Irene Kucherova (2010)

Irene will spend nine months working with the 240 children ages 6-16 years old of Orphanage 1 in Kherson, Southern Ukraine. As wards of the state, these children live their lives in relative isolation from the wider community and are quite marginalized socially. Through outreach programs to the local community and university, Irene intends to involve community members and university students as tutors, mentors, and inspirational figures for the children through participation in structured enrichment programs. She also plans to broaden the children’s life experiences by taking them to local […]

Isaac Miller (2010)

Detroit has become the poster child for the impact of both deindustrialization and economic collapse on America’s inner cities. However, in the face of overwhelming problems, there is a growing movement to rebuild and re-imagine Detroit. Increasingly, Detroit is being seen not just as a place of despair, but as a source of inspiration in imagining new possibilities for cities in the twenty first century. Isaac’s project will use workshops on poetry, community organizing, and participatory urban planning to empower Detroit youth as leaders in confronting the city’s crisis and […]

Jacob Seigel-Boettner (2010)

For many in America, the bicycle commute is a lifestyle choice. For the other 99% of the world, each pedal stroke is progress out of poverty, toward an education, and over the mountains of social and cultural discrimination. With My Own Two Wheels, a feature- length documentary, will link together the stories of individuals who have been empowered by the bicycle. With the help of six bicycle development projects, With My Own Two Wheels will tell the stories of individuals from Belgium, Rwanda, Zambia, Ghana, India, Guatemala, and the United […]

Ryan Bosworth (2010)

Ryan’s project is a community-building program designed to produce detailed, open-source street-level maps of three unmapped temporary relocation areas (TRAs) in Delft, Cape Town, South Africa; home to an estimated one hundred thousand displaced residents. Ryan’s work in Cape Town involves local community-based organizations, township residents, IkamvaYouth students (www.ikamvayouth.org), OpenStreetMap (OSM) volunteers, and students and faculty from the University of Cape Town in a participatory mapping project. The three main objectives of project are to (1) develop community support networks for recently displaced residents, (2) to strengthen the capacity of […]