Supported by a $10,000 grant from the Davis Projects for Peace program, Axelle Tougouma ’27 of Fada N’Gourma, Burkina Faso, will pursue a solar-powered irrigation system and deliver agricultural training for Burkinabé women refugees in Ivory Coast, aiming to combat food insecurity and foster economic independence.

Each year, Projects for Peace provides funding to 125 or more student leaders to implement innovative, community-centered, and scalable responses to the world’s most pressing issues.

Tougouma’s project supports women refugees living in Ouangolodougou, an Ivory Coast city 18 miles from the border of Burkina Faso, a conflict-ridden country in recent years.

Millions of Burkinabè, mostly women and children, have been displaced within their country, and nearly 190,000 people have sought refuge in neighboring countries, according to the UN Refugee Agency. Tougouma’s own father, who owns a business selling agricultural inputs, had to relocate his farm due to the conflict.

Tougouma’s irrigation project seeks to support and empower Burkinabé women in Ouangolodougou as they deal with economic hardship and food insecurity. But, she says, “you cannot just build an irrigation system. You need to study the soil so that you implement the best system that works with the kind of culture they have and also the kind of crops they are willing to have in the future.”

Once installed, the system will provide the women of Ouangolodougou with access to water and the ability to more efficiently grow food, both as a means of subsistence and a source of revenue. “A system of irrigation provides the opportunity to those women to have constant activities going on instead of waiting for the rainy season,” says Tougouma.

Working remotely over the summer, Tougouma will guide her project partners in the region, including an agricultural engineer based in Burkina Faso who is leading the irrigation system build-out, scheduled to be completed by August. 

“My way to contribute to peace is through humanitarian action.”

Ultimately, Tougouma hopes her project creates a more resilient community. “My vision is just empowering the whole community and giving that financial autonomy to those women so that they can thrive, the family can thrive, the children can thrive.”

At �ֲ���ý, Tougouma, who is a double major in mathematics and economics, has learned to combine her analytical skills with her passion for community service and engagement. In Assistant Professor of Economics Kyle Coombs’ “Data Science for Economists” course, for example, Tougouma learned to apply her economical knowledge to a real-world community engagement project completed in conjunction with the city of Lewiston.

“�ֲ���ý gives you that opportunity to explore community services through your major,” Tougouma says. 

In 2023, through a United World College GoMakeADifference grant, Tougouma worked with an organization that employs internally-displaced women in Burkina Faso in soap-making jobs. In 2022, she co-led a project that provided displaced women and children with essential goods, mental health activities, and skills training, such as crocheting and soap-making.

“My way to contribute to peace is through humanitarian action.”

With a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace Award, Ramiro Davila ’25, a double major in economics and politics from Orlando, Fla., plans to support children’s access to education in Ecuador — with shoes.

This summer, Davila will work with a U.S.-based nonprofit, Because International, to distribute long-lasting, size-adjustable shoes to children — — in five villages throughout the province of Manabí, Ecuador.

He’ll also organize educational workshops for children and adults in the communities.

Handing someone a pair of shoes might seem like a very simple thing, Davila says, but in rural communities around the world, shoes help people get from place to place, like from home to school. Not having shoes “is obviously a barrier to education, however you want to look at it,” he says.

During his last year of high school, Davila delivered 100 pairs of The Shoe That Grows to the rural community of La Travesia. This time, he wants to provide a larger, longer-lasting impact, through workshops and activities for the children and adults in rural Ecuador.

Davila hopes to expand the efforts to Chile and Peru eventually, but for now his focus is on Ecuador.

“The inspiration for this initiative is deeply innate to who I am as an Ecuadorian-American,” Davila says. He was born in Ecuador, and lived there until his family moved to the U.S. when he was 8 years old. They return to Ecuador each summer, so he still feels connected to the community there.

Davila grew up a few minutes from the communities that he hopes to serve. “Even as a kid, I could see the grave issues and the structural problems present. And as I grew up and matured and I went back every summer, it became more apparent that I needed to do something, given the perspective and the opportunities that I’ve been fortunate enough to have been given.”

