyn, executive director of DukeEngage, recently served as guest editor for the Journal of Higher Education and Outreach, Volume 17(2), May 2013, along with Amanda Moore McBride, associate professor and associate dean for social work, Washington University in St. Louis. Read their introduction to the edited volume here.
Mlyn and McBride also contributed a co-authored article, "Administering a Volunteer or Service-Leaning Program Abroad for Civic Engagement" to the publication Internships, Service Learning, and Volunteering Abroad: Successful Models and Best Practices, published by NAFSA, Association of International Educators. The guide is available for purchase on the NAFSA web site.
Melinda Gates engages 12 DukeEngage participants on topics such as global health and social inequities in private session
Slideshow photos (use arrows to advance):
Photo 1: (front row) Ray Liu, Kristen Lee, Melinda Gates, Katie Guidera, Ting-Ting Zhou, Saher Valiani, Kaitlin Rogers, (back row) Andrew Rotolo, Lucas Metropulos, Josh Sommer, Samir Rao, Erica Nagi, Eric Mlyn, Deborah Olaleye
Photo 2: Lucas Metropulos, Eric Mlyn, Melinda Gates
Photo 3: Josh Sommer, Samir Rao, Saher Valiani
Twelve DukeEngage participants from years past gathered this morning with Duke alumna Melinda Gates (BS '86, MBA '87), affording a rare opportunity for them to share their personal stories of transformation and to offer their collective thanks to Mrs. Gates and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for providing a $15 million endowment gift to establish the DukeEngage program in 2007. The Gates Foundation's start-up support, bolstered by additional gifts to the program since, including $15 million from The Duke Endowment, has enabled more than 2,400 Duke students thus far to take part in the civic engagement program. Each summer, DukeEngage fully funds and supports immersive service experiences for more than 400 Duke students in partner communities worldwide.
Melinda Gates, who will deliver this year's Commencement address on Sunday, May 12, took time out of her weekend schedule to learn about the group's unique DukeEngage experiences, with diverse service projects taking them to places such as South Africa, Egypt, Ecuador, India, Seattle, Tucson and hometown Durham, North Carolina.
The participants — a group which included three Duke alumni and five graduating seniors — shared details about their particular projects as well as how their service work shaped who they are, what they value, their studies back at Duke, and their current and future endeavors. The lively one-hour conversation touched on topics ranging from global health and development to education, conservation and social inequities.
One participant, Josh Summer, who was diagnosed with Chordoma, a rare form of cancer, his freshman year at Duke, unfolded how his DukeEngage independent project, based locally in Durham, helped him build the early stages of Chordoma Foundation, which now stands as a model for rare cancer research by patient organizations. Under his leadership, the Chordoma Foundation has united and expanded the Chordoma research community and brought about substantial scientific advances, including the development of preclinical models and the discovery of a driving genetic variant.
Graduating senior Kristen Lee shared how her experience working with the NGO Acción Ecológica in Ecuador on environmental justice gender/interfamily violence issues helped inform her life path, which, following Commencement, will take her to Washington, D.C. There, she will serve as a Truman-Albright fellow at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Melinda Gates encouraged those gathered to continue giving back in whatever way they were able. "I hope you will take that seed, that spark, keep it alive, and come back to it," she said.
This summer, 431 DukeEngage students are serving in 35 nations and more than a dozen U.S. communities. To date, DukeEngage students have contributed more than 780,000 hours of service in partner communities worldwide.
DukeEngage participants reflect on conversation with Melinda Gates
Pictured: (top row) Saher Valiani, Andrew Rotolo (bottom row) Katie Guidera, Ray Liu
Twelve DukeEngage participants from years past gathered this morning with Duke alumna Melinda Gates, affording a rare opportunity both to share their unique and personal stories of transformation and to offer their collective thanks to Ms. Gates and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for providing a $15 million endowment for DukeEngage, which was launched by Duke in 2007.
Four participants have shared immediate reflections on their conversation with Mrs. Gates. (A short biography on each contributor follows at the end of the post.)
