Project proposal applications should be submitted to the Lisle office by July 15th, 2011. Key required elements contained in the application include:
Lisle Board members will provide consultation in the developing of proposals to fulfill this funding opportunity. Please feel free to call, write, or email for further details or help.
The grant committee reviewed six proposals for Global Seed Grant funding this year. Each year we get a variety of proposals and have hard decisions to make. Many of the proposals describe very needy and deserving projects and amazing staff and volunteers doing fantastic work on extremely small budgets. The work of the review committee is not easy but it is rewarding when we see that we can make a difference even with our limited funds.
The job of the committee is to evaluate each proposal and assign points for various factors, coming up with a final score for each proposal that is then used to rank them. The process and the criteria we use are described on the Lisle Web site.The ranked proposals are then presented to the Lisle Board where the final decision is made on funding. This year, the Board's decision was to fund three of the proposals as submitted. The two lowest-ranking proposals were seen to be lacking in sufficient detail or out of the scope of our mission. Those proposals are being returned to the submitter with comments and an invitation to resubmit a revised proposal in the next funding cycle.
In our eighth year of the grant program, Lisle chose to support four projects. The four proposals selected for funding are great examples of how the work of Lisle continues in the new era of Seed Fund Grants. These projects are described below.Friends of African Village Libraries (FAVL) has held summer reading camps in many of the 13 rural villages in Burkina Faso and Ghana where FAVL has established a community library. The camps provide elementary school students with individual reading assistance and an opportunity to engage in lot of reading and writing activities, in a fun environment with games and activities. FAVL’s goal is to foster and enable a reading culture in these villages that are among the poorest in the world, with very low rates of literacy (less than 25% for adults). In school, teachers rely on rote learning and have classes that range from 65 to 90 pupils.
Each summer camp has approximately 20 students, two student assistants who went to camp the previous summer, and four adult camp counselors. Counselors make use of a carefully selected stock of books common to each library, mostly by African authors focusing on themes relevant to village life. Counselors work one-on-one with students to help them improve their reading. Children are encouraged to read to their younger siblings, and prior camp goers are invited back to serve as counselors and act as reading mentors for their village. FAVL also provides breakfast, lunch, and a camp T-shirt.The camps involve children from different villages as well as people from outside Burkina Faso. They foster vibrant interaction within the community, within rural neighborhoods, and with outsiders as well. The camps are also the only organized activity for children in the summer and help prevent any backward slide between grades. Based on reading tests prior to and a few months after the summer camps, campers have shown significant gains in their reading abilities. Children create stories and plays during the camp, some of which FAVL will make into books that will be printed in small numbers and stocked in the libraries for the camps next year. These books will be in French and Dioula, the local language.
Peace Corps volunteers and study abroad students from Santa Clara University's Reading West Africa program will participate in the camps and work afterwards to make the books. FAVL recently held a workshop for 10 Peace Corps volunteers in Burkina Faso, training them to participate in summer reading camps in July 2011. Two Santa Clara Unviersity students will participate in reading camps in Ghana in August 2011. The infusion of young people from the United States with their own summer camp experiences is invaluable for the African staff at FAVL who did not go to summer camps as children. The exchange between the children and the U.S. volunteers is also important, with the volunteers acting as emissaries from the world at large. In exchange, past volunteers say, they gained an understanding of what it is like to live in a poor African village and come away committed to working for change. With Lisle's funding, FAVL will be able to hold five one-week camps, changing the lives of 100 village children and their U.S. mentors.The project director is Michael Kevane and the mentor is Smita Patel.
Cambodia is still suffering from three decades of violence, including a genocide (1975 - 1979) that targeted educated people. Today 45% of the children are malnourished and only 6% complete high school. Rural parents, who are subsistence farmers, cannot afford to keep their children to school. Three-quarters of the children who start school drop out between third and sixth grades.
The greatest wish for children in Cambodia is to go to school. Our sponsorship program helps students who are doing well in school but face extreme hardships. Most do not have enough food to eat. These children have little hope for escaping poverty. Most of our sponsored students are girls because they are more disadvantaged.Statistics show that the most effective method for ending poverty is education of girls. Seven years ago we started sponsoring girls education, at 7th grade and above. Our students come from remote areas in eight provinces. Some are ethnic Khmer/Buddhist (96% of the population) and others are from ethnic minority groups including Kui and Por. Most of the ethnic minority students are the first in their village to go to university.
Two schools in the US have sponsored students in Cambodia. These schools have Caucasian and Hispanic students who come from a variety of economic backgrounds. One out of three children in our county eats from an emergency food box each month. We are planning a teleconference, so the students can meet each other. Additionally, a group of university students from the US will be meeting our university students in Cambodia next year. We stay in touch with our university graduates.Our students have sponsors in the US who cover the cost of high school. Each year the students and their sponsors exchange letters and photos. Friendship with Cambodia leads educational trips to Cambodia. Trip participants meet with the sponsored students and have small group discussions.