For the workshops, Davila wants to partner with the local schools to organize lessons and activities for the children, and for the parents, to emphasize the importance of education and health, and maybe some other skills, like personal finance.

“I feel like those are key skills that could go a long way to making a direct impact in the short term, but also complement those with the more traditional educational skills that these kids need.”

On an even broader level, the community engagement could help bring awareness to the broader issues of access to education in rural communities. In addition to giving the local news media opportunities to publicize the workshops, Davila hopes to engage with local government leaders.

“That’s my most direct way of bringing awareness to the issue,” he says. “I think the more attention that is given, the more potential there is for these issues to be fixed. And it’s not an easy task and it’s not a short term task, but there needs to be a starting point to it, and that’s basically what I’m trying to do.”

By helping students at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, a high school for orphaned and vulnerable youth in rural Rwanda, to think and speak about the society they want to see, “the project will contribute to cultivating Rwanda’s next generation of peace- and changemakers,” Whidden, a politics major, wrote in her grant proposal.

Twenty-five years after the genocide that devastated the country, one of Rwanda’s central development goals is to strengthen open dialogue and critical thinking, particularly among the country’s youth.

To that end, Whidden, a veteran of �ֲ���ý’ Brooks Quimby Debate Council, and staff in the Village’s career center will develop a debate curriculum, culminating in a weeklong camp. The curriculum will address the triple goals of critical thinking, public speaking, and English language learning.

“The goal of developing this curriculum is to give students the skills to think and question for themselves, rather than having some white Western individual coming in and trying to challenge certain ideas or status quos,” Whidden said in a recent interview. “It’s not for me to come in and question those things for them but to give them the tools to start asking those questions for themselves.”

Whidden, of New York City, first traveled to Rwanda during Short Term in 2015, as part of a documentary filmmaking course looking at post-genocide reconstruction, taught by Professor of French and Francophone Studies Alexandre Dauge-Roth. Back on campus, she completed a semester-long research project on post-conflict development in Rwanda.

With funding from the �ֲ���ý Purposeful Work internship program, she returned to the country in  summer 2017 as an intern for the Village. She worked in the school’s career center, taught an accelerated English course, and created a peer-mentoring program.

“I had a really incredible experience working there,” Whidden said. “I became really close with my students — especially with my debaters, who were remarkable — and I built a strong relationship with my supervisor and with the director of the Village.”

After her eight weeks at the Village this year, Whidden will move to Morocco on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award. In the meantime, she’s grateful for the chance to return to the school.

“It’s a complete privilege and remarkable opportunity to give back to and continue to work with an organization that was really formative in my personal and professional development,” she said.

Gift Pola Kiti ’18 received a 2017 Davis Projects for Peace grant for the establishment of a clinic in a Kenyan village near her home town of Mombasa.

“I am passionate about public health,” says Gift Pola Kiti ’18 of Mombasa, Kenya. It’s a passion that Kiti is putting into action back home this summer, thanks to a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant.

Kiti was awarded the grant to complete the establishment of Zawadi Healthcare Services, a health clinic in Kashani, an impoverished village of approximately 8,000 residents on the outskirts of Mombasa.

Kiti’s Projects for Peace award will finish the renovation of the clinic building and pay for equipment. The clinic will provide healthcare services, nutrition education, and family planning services.

“I was raised not so far from Kashani and I have relatives in the area, so it has always been home for me,” says Kiti, a chemistry major at �ֲ���ý. “I was actively involved with the community church in the area through singing in the church, teaching in Sunday school, and other volunteer activities.”

Kiti has seen friends experience unplanned pregnancies, and knows of members of her church who have died because they couldn’t obtain timely healthcare.

Across Kenya, about a third of the population lacks access to health care, and distance to healthcare facilities is a significant barrier to access. Residents of Kashani must walk at least three miles under the hot sun to catch a bus to the nearest health clinic, six miles away.

The absence of a healthcare facility in Kashani means that residents delay treatment until their health has deteriorated, Kiti says. The situation has led to high morbidity and mortality rates from preventable and easily treatable conditions. Kiti has seen friends experience unplanned pregnancies, and knows of members of her church who have died because they couldn’t obtain timely healthcare.