Saher Valiani '13
My introduction to civic engagement through the DukeEngage program in Tucson, Arizona greatly influenced the rest of my undergraduate career and fueled my desire to pursue a future career in public service with a law degree. After so largely shaping my life in a great many ways, the program provided me the awe-inspiring opportunity to meet with Melinda Gates today during her visit to Duke University, where she set aside time to meet with a dozen former DukeEngage participants. During our hour together we discussed Melinda Gates’ own civic engagement endeavors, her motivations for becoming involved in service and her desire to provide the tools for underserved communities to pull themselves up onto an equal playing field. Throughout our meeting, I thought back to my own experiences working with migrants in Tucson in which I grew frustrated that human rights appeared to be allocated contingent upon a person’s birthplace or economic standing, yet encouraged by the program and by this discussion that we students could help grant agency to the issues through the attention we can draw within our unique fields. Our conversation reinforced my initial motivations to continue civic engagement well past college and use the connections and tools I gained from DukeEngage to tackle societal problems at home and abroad. I truly valued the opportunity to engage in conversation about issues of great global importance with one of the world’s most engaged civic leaders on one of my last days on Duke’s campus, and I am immeasurably grateful for DukeEngage’s existence thanks to the generous donation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Andrew Rotolo '14
"Life is a learning journey." These are the words that stay with me after hearing Melinda Gates discuss her path to philanthropy this morning. Like most of the students who were in the room, I have thought about my own path to service in great depth, carefully considering where I can best use what I have been given to serve others. Melinda took great care in each comment she made this morning, and spent much more time actively listening to our stories before sharing her own. I think this reflects well the idea of living out the learning journey. For Melinda Gates this journey has taken her all over the world to observe and act upon instances of people in need from all walks of life. She expressed that two questions — "What if it were me in their place?" and "How can I use my voice?" — have been strong guides to motivate her to continue, but it is through learning that she has begun to find some answers. Her display of knowledge in several areas, from global health to education policy to economic development, are a testament to where this learning journey can begin to lead you, and certainly where it has led Melinda Gates in some scenarios. The other piece, however, is the intangible knowledge that grows us as people and helps us to see from new perspectives. What has been found with the DukeEngage program is that a humbling experience can have a lifetime effect on the one who takes it in and learns from it. What is encouraging is that the story of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation started in this same manner. This is where change in the world seems to be occurring at its best - when learning is involved.
Katie Guidera '14
Today I had the unique opportunity to share my DukeEngage story and its continued impact on my academic, professional, and personal aspirations with my fellow classmates and Mrs. Melinda Gates. Listening to the stories of some of the most passionate students I have ever met, in addition to those of my long-time role model Mrs. Gates, was truly transformative and inspiring. As a group, we discussed the issues that really hit close to home for me: merging the fields of global health and international development, bridging global experiences with domestic interests, and finding a way to address global diseases in an interdisciplinary way. As a student volunteer, this conversation has reignited the flame that was lit initially during DukeEngage by challenging me to give more thought to the ways in which the interconnected nature of health and social inequality might be addressed.
As a Global Mental Health major, this conversation has reaffirmed my interest in the highly under-researched and under-addressed area of mental health in developing nations. As the founder of an organization called the Malaria Awareness Program, this conversation has inspired me to further our mission to merge community-driven education with a locally-run social enterprise in rural South Africa. I am excited to continue to reflect on this experience as I finish my studies at Duke and find my way in the professional world. I will be traveling to South Africa next week to continue my work with the Malaria Awareness Program, and I could not be more excited to extend today’s conversation with those whom I meet in the coming weeks in a meaningful way.
Ray Liu '15
What does it mean to really engage? And what is "civic engagement"? Often I encapsulate engagement in my switch from biomedical engineering to political science, or from the science lab to social justice following my DukeEngage experience. But Melinda Gates challenged that notion, and pushed me to rethink what real engagement looks like. As she described her first and subsequent visits to Africa, Melinda Gates asked us to consider the question: "What if it were me?" It was then that all 12 of us DukeEngage participants realized this was the question that connected all of our individual experiences. Though my post-DukeEngage reflection process has been a long one, her question helped me realize that passion and calling arise when you let an experience fully permeate your being. Don't lose the seed that DukeEngage has embedded in you, she said. Some of you will end up in the Peace Corps and others will end up on Wall Street in the next couple of years. You may not act upon what you learned immediately, but come back to it when you're ready. Throughout our hour of conversation, Melinda Gates also reiterated the notion that in order to create a more horizontal playing field and bring the world together, we must bring different fields together. Mrs. Gates really embodied this interdisciplinary spirit, connecting her expertise in global health and philanthropy with deep knowledge beyond those fields, and demonstrating the great potential we have to change our world when disciplinary walls are dissolved. Until now I've envisioned my pre-DukeEngage and post-DukeEngage lives as separate entities, but meeting Melinda Gates helped me realize that passions are not uni-disciplinary and that nothing is truly mutually exclusive. I can wield my math and science skills, combine them with my knowledge of culture and politics, and even team with movers and shakers in other places as a force for good. I'm not sure what this means for my future experiences and endeavors, but I know this much: the transformative experience that DukeEngage provides carries real breadth and depth, its impacts both quantitative and qualitative. The program has sent 2,400 students to the corners of the earth in 75 countries to date, but as Albert Einstein put it, "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted." Hopefully soon, we'll have both the stories and the numbers to know that our world is moving in a better direction.
