RICHMOND, Ind., April 2, 2007 — Earlham College seniors Jamie-Rose Rothenberg and Behar Xharra are among the winners of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis 100 Projects for Peace competition, a national program that gives college students $10,000 each to complete summer projects that promote peace.

Kathryn Wasserman Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist, funded the program on the occasion of her 100th birthday. Rothenberg, Xharra and the other recipients were chosen among applicants from more than 65 colleges including such top schools as Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Princeton, Harvard and Yale. Earlham was the only Indiana institution represented and the only member of the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GCLA) with more than one winner.

Picturing Peace

Rothenberg, a Peace and Global Studies major, will return to her home state of Washington to work with local teenagers, many of them the children of immigrants, on a creative arts program that will culminate with the students answering the question, "what does peace look like?" by planning and creating a mural that includes images of peace. The multi-faceted program will run for three months at a local arts center. Students will participate in art classes, book discussions and creative writing sessions under Rothenberg's leadership. Artists, historians and community leaders will speak to the group on various subjects and serve as mentors to the participants. The final mural will be a collaboration between the teenagers and their mentors.

Rothenberg participated in Earlham's off-campus study program in South Asia, served as an AmeriCorps volunteer and received a Plowshares Grant for a project of her own design in 2006. She hopes to pursue a career encouraging empowerment for youth.

"This is what I want to do with my life," says Rothenberg. "Very few people get their dream job right out of school, so I am feeling very fortunate. This project will only last for three months, but my hope is that it will become a model for future projects and that involving teenagers in creating public art will become transformative for the entire community."

Dialogue Across the Divide

International Studies major Xharra, a native of Kosovo, also will return home to complete his project. He intends to facilitate a dialogue between university students of Serbian and Kosovar Albanian heritage. Relations between the two groups have been poor since the 1999 war in Kosovo, and distrust between the groups dates back thousands of years. Xharra plans to use a model he developed through work with Americans for Informed Democracy and an Earlham student group called DIALOGUE to gather a dozen students in Montenegro. This pilot group will live together and will enter into dialogue about their ethnic and political conflict, even as they share a life together. This small group will then help organize a videoconference discussion that will originate from facilities provided by The World Bank and include more university students from Serbian and Kosovar Albanian heritage. The project is designed to foster better understanding between ethnic groups, which Xharra hopes will contribute to a better future for the Balkans.

Xharra has been involved in Model UN at Earlham, played on the men's soccer team, completed a GLCA off-campus program on the European Union and completed a summer internship with the Prime Minister of Kosovo. He hopes to pursue a career that will bring positive political change to his native country.

"I have no Serbian friends even though we share a border and even though our grandparents lived together and shared a fairly prosperous life during the Soviet era," Xharra says. "But while studying in the United States, I have met a woman from Serbia and we have found it easy to talk about interests we share. I think that if it worked for us, it could work for Kosovo."

 

Kathryn Wasserman Davis earned a B.A. from Wellesley, a M.A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. from the University of Geneva. According to the program's Web site, she created the KMD 100 Projects for Peace program in order to challenge tomorrow's leaders to formulate and test their own ideas for building the prospects for peace. The 100 projects commemorate Mrs. Davis' 100th birthday and amount to $1million of funding for peace projects that will take place this summer in locations throughout the world.

"I want to use my 100th birthday to help young people launch some initiatives — things that they can do during the summer of 2007 — that will bring new thinking to the prospects of peace in the world," she says.

Earlham President Douglas C. Bennett was so inspired by Wasserman Davis' generosity and vision that he decided to use his own discretionary budget to fund a third peace project that was not funded by the national program, but still demonstrated tremendous promise in the realm of peacemaking.

Amid Great Poverty, Cultural Riches

Bethany Rochelle Leeman, a senior majoring in Spanish and Human Development and Social Relations, was chosen by Bennett to receive funding for her project. She will use her grant to found a grassroots organization that will promote cultural awareness, literacy and cultural exchange in the community of Santa Catarina Palopo in Guatemala. The components of the project will include creating a series of trilingual books of indigenous children's stories, providing language training for women in the community, and creating a cultural exchange in which artisans in the community will teach weaving to international visitors. The inspiration for her project came while working with the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging in the same community where her summer project will take place. She talked with community members about their needs, and her proposal grew out of those conversations. At Earlham, Leeman has been a Bonner Scholar (a scholarship program requiring extensive community service) and participated in the Border Studies off-campus program.

"This project is a great way to bring my two majors together," notes Leeman. "For my senior thesis, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the 'violence of poverty,' so I'm glad to have the opportunity to do something constructive for a financially impoverished, but culturally rich, community."

KWD 100 Projects for Peace invited all students from schools participating in the Davis United World College (UWC) Scholars Program to submit a plan for their own grassroots projects for peace that the students themselves would implement during the summer of 2007. A competition for the funding took place on 65 of the 76 campuses in the UWC Scholars Program, which provides grants to select American colleges and universities in support of students from all over the world who have completed their pre-university studies at UWC schools.

"We are very grateful to all the students who submitted proposals and the many faculty and staff on all those campuses across the country who played a part in evaluating and submitting the students' work," said Executive Director of the Davis UWC Scholars Program Philip O. Geier. "Mrs. Davis, who just turned 100 years old in February, sends her congratulations to all the students for their creativity and commitment. She feels this is a wonderful way to celebrate her birthday."

UWC schools are in the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Norway, Singapore, Swaziland, the United Kingdom and Venezuela. Since the founding of the first UWC in 1962 at the height of the Cold War, these schools have provided opportunities to students from some 175 countries, representing all regions of the world. Students are selected in their home countries by volunteer committees, and receive scholarships to attend the United World College schools. At present, there are 47 UWC Scholars at Earlham.

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