In summer 2016, Kiti conducted a health needs assessment of Kashani with a nurse and other health care workers. A local church donated a building for a clinic, and last October the Clinton Global Initiative University Innovation Fund provided a grant to begin renovations and the collection of supplies and equipment. Volunteer staffing commitments are also in hand.

The Projects for Peace grant will enable the completion of the care center, with the opening planned for the end of summer 2017.

“This community has provided support throughout my life and when I received a scholarship to study in the U.S., the community celebrated with me,” says Kiti, who brings a wealth of organizational, administrative, and business expertise to the project.

“My desire to achieve something meaningful for this community gave birth to Zawadi Healthcare Services.”

Bantu Mabaso ’18 will help teach farmers to deal with severe drought in her native Swaziland.

Miles Schelling ’16 will co-develop an afterschool program in music, art, and environmental studies for children in a remote Himalayan village.

Both will collaborate with local leaders to help build facilities, create teaching materials, and provide equipment and supplies to get their projects off the ground.

These are the initiatives that �ֲ���ý students will undertake during summer 2016 thanks to Davis Projects for Peace, a grant program whose winners receive $10,000 to carry out projects that help ameliorate root causes of conflict.

�ֲ���ý students have received grants every year since the late philanthropist Kathryn W. Davis launched the program in 2007 on the occasion of her 100th birthday.

“Peace isn’t simply the absence or cessation of violence,” says Darby Ray, director of �ֲ���ý’ Harward Center for Community Partnerships, which works closely with students applying for the program. “Peace is the achievement or enjoyment of communal flourishing, and that means the development of systems and habits of being that promote and enable such flourishing.

“These students’ projects are designed to develop exactly these things in collaboration with those whose lives and livelihoods are most at stake.”

In the first year of Projects for Peace, 10 �ֲ���ý students received a grant to assist a children’s home in a region of Rwanda hit especially hard by the 1994 genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Last year’s recipient, Patrick Tolosky ’15, used the grant to construct a health center with the people of the Q’eros nation, located in a remote region of the Peruvian Andes.

All told, 29 �ֲ���ý students (including this year’s recipients) have undertaken 13 Projects for Peace. Beneficiaries have included members of ethnic minorities in Myanmar, impoverished rural women in India, and people disabled by land mines in Afghanistan.

�ֲ���ý’ engagement with Projects for Peace illustrates the college’s commitment, as expressed in its mission statement, to “responsible stewardship of the wider world.” If much of the college’s community-engaged learning, which is facilitated by the Harward Center, takes place locally, “the opportunities and need for such work are global,” says Ray.

“The skills our students develop through community-engaged work here in Lewiston — things like self-awareness, cross-cultural communication, and collaborative problem-solving — are relevant to any context.”

The �ֲ���ý projects are two of 120 across the nation that have been funded for 2016. Projects for Peace is a program of the Davis United World College Scholars Program. Here’s more about the projects Mabaso and Schelling will launch this summer.

Bantu Mabaso ’18

Visiting her grandfather in rural Swaziland last summer, Bantu Mabaso ’18 was struck by a change at mealtimes: The family was eating less corn, a staple in that African country.

The cause was persistent drought, related to global climate change, that has drastically reduced food production in southern Africa.

This spring’s corn crop in Swaziland is projected to be nearly two-thirds smaller than the previous season’s — which was because of the extreme El Niño phenomenon of 2015–16.

Wanting to have a hand in addressing the food crisis, Mabaso recently received a Projects for Peace grant with which she’ll help a farming community in Swaziland’s agricultural Middleveld region cope with drought.

The $10,000 grant will enable Mabaso, a politics major from Mpaka, Swaziland, to advance drought-resistant agricultural practices and help relieve food shortages in Phalala, a community of 40 farmsteads. The long-term goal, Mabaso says, is both to ensure food security and self-sufficiency in Phalala and create a teaching model useful in other drought-stricken regions.