CONTRIBUTORS
Saher Valiani is a graduating senior from Fayetteville, Georgia, majoring in political science and international comparative studies. Her program of study at Duke has been defined largely by her summer experience on United States and Mexico border through the DukeEngage in Tucson, Arizona program in 2011. After learning about border politics and witnessing the normalcy of human rights abuses against immigrants in the United States, she pursued her own independent research on Peruvian immigrants' rights and abuses in Santiago, Chile as part of the Hart Leadership Program at Duke. Her service-learning experiences have influenced Saher to matriculate to the Washington University of St. Louis School of Law after graduation where she plans to study international human rights and public interest law.
Andrew Rotolo spent 10 weeks in Nairobi, Kenya working as an independent project DukeEngage student in collaboration with an organization called First Love Kenya, whose mission is to care for and educate orphaned youth living in the slums around Nairobi. During his time with First Love, Andrew worked out of a school to help run a feeding program, provide first-aid, tutor students, and run school cleanup projects. Once back at Duke, he began studying Swahili and picked up a scholarship the following summer to do an immersive language and culture study program back in Kenya. During the summer of 2013, he will return to Kenya for a third time to work more specifically on microfinance and entrepreneurship opportunities there. He is pursuing an International Comparative Studies major with a certificate in Markets & Management Studies. Following his graduation from Duke in 2014, he will be commissioned as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
Katie Guidera, a rising senior from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, co-founded the Malaria Awareness Program (MAP), an organization that works in rural South Africa to create pathways of change through malaria education and social enterprise initiatives. Last summer, Katie traveled to HaMakuya where MAP ran a successful pilot program. There, community health workers led interactive education workshops in six villages, attracting over 350 participants. A recent winner of the Resolution Social Venture Fellowship, Katie will return to South Africa this summer to work on expanding MAP's reach to HaMakuya’s remaining eight villages and beyond. MAP also will work with a local sewing cooperative to start a mosquito bed net operation, which will provide a tangible means of malaria prevention. Katie is studying Global Mental Health through Duke's Program II major. In the future, she hopes to work in the public health field.
Ray Liu is a sophomore from San Jose, California, with a love for understanding the world through language and culture and bettering that world through advocacy and politics. He began to consider a political science major after teaching hip-hop and a cappella through his DukeEngage program in Zhuhai, China—an experience that pitted him against his very self but helped him discover his passion: to promote empowerment and reconciliation through education, entrepreneurship, government, and the arts. Ray hopes to pursue business school or graduate studies eventually; but for now, he is excited to teach dance this summer for I.D.E.A.S., an organization based in Beidaihe, China that works towards education reform.
2013 DukeEngage Academy underway
More than 430 Duke undergraduates are taking part in the 2013 DukeEngage Academy—an intensive two-day conference designed to prepare students for their DukeEngage experiences this summer across the United States and around the world.
The event opened with a morning address from Duke President Richard Brodhead and segues into numerous preparatory workshops exploring the topics of serving across cultures, the ethics of engagement, community partnerships, and the dynamics of short-term service.
Participants also have plenty of opportunities to hear and learn from DukeEngage “alumni” who coursed through the program in summers past.
On day two, students select three optional workshops from among more than a dozen topical sessions offered to learn more about traveling as a woman, documenting in the field, connecting service to their professional development, community organizing and more.
