MiddBrief - Students awarded $10,000 peace grant

Dristy Shrestha ’11 and Wyatt Orme ’12, along with Olivia Grugan ’12, have each been awarded $10,000 in funding from the Davis Projects for Peace initiative for projects to be completed in Guatemala and Nepal this summer.

Orme and Grugan will build a public library in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Their project, entitled “Unveiling Reality — A Library and Oral History Project in Guatemala,” seeks to inspire youth to investigate past violent events in order to encourage a better understanding of the country’s current volatility. The library will be located in a school where Grugan worked in 2008. Grugan and Orme hope to use their relationships with Guatemalans in order to gather an enthusiastic response to the project.

Dristy Shrestha ’11, for a project titled “Scouts to Promote Peace and Unity in Nepal,” will travel to Nepal to organize a camping event for more than 500 youth of different castes and ethnicities. Shrestha will work with Nepal Scouts, a national organization that organizes activities for Nepali youth 12 to 16 years old. She hopes the event will promote peace and unity by allowing youth to form friendships outside of their social and ethnic classes. Shrestha herself is from Nepal and an alum of the program.

Of the 25 projects submitted by College students, two were granted funding from Projects for Peace. The office of President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz will fund an additional project by Mahnaz Rezaie ’13 to build well-pumps in an Afghan community. Rezaie’s project, titled “Hand Well-pumps for Karte Amin 2nd, Herat, Afghanistan” will bring easier access to drinking water for a community of around 1,800 near the border with Iran.

Through the Davis Projects for Peace initiative, students from colleges and universities in the Davis United World College Scholars Program will receive a collective $1 million in funding during the summer of 2010 for self-designed grassroots projects in all regions of the world.

The philanthropist Kathryn W. Davis began the initiative in 2007 on the anniversary of her 100th birthday in order to encourage university students to launch their plans for building world peace.