This summer, working with local leaders and rural development staff from Swaziland’s national government, Mabaso will oversee the building of an agricultural learning center, the development of a curriculum, and the creation of markets for such crops as jugo beans, cowpeas, squash, and sweet potatoes.

Largely given over to subsistence farming, Phalala until recent years received adequate rainfall for growing corn (known there, as in other countries, as maize). But now, after years of drought, rural communities like Phalala are at the brink of famine, Mabaso says. Two-thirds of Swaziland’s rural population depends on food assistance.

“This is where you come face to face with the agricultural aspect of Swaziland,” Mabaso says, “and with the drought going on, you can like really see the effects that it’s having.”

Mabaso grew up in the Lowveld, a historically arid region where drought-resistant agriculture is well-established. “That’s how we were able to feed ourselves,” she says. And she realized the potential benefits of sharing that know-how with longtime maize farmers in the Middleveld.

How will Mabaso’s project serve to “prepare for peace” — that is, address the intention of program founder Kathryn Davis?

Advancing social justice and human dignity is essential to ensuring peace and stability, says Mabaso, who is deeply dedicated to community empowerment. The drought disproportionately affects Swaziland’s rural population, as opposed to urban dwellers — threatening the agrarian way of life and impacting residents’ dignity, in addition to posing the immediate threat of famine.

Her project aims to help correct this social injustice by restoring the livelihoods of farming households in Phalala. “Building resilient communities and bringing people together is something that I’m really passionate about,” she says.

“It’s important to me that communities be able to determine their own development trajectories without the top-down development model. This is a good example of a bottom-up model, of things coming from the people.”

The grant will pay for building materials for the learning center, as well as seeds and farm and irrigation equipment. Young people from Phalala will attend three weeks of training in drought-resistant farming.

Mabaso says, “My role is making sure that the partnerships that we have are being maintained, and just being there to make sure that the project is going.” With generating income for participants as an objective, she’ll also help them develop business practices and market their produce.

Miles Schelling ’16

Miles Schelling spent time in India during summer 2015 to study, teach, and absorb the distinctive culture of that nation’s classical music.

With a Project for Peace award, Schelling will return back to India this summer — this time to create lesson plans for music, as well as visual art and environmental concepts, for children in a remote Himalayan village.

Hailing from Putney, Vt., Schelling plays sitar, as well as jazz bass.

Last summer, supported by a Phillips Fellowship from �ֲ���ý, Schelling studied music in Delhi with two prominent musicians, sitarist Shubhendra Rao, who studied with Ravi Shankar; and Saskia Rao-de Haas, who has adapted the cello to Indian music.

The Raos enrolled Schelling in a teacher-training program under the auspices of their Shubhendra and Saskia Rao Foundation, whose stated mission is “to make music every child’s birthright.”

In that 2015 program, Schelling studied the creation of curricula for teaching young children fundamentals of music and visual art within an Indian context. The Indian visit was capped with a week in the high Himalayan village of Dunagiri, working with the children of that rural community.

The owner of a yoga and meditation center in the village, Piyush Kumar, who opens the grounds of his establishment to local children as a playground, offered to provide land for an arts education facility there.

Hence Schelling’s Project for Peace this summer to launch an after-school, hands-on educational program and collaborate with local teachers to create lesson materials for children aged 6–16, and will spearhead the construction of a simple learning center for storing materials and holding classes in inclement weather.

Schelling points out that the lessons will supplement, not overlap, the village’s public education curriculum, and emphasize creative self-expression and collaborative problem-solving skills that, ideally, will promote peace.

In the interests of making the program sustainable, the lessons will be recorded on index cards that will be laminated for repeated use. Structured in two-week segments, the lessons will be adaptable for pupils of diverse ages and abilities.

In addition to covering travel, the $10,000 Projects for Peace grant will pay for construction of the arts center and the purchase of musical instruments and art supplies.

Patrick Tolosky ’15, a Spanish major and premed student from Longmeadow, Mass., was awarded a Davis Projects for Peace grant to build a health center in Peru. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

A Spanish major at �ֲ���ý College, Patrick Tolosky ’15 of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, has been awarded a Davis Projects for Peace grant to construct a health center with the people of the Q’eros nation, located in a remote region of the Peruvian Andes.