Our students are now graduating from 12th grade and all want to go to university. They want to help improve life for other Cambodians. Our university students include a nurse midwife, teachers, an environmental lawyer, IT majors, and NGO workers. The cost of university is $1500 per year compared to $360 for high school. The Lisle grant will provide general support to this program.The project director is Bhavia Wagner and the Lisle Mentor is Dianne Brause.
Lubuto Library Project brings together people from diverse backgrounds to work collectively to create opportunities for the most vulnerable. The approach is cooperative and democratic, and involves extensive engagement with local communities, at every stage of the process to ensure relevance and appropriateness. Program decisions are taken collectively, to reflect local needs. The programs offered by Lubuto Libraries enhance and preserve traditional cultures and stories and also provide an educational experience which creates a sense of self-worth among children, whilst improving literacy, communication skills, discover greater tolerance for different ideas, and gain greater respect for all life. Lubuto Libraries improve educational outcomes and thus contribute to poverty reduction.
Lubuto Library Project is seeking funding for staff training at the second Lubuto Library in Lusaka, Zambia. Zambia-s Ministry of Education is committed to providing incentive pay for teachers to staff the library, and to receive in-service training by a long-term volunteer professional librarian/trainer, to be provided by VSO. Lubuto Library Project (LLP) has already worked with VSO to identify a qualified professional librarian/trainer who will lead this capacity building at the library. Although the position is voluntary, LLP is required to part-fund the costs associated with the position, and we are seeking funding from Lisle to help with these costs.The overall objective of the VSO volunteer is to improve the efficacy of the library, its systems and services and strengthen outreach and the library’s prominence in the community. To achieve this goal the VSO will train library staff to, 1) Manage library collection and services, 2) Develop and implement library programming, 3) Work with outreach staff to encourage street children and youth and other OVC to come to the library, with a particular goal of achieving gender equity in library use and program participation, and 4) Develop a library operational manual
The focus population is children and youth ages 4 to 18 (primarily), especially targeting street children, orphans and other vulnerable and out-of-school children and youth. The library also serves large numbers of children who do attend government and community schools in the area. The Ngwerere Lubuto Library had over 7,000 visits in its first month, with outreach to street children resulting in high participation in the new library’s Lubuto Drama program. The library will reach many thousands of vulnerable children and youth in future. In addition the project aims to build local capacity of the library staff in library management and delivery of educational services.The project director is Jane Kinney Meyers and the Lisle mentor is Smita Patel.
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The Unitarian Union of Northeast India Education Committee runs schools as part of its social justice programme furthering the pioneering work of Babu Hajom Kissor Singh, the founder of Unitarianism in Khasi, Jaintia and Karbi Anglong. The Education Committee of the Unitarian Union of Northeast India is a standing committee to oversee the smooth functioning of all Unitarian schools in the region. It gives trainings and thereby increases self-knowledge of teachers and enhancing the quality teaching learning in the schools.
As mentioned above giving training to teachers is the most important responsibility of the Education Committee. Meghalaya being the Earthquake prone areas and considering even the potentially frequent work-related mining accidents that occur in Meghalaya, it is the desire of the Education Committee to sensitize and prepare the teachers and the students in disaster management for the safety of the general public. It is also proposed to involve all sections of the society irrespective of cultures, religions and communities in youth training to enable the community to take responsibilities in the planning and carrying out the strategies for disaster management on joint and cooperative project of working together for the development of the community. The Committee proposes to conduct a Two Day Emergency Preparedness Youth Training for Villages in Meghalaya India. The project has three purposes, 1) to empower youth in Meghalaya to become powerful spokespersons for youth and community needs and interests, 2) to expand the work of the Mountain Children’s Forum (a grassroots Indian organization) from North India into Meghalaya, Northeast India to empower the future community leaders to take responsible roles in planning and carrying out strategies for community development, and, 3) to promote inter-tribal and cross-community sharing of ideas and planning strategies among youth from several districts of rural mountain India.The Project activities will consist of 1 day of youth instruction, 1 day of teacher/leader training, and 12 months of follow-up. It is proposed to have a focused group of 32 school children (2 boys + 2 girls from each of 4 city schools with different cultures and religion and communities studying in these schools; 3 boys + 3 girls from each of 2 rural schools), ages 12-17; 30 adult leaders (comprised of 15 young teachers from Khasi Hills, 10 from Jaintia Hills, 3 from Ri Bhoi districts and 2 from Karbi Anglong, Assam.
It is also proposed that follow up activities will include their teachers reporting on their activities in the classes. It is also proposed to have an exchange programme with the MCF in Uttarakhand to learn more of the activities of the Mountain Childrens Forum and to enrich their experiences through visiting other ethnic groups.The project director is Cream Lemon Nongbri and the mentor is Mark Kinney.
We will keep you informed of the progress of these funded projects. If you have any questions or want more detailed information about the organizations or their work, please contact Mark Kinney at mark.kinney@utoledo.edu.