The Academy concludes Tuesday with an address delivered by Josh Sommer, executive director of the Chordoma Foundation, a nonprofit organization that proactively initiates, facilitates and funds research to develop effective treatments and ultimately a cure for chordoma – a rare cancer of the skull and spine. Diagnosed with chordoma his freshman year at Duke, Sommer joined the lab of Dr. Michael Kelley at Duke, where he experienced the practical challenges of rare cancer research—insufficient funding, lack of biospecimens and models, and lack of coordination among investigators. To solve these problems and advance the search for a cure, Sommer started the Chordoma Foundation in 2007, supported by the DukeEngage program. This support allowed him to build the foundation—now as a model for rare cancer research by patient organizations. Under his leadership, the Chordoma Foundation has united and expanded the chordoma research community and brought about substantial scientific advances, including the development of preclinical models, the discovery of a driving genetic variant, and the identification of several relevant therapeutic targets. To complement his work at the Foundation, from 2008-2011, Sommer served as a fellow in Duke's Program on Global Health and Technology Access, where he studied policies that influence sharing of biological materials and data. For his efforts to advance chordoma research, Sommer was honored by ABC News as a Person of the Year in 2008 and as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 transforming science and healthcare in 2013.
DukeEngage provides full funding for students to pursue a summer of civic engagement work in one of 39 group programs within the United States, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Nearly 40 students also pursue independent DukeEngage projects in collaboration with community partners across the world.
Public Art Gone Awry - a project by Leslie Hillman, DukeEngage in Belfast
Can public art ever be a bad thing? Paintings designed to showcase a community’s voice and history – could these actually tear neighborhoods apart? In Northern Ireland, yes. So why not just cover them up? Well, if there is one thing that I’ve learned about Northern Ireland in the past year and a half, it’s that there are no simple answers to anything. For my digital essay, I knew that I wanted to explore the problematic nature of the public murals covering city street corners throughout Northern Ireland...
DukeEngage alumnus wins 2nd place at ChangeWorks competition
Duke Junior Craig Moxley, a public policy major pursuing a certificate in global health and minor in Spanish, who participated in DukeEngage in Nicaragua-Granada in 2011, has won 2nd place and $3,000 in the Duke ChangeWorks Competition for his project on orphan mental health. The project called COPE, is fully operational today in rural Uganda and is filling a need for counseling services that target orphaned and vulnerable children.
Craig worked on the project under the mentorship of DGHI faculty member Sumi Ariely and with partners in the rural area of Naama, Uganda, where he completed DGHI fieldwork last summer. Global health student and senior Grace Zhou helped develop the idea for the project two years ago, in connection with DGHI faculty member Kathryn Whetten and the POFO research project. Another team of students funded by DGHI will return to Naama this summer to continue working on COPE.
Of note: 3rd place winners in the competition included Connor Cotton (2012 independent project in Togo) and Mona Dai (DukeEngage in Uganda 2012).
DukeEngage students bound for Togo prepare through independent studies
For some students participating in DukeEngage this summer, their civic engagement experience begins with academic preparation well before they reach their service destination.
Six of those students are participating in the new DukeEngage in Togo program, led by Charlie Piot, Duke University professor of cultural anthropology, African & African American studies and women's studies. As part of their preparation for their eight weeks of DukeEngage service in the villages of Farendé and Kuwdé, each student is pursuing an independent study with Piot during the spring 2013 semester.
Piot’s program is one of several DukeEngage initiatives that requires or recommends academic coursework to help participants better understand the issues they will address through service in their partner community.
The DukeEngage in Togo program seeks to explore and help curb, over time, the migration of young people seeking work from the villages of northern Togo to overpopulated cities of the south to plantations in neighboring Benin or Nigeria. Says Piot, “They leave because there is little opportunity at home to do anything but farm for subsistence – ‘because of our poverty’, they say. Old and young agree that the future of the villages, and perhaps of youth itself, lies in reversing this trend.”
The program builds on efforts begun a few years ago by a handful of Duke students—which included DukeEngage independent project students—who helped Piot establish the framework for the ongoing initiative. This summer’s group, says Piot, “will interview teens who leave for Benin and Nigeria, provide support for a solar-powered cyber café that Duke students built in Farendé last summer, work in a school and local youth center, and explore alternative sources of income for youth. Coming to terms with migration in one of the world’s poorest regions – through engaging the intimacies and everyday lives of teens themselves – will be a transformative experience for students.”
Through his independent study this semester, the six student participants read and discuss a range of related materials, says Piot, “from a memoir by an anthropologist about living in a village in West Africa, to readings about the history of the area, to anthropological work on West African belief and culture, to selections from my own writings on the area in which they'll be working, to more detailed studies about each of their summer projects.”