Now in its ninth year, Projects for Peace provides $10,000 grants to aspiring undergraduates attending member institutions of the Davis United World College Scholar Program. These students propose sustainable projects around the world that promote peace and address the root causes of conflict.

Tolosky will work collaboratively with the Q’eros people, one of the few remaining Inca communities in Peru, to build a health center focused on preventive care. This “Hampi Wasi,” or home of healing, will serve as a base for both visiting healthcare professionals and practitioners of the botanically based traditional medicine of the Q’eros.

“This work cannot wait, because this community should no longer have to abandon a newborn to curable dehydration or watch preventable infection take a limb or a life,” Tolosky says.

“I’ll be excited to hit the ground running and get started quickly upon arriving in Peru in mid-June. It will be rewarding to see what true collaboration can accomplish.”

Tolosky, who aspires to a career in public health and medicine, is the president of the pre-med club at �ֲ���ý and co-president of the college’s Public Health Initiative. He has tutored children at the Lewiston Public Library and has volunteered widely on and off campus.

He also received a 2015-16 Fulbright Teaching Assistantship for Spain, one of 18 current or former �ֲ���ý students to receive Fulbright fellowships this year. He will work in Peru during the summer and head for Spain in September.

Hannah Rae Porst ’11.

Tolosky’s Project for Peace extends the work of Hannah Porst, who graduated from �ֲ���ý and received a Project for Peace grant in 2011. With her Davis grant, Porst built the first Q’eros school, in the village of Ch’allmachimpana.

That project, Tolosky explains, spawned Willka Yachay, a nonprofit that continues to help the community thrive. In a collaborative effort since 2012, Willka Yachay and the Q’eros people have constructed three additional school buildings that serve children and adults. They have also undertaken other projects for this community whose 14 villages comprise about 2,000 people.

Porst and Tolosky were initially put in contact by a common adviser, professor Claudia Aburto Guzmán of the �ֲ���ý Spanish department. Porst and Tolosky then met last summer at a children’s home in Urubamba, Peru, where Tolosky helped build a sustainable greenhouse after studying in Lima. They have collaborated closely since then. It was Tolosky’s third visit to South America.

Tolosky was moved to launch his project when Porst told him about the lack of healthcare among the Q’eros — and about one of the consequences of that lack, the child mortality rate. “The World Bank database cites Peru’s child mortality at 2 percent, while in Q’eros it is around 40 to 50 percent. When Hannah told me that, I simply couldn’t comprehend it.”

The Hampi Wasi will provide education in preventative medicine and serve as a base of operations for visiting healthcare professionals. Combining traditional and modern practices, volunteers will teach nutrition, sanitation, prevention of hypothermia and other preventative measures.

But it will also support the traditional medical practices of the Q’eros, serving as a repository for documentation of those practices, which are now passed down orally. Part of the tradition is lost every time one of its practitioners dies, as was evidenced by a recent unexpected death of a highly skilled “curandero” or healer.

“The intention is not to establish Western medical care as the dominant force, but rather to supplement the traditional practices of the Q’eros people when it’s beneficial,” says Tolosky.

“This will be a great example of different types of medicine working together toward a common goal.”

Tolosky, whose summertime work in a Massachusetts emergency department has opened his eyes to the effects of both poverty and preventative care on overall health, sees healthcare as the key to a peaceful and sustainable future for the Q’eros community.

He adds, “I think a beautiful part of this world is how many different cultures there are, and how each has something to offer the others. I’m excited to learn from the Q’eros people and walk away with a broadened perspective about what it means to be human.”

Devin Tatro ’14 of Haverhill, Mass., is the co-recipient of a Davis Project for Peace grant. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Two �ֲ���ý seniors have received a national award that will launch an initiative in Rwanda to support children of incarcerated people.

A 2014 Davis Project for Peace award has gone to Simone Schriger of Los Angeles and Devin Tatro of Haverhill, Mass., who, after graduating from �ֲ���ý, will spend this summer in Rwanda developing a program to foster resiliency and community among people whose parents have been imprisoned for reasons including their involvement in the 1994 genocide.

