2012-2013 German Fulbright Schuman student Robert Lepenies is currently home in Berlin before he starts a Post-Doc at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy this fall after his wonderful year at Yale University. He recently wrote to the Fulbright Commission in Belgium about a project he submitted to the U.S. Department of State’s Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund, which supports alumni initiatives that promote shared values and innovative solutions to global challenges. The competition provides small grants to teams of past and current participants of U.S. government-funded exchange programs to carry out public service projects that utilize skills and knowledge they have gained through their exchange experiences:
“I truly had the most productive and inspiring time in the U.S. and I am tremendously grateful for your support.
My time in the U.S. has already made a major impact on my career and projects: Together with a group of German academics at Yale, I have founded the German chapter of ASAP (Academics Stand Against Poverty Germany). I wanted to ask whether it would be possible for you to relay a call for support to a project for which we are currently applying for funding in the annual global Alumni Exchange Innovation Fund competition run by the State Department (https://alumni.state.gov/aeif/). We are a team of Fulbright and Fulbright-Schuman alumni who have partnered up with ASAP for this project.
I attach the call below.
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Call for Support & Your Vote
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Dear Friends,
As part of an application for funding from the 2013 State Department’s Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund (AEIF), we kindly ask you for your support of a project that we submitted for the annual AEIF competition. We are an international team of Fulbright alumni, proposing a truly global project that should be administered in Berlin.
The Global Colleagues Program (GCP) which we propose would develop partnerships between poverty scholars from the Global North and South, in order to promote high quality collaborative research on poverty and to connect promising young scholars from the Global South with opportunities and resources that would otherwise be inaccessible. Over the course of the year-long program, scholar pairs will launch a poverty research project and compete to win funding to travel to a Berlin conference and to conduct a workshop in the home country of the colleague from the Global South. Program outcomes will include a collection of papers by colleague pairs, titled Global Colleagues, five workshops in the Global South, and a conference on North-South collaboration in poverty research in Berlin. We have already partnered up with Yale-based organisation Academics Stand Against Poverty to make this possible.
We just learned that our project was short-listed for the final round in this global competition: now we need support from YOU.
It takes 1 minute to help us out: Check out our proposal here: https://alumni.state.gov/node/3353 with your alumni account and click on “like”. We are very grateful for your support and look forward to your suggestions.
Kind regards,
Robert Lepenies
PhD candidate Hertie School of Governance, Berlin
Fulbright Schuman Scholar 2012/13 at the Global Justice Program,Yale University
Co-founder of Academics Stand Against Poverty Germany (international site: academicsstand.org)
The Fulbright Commission will post the outcome of the competition when it becomes available.
For more information on the Fulbright Schuman Program, visit www.fulbrightschuman.eu.