In the weeks before spring break, students met weekly as a group to discuss common readings; following spring break, students are branching off into readings about their specific projects, though group meetings and discussions will continue through the end of the semester. Each student will prepare a 20- to 30-page annotated bibliography of the semester's readings.
The learning opportunities will not stop, however, when the spring semester ends. Once students arrive in Togo, the group will continue meeting weekly to discuss and consider their service experience within broader historical, cultural and political contexts. Students will keep two journals—one examining their service in Togo in light of their readings from the spring independent study and the other capturing personal reflections on their experiences.
Piot believes the academic preparation benefits students and deepens their understanding of the service they’re undertaking. “I've done an independent study like this the past three years with students [serving in Togo], and each year they have said it was indispensable to preparing them for their summer experience.”
Duke senior Stephanie Rotolo, a DukeEngage independent project student who served in Togo with Piot during the summer of 2011 says, “The opportunity to do an independent study with Charlie before going to Togo definitely enriched my experience while I was there. Having background knowledge of the history and culture of the region and a well-prepared project allowed me to engage more deeply with the community and get a lot out of the experience. After returning to Duke, we were all so passionate about what we did that we enrolled in another independent study to write articles about our projects that we hope to publish soon. This passion is present in so many of the groups that Charlie has taken to Togo as we have gotten students from other years, even some alumni, to join in this writing project.”
For Duke first-year student Bradford Ellison, who is part of the DukeEngage group serving in Togo this summer, the independent study with Piot is providing an academic framework for his project that he feels is essential as he considers what waits for him at Duke after his return.
“Being in the Togo independent study is giving me a foundation of historical and cultural knowledge which I would not receive otherwise and which will enable me to better understand and analyze the community I am working with,” says Ellison. “Now I can conceptualize specific ideas as they would fit with Kabré culture and history. Because of this independent study, DukeEngage has already become an experience which is also shaping my future academic plans.”
Fellow first-year Emma Smith, another DukeEngage in Togo participant this summer, adds, “I feel that the readings and discussions that have come from the independent study are building an essential foundation and setting groundwork for the experiences I will have over the course of the summer and providing me with knowledge and insights that I do not believe I could otherwise acquire. The independent study with Charlie has provided me with the resources to understand more complicated issues and traditions, such as witchcraft, that are so fundamental to everyday life in Northern Togo. I feel that because of this opportunity to study with and learn from him, I will arrive in Togo this summer well prepared to learn and make an impact.”
Piot adds that the learning will not necessarily stop when this summer’s students return from Togo. In addition to any related courses in which they may enroll in any number of disciplines, Piot says, “If the students are game, I'll do another independent study with them to write up their findings. I've done this with the students the last two years. Since students’ pieces have been of high quality, we're pursuing publishing options—either in a university press edited volume or on a website we'll create.”
Interested in leading a new DukeEngage program?
DukeEngage has issued its annual Call for Proposals to lead a DukeEngage program for summer 2014 as well as application guidelines for site exploration grants. Both documents appear in PDF form at the end of this post.
Each summer, more than 40 diverse DukeEngage "group" programs take place within partner communities throughout the world. For 2014, DukeEngage is very interested in new projects that would take place in U.S. communities, which supports a major goal in its new strategic plan to expand opportunities for DukeEngage students to serve within the United States.
The deadline for site exploration grant applications is: 5 pm, Friday, April 19, 2013.
The deadline for submitting a program proposal for summer 2014 is: 5 pm, Monday, August 19, 2013.
DukeEngage alum brings spotlight to Nigeria through documentary
Nusaibah Kofar-Naisa, a 2012 Duke graduate and a participant in DukeEngage in Cairo, Egypt, in 2010, recently moved to Nigeria to produce a documentary film, "A Gateway to Kano" that has earned finalist status in the Afrinolly competition. The film features interviews with residents of Kano, Nigeria, touching on topics of health care, education, and other community challenges.
Viewers may vote for the film here.
Kofar-Naisa, a Muslim-Nigerian-American who grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, was a Baldwin Scholar at Duke. She eventually plans to pursue a Ph.D. in political science.
DukeEngage unveils new strategic plan
"DukeEngage 2017: A Blueprint for Deeper and Broader Engagement" is the new strategic plan guiding DukeEngage over the course of the next five years.
Key goal areas include areas focused on faculty and community partner engagement, expansion of domestic programs and deepening curricular connections between students' service and their academic journey at Duke.
Read more at the DukeEngage Strategic Plan web site.