Simone Schriger ’14 of Los Angeles. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Established in 2007 by the late Kathryn Wasserman Davis, the Project for Peace program provides $10,000 apiece to initiatives promoting peace and addressing root causes of conflict. Learn more at .

Titled Restoration, Reconciliation and Rehabilitation: Empowering CIPs, Schriger and Tatro’s project will explore how children of incarcerated parents (CIPs) can develop coping skills conducive to their mental health.

The pair will establish the program with the Rwandan branch of Prison Fellowship International. They are basing their project on activities proven in U.S. CIP-advocacy programs, which they will adapt for Rwanda’s unique circumstances.

Imprisonment is a salient social and political issue in Rwanda, which ranks seventh worldwide for imprisoned population, according to Tatro and Schriger. Twenty years after the 1994 genocide, in which Hutu extremists massacred as many as a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu, the nation is still working toward recovery — a situation presenting a unique context for more universal concerns about children of prisoners.

With some 120,000 individuals accused of genocidal crimes, Rwanda found distinctive ways — such as the “gacaca” courts adapted from tribal practices — to exercise justice in the years after the massacre.

“Achieving a peaceful society demands successful criminal reconciliation: healing broken relationships, repairing the damage done by crime and restoring an imprisoned offender to an integrated and productive member of society upon release,” Tatro and Schriger write in their Davis proposal.

Yet, they note, the children of prisoners have typically been neglected in the two decades of national healing.

“Rwandan CIPs are a critical missing link in national reunification and vital to the peace-seeking process.”

Schriger and Tatro bring complementary interests and skills to the project. Tatro, who has studied in Rwanda, is an honors anthropology major whose experience with field work will inform the pair’s research.

“Working with children of incarcerated parents as a demographic is something I’ve been interested in doing,” she says. “It’s a demographic that people don’t necessarily know how to help or deal with.

“A lot of these children go under the radar — it’s like losing a parent, but also involves shame and confusion. We will look into how this ties into their identity.”

An honors psychology major, Schriger is interested in the practice of restorative justice, a theme in Rwandan reconciliation and recovery efforts since the genocide. She believes that restorative justice methods are the key to an empowered community.

Restorative justice prioritizes the personal needs of the victim and the community over the abstract needs of the state. It fosters dialogue among the parties with the intent of redressing the victims’ grievances and rehabilitating the offender.

“It is based on the belief that justice has to be achieved through a process of reconciliation and conversation, rather than just banishing someone to a cell,” Schriger says.

The pair hope to bring that concept into the breach between imprisoned parents and their children, who are typically separated by barriers not only physical but emotional and social.

“We want to put children in contact with their parents,” says Schriger. “We want them to understand that their parents are real people — and that not everything has to be perfect, but that they can have working relationships.”

Tatro points out that her and Schriger’s project reflects a growing worldwide concern about the well-being of CIPs. “A lot of our work in designing this project was looking at programs in this country that address children with incarcerated parents — programs that are growing in number and influence.”

The project will be undertaken in partnership with Prison Fellowship Rwanda, a nonprofit related to Prison Fellowship International, an NGO that employs restorative justice techniques to aid prisoners, ex-prisoners, victims and their families.

Along with interventions by expert counselors, Tatro and Schriger will empower CIPs with resources for emotional catharsis and self-understanding, such as journaling, support groups and letter writing to imprisoned parents.

Drawing on Tatro’s anthropology training, the pair will also document the narratives of the children, “beginning to capture and interpret their unique position, and what it means for peacemaking, in a post-genocidal culture,” they write.

Tatro visited Rwanda in the fall of 2012 where she got hands-on experience in conflict resolution at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Rwanda Development Board.

She also conducted research in Uganda for her honors thesis in anthropology, which looks at the efforts of the Sebei people to market their ethnic and cultural heritage to tourists and international aid organizations.

Schriger, who received a prestigious Watson Fellowship this spring, worked with CIPs at a program for impoverished children in Los Angeles. She spent winter 2012 in Chile, where, in addition to studying at a local university, she conducted research for her honors thesis about perceptions of dating violence in that country.

Davis Project for Peace recipients Spencer Collet ’13 and James LePage ’13. Photograph by Michael Bradley/�ֲ���ý College.

Initiatives to foster Israeli-Palestinian dialogue through the Web and nurture collaborative conversations in a recently liberalized Myanmar have garnered Davis Projects for Peace awards for three �ֲ���ý students.

The $10,000 awards support international projects that college students undertake to “bring new thinking to the prospects of peace in the world,” in the words of philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis. .

Two seniors, Spencer Collet of Leawood, Kan., and James LePage of Cumberland, Maine, received the award for “Tweets for Peace,” their project using the Internet to enhance communication between Israeli and Palestinian youth. The pair will work with former participants in the Seeds of Peace conflict resolution program that takes place every summer in Otisfield, Maine.

2013 Davis Project for Peace recipient Aung Myint ’14. Photograph by Michael Bradley/�ֲ���ý College.

Aung Myint, a junior from Yangon, Myanmar, received his award for “Minorities, Monasteries, and Conversations,” a reading-discussion program to help build the capacity for critical judgment and constructive dialogue among ethnic minorities in his native country. Using Burmese translations of English texts from the Maryland-based , Myint will coordinate gatherings in Buddhist monasteries in Yangon.

Learn more about the �ֲ���ý students’ Projects for Peace:

• Tweets for Peace
• Minorities, Monasteries, and Conversations

First-year students Natacha Danon, left, and Olivia Krishnaswami are sharing a Davis Projects for Peace grant for a project in India. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

Two first-year students from the Seattle area have received a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant to stimulate economic development and support a rural education initiative in a community in India.

The project devised by Olivia Krishnaswami and Natacha Danon will support humanitarian efforts in the district of Kanchipuram, in the state of Tamil Nadu, by marketing to U.S. customers silk scarves made by local women.

The initiative is one of 100 initiatives supported this year by the program. At age 104, founder and philanthropist Kathryn W. Davis funds the program to encourage college students to undertake innovative, meaningful projects that promote peace in the world.

Krishnaswami and Danon are partnering with the , which supports marginalized people in nearly 200 rural villages in Kanchipuram. RIDE provides “bridge schools” to help move children from labor into education, self-help groups for women and training for entrepreneurial and vocational success, and it also monitors compliance with child labor regulations.

“The people in RIDE have this vision of the community as something stronger than what it is now and they are working to get there,” says Krishnaswami.

How will her and Danon’s project advance the cause of peace? In the most basic sense, peace is the absence of violence, explains Krishnaswami.

“But there’s this greater idea of peace meaning that people in a society are getting what they need — food, water, education. And with this broader sense of peace comes stability, and less likelihood that a community will fall prey to violence.”

Kanchipuram is known for its specialty silk saris, the women’s garments that consist of a single strip of cloth that is wrapped and draped around the body. Many women manufacture the saris at home.

But the sari industry is linked with perpetuating disproportionate levels of poverty for women and children, especially for those from traditionally lower castes. Because gender bias discourages women from working outside the home, factories often look to children as a labor force, keeping them from getting an education and locking them into a future of poorly paying work.

“Exclusion of women from the workforce has led to the rise of child labor as an alternative to boosting family income,” the �ֲ���ý students explain in their Projects for Peace proposal. “With children working rather than attending school, human capital levels stagnate.

“The development of human capital is crucial for a community to uplift itself out of poverty and social inequality.”

The Projects for Peace grant will enable Krishnaswami and Danon to employ RIDE self-help groups to create scarves in the styles of the saris that they already produce. They will market the scarves in the United States, dividing proceeds equally among business expenses (including payment to the scarf makers), product and market development, and funds for RIDE programs.

To distribute the scarves, Krishnaswami and Danon will recruit sales representatives on college and high school campuses, hold benefit concerts and branch out to the retail sector through local businesses in Seattle and Maine — including the restaurant Mother India in Lewiston.

They estimate the project will initially employ more than 100 women and generate $3,300 for RIDE. The short-term goal is to sell 500 scarves by the end of summer 2012, but the project is designed to become sustainable over time.

Overall the project will create employment opportunities for women, utilize preexisting skills in an environmentally conscious way and support the programs of RIDE through funds and awareness.

The project originated with Krishnaswami, who implemented a program to sell canvas bags for RIDE in high school. “I’ve had this dream for a long time. I got so passionate about the idea of it.

“I had the idea that maybe it could grow, but I didn’t know how to do that. So getting this grant has really kick-started it for me.”

Krishnaswami is a double major in politics and women and gender studies. Danon expects to major in politics or anthropology.

During a community dinner on the eve of her departure from the remote Peruvian community of Ch’allmachimpana, Hannah Porst asked residents of this mountain village how she could thank them for their hospitality.

There was some initial talk about providing soccer shoes — but what we really need, they told her, is a school.

“I can’t make any promises,” Porst, then a �ֲ���ý College junior studying abroad, replied during that April 2010 dinner. “This is a huge undertaking.”

But Porst, of Madison, Wis., couldn’t let it go. And upon her return to the U.S., she explored the idea with advisers including family and, at �ֲ���ý, William Hiss, executive director for international advancement. Hiss suggested she apply for a Davis Projects for Peace award.

Now Porst has received a $10,000 Projects for Peace grant — covering a third of the cost of her initiative and making it possible for the school to be built this summer.

Founded by philanthropist Kathryn W. Davis in 2007 on the occasion of her 100th birthday, Projects for Peace awards support initiatives worldwide that focus on conflict resolution, reconciliation, building understanding and breaking down barriers that cause conflict. The recipients have included �ֲ���ý students each year since the program’s inception.

The 25-student primary school in Ch’allmachimpana will serve the cause of peace, Porst explains, by providing an education that will make young people less vulnerable to exploitation if they leave their village for mainstream society. “We’re making available aspects of modernity that lead to an improved quality of life,” she says, “while helping the children retain roots in the traditional world.”

Learn more about the school: www.challmaschool.org/

Ch’allmachimpana is a village in Q’eros, a region whose people are recognized as a “national living patrimony” because of the continuity of their ancient indigenous traditions. They are subsistence llama and alpaca herders, potato farmers and weavers living without dependable water supplies or electricity.

Modernity is encroaching on this ancient way of life as roads open the region to the rest of the world, and as young people leave for the city. As Porst explains, “There’s just a tough life in Cuzco” — the nearest major city — “for a lot of kids who go there.”

About the award, Porst says she feels “so honored and so happy for the people of Ch’allmachimpana that everything is coming together,” she says. “It’s unbelievable that this process started less than a year ago and it’s already a reality.”

In fact, classes are already in session in temporary quarters in the village. With residents having a decisive role in the curriculum, the school will teach the children to read and write in both Quechua, their native tongue, and Spanish, preparing them to interact with the modern world while sustaining their traditions.

The school will ultimately serve as a village center for education, nutrition, health care and economic opportunity.

The permanent school will be built during the summer. Its total cost includes $7,500 for building materials for the school building itself, $600 for a photovoltaic solar panel and $200 for a greenhouse.

Another part of the project, still without a price tag, is a water purification system: Water-borne parasites are a leading contributor to the local 47 percent mortality rate among children aged 5 and under.

Porst has raised $17,000 for the project, including the Projects for Peace award. The Mountain Fund, an NGO, is serving as a conduit for donations.

Porst graduates from �ֲ���ý in May as , and will spend the following year in Peru, much of the time in Ch’allmachimpana. She first learned of the village from a documentary film made by one of her advisers during her semester in Peru.

“Immediately after I saw the documentary I said, ‘I want to go there,’ ” Porst says.”I was so touched by the people that I met onscreen.”

Students from more than 90 campuses will receive Projects for Peace grants totaling more than $1 million in summer 2011 for projects in all regions of the world — projects that focus on conflict resolution, reconciliation, building understanding and breaking down barriers that cause conflict.

A complete list of the participating schools and projects, as well as a summary of all previous projects and a video interview with Davis from 2006, is available on the .