Join the students from the Spring Break Cuba trip and hear their presentations on their experiences in this fascinating country! Public welcome.
Wednesday, April 30 in the DLC.
MPA
Team El Salvador Leadership Applications – Still time to apply! –
– Application deadline EXTENDED to April 29 –
Team El Salvador Practicum 2014-2015 Call for Leadership Applications
Team El Salvador (TES) is seeking three student leaders to lead the Team El Salvador 9 Practicum during its 2014-2015 program year.
Do you want to gain skills in leadership? International Development? Environmental policy and natural resource management? Survey creation? Improving your Spanish proficiency and communication?
TES leadership is open to all MIIS students, from all departments and fields of study!
How to apply? Please send resume and cover letter to: teamelsalvadormiis@gmail.com by Tuesday, April 29th. Visit us at: http://blogs.miis.edu/teamelsalvador
Team El Salvador provides a unique, professional opportunity for MIIS students to develop and apply practical skills and enhance language proficiency and multicultural competency in a dynamic international setting.
Team leaders will cultivate a variety of professional skills while gaining real world experience. The ideal candidate has a passion for international development, strong leadership skills, and a willingness to facilitate and manage a variety of program elements, including communication and outreach, program development, fundraising, updating and developing website content and social media sites, event scheduling and management, meeting planning and travel logistics and community engagement.
Ideal Candidates will:
• Speak, write and read Spanish at a 400 level
• Understand the mission and goals of Team El Salvador and
El Salvadoran history and culture
• Have strong communication and organizational skills
• Have experience living and working in rural communities of Latin America (or other developing
countries)
• Have a lucid understanding of the unpredictable nature of development work
• Be personable, dynamic, patient, flexible and adaptable to changing program and project
demands
• Have experience with fundraising
• Develop and deliver compelling presentations to MIIS faculty, prospective team members, etc.
Executive management and staff
TODAY: Amnesty International Executive Director to Speak at MIIS – 6:00pm
Tonight at 6:00pm Steve Hawkins, the Executive Director of Amnesty International, will speak to MIIS students. Don’t MIIS this amazing event! Reception to fallow in the McCone Atrium
“Bringing Human Rights Home”
Before joining Amnesty International USA as its Executive Director, Steven W Hawkins was the Executive Vice President and Chief Program Officer of the NAACP. He is a nationally renowned attorney and grassroots advocacy leader at the forefront of social justice issues, including death penalty abolition, criminal justice reform and defending civil liberties. As an attorney, he brought litigation that led to the release of three teenagers wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death row in Tennessee. He was also a law professor in South Africa during apartheid, teaching black lawyers who faced discriminatory treatment in the courts. Steven obtained his undergraduate degree from Harvard College and New York University.
New Service-Learning Course Builds Community Partnerships through Hands-On Learning
Monterey Institute students from the International Education Management, Public Administration, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, Teaching a Foreign Language, and Translation and Interpretation degree programs are participating in a new course this semester, learning about program design while working with seven local organizations on projects that further each of their missions.
The new course, “Service-Learning: International and Domestic Community Partnerships,” was developed and taught by Professor Netta Avineri, who is passionate about civic engagement and prioritizes real world applications of her in-class lessons. The organizations are: Big Sur Charter School, Community Assessment of Monterey County, Girls’ Health in Girls’ Hands, International School of Monterey, Lyceum, National Steinbeck Center, and the YMCA. Student projects include website design, parent handbook and training development, educational video creation, leadership curriculum research, service-learning program development, grant writing, outreach, and tutor training handbook creation.
Alexandra (Ali) Philbrick (MAIEM ’14) and Kathryn Lattman (MAIEM ’15) have been working with the Girls’ Health in Girls’ Hands initiative this semester. Every year girls in Monterey County organize a summit with peer-taught sessions, which Ali and Kathryn attended and assisted with. They are working on a video to help the next group of girl organizers and also helping out with curriculum design, activities, and lessons, and doing research for a report.
“It could not be more perfect for me,” shares Ali, who will build on her experience working with local girls when she heads off to Peru for the practicum portion of her degree in the fall. In Peru, she will be working with the nonprofit organization Girlsportworks whose mission is to teach life skills to young women through athletics. “This is exactly what I want to be doing in the future,” she says. “Netta put a lot of thought into this,” says Kathryn appreciatively of the course, and adds that “you can’t beat the opportunity to learn by doing and do good at the same time by helping others.”
Lauryn Agnew: Net Impact & GSIPM Dean’s Seminar 4/15/14
Lauryn Agnew, the founder of Bay Area Impact Investing and President of Seal Cove Financial, is set to speak at MIIS on Tuesday, April 15 at 12:30 pm in McGowan 100.
Lauryn has nearly three decades of experience in developing and implementing strategies in the institutional investment industry. She also serves as trustee on the Board of the San Mateo County Employees Retirement Association, chair of the investment committees of the United Way of the Bay Area and the Girl Scouts of Northern California and member of the finance committee of the Immaculate Conception Academy of San Francisco.
Please join Lauryn as part of the GSIPM Dean’s Seminar Series and Net Impact MIIS here on campus next week!
Need help with journalistic writing? Mark Schapiro is here to help! Updated w/correct email address
Click photo to enlarge.
MIIS Team Reaches Finals of Regional Hult Prize Competition, Makes Key Connections
A team of Monterey Institute students—Maria Kovell (MPA ‘14), Amitay Flores (MAIPS ‘14), Amanda Boyek (MAIPS ‘14), Natalie Cox (MPA ‘14), and Amy Ross (MPA ‘14)—made their mark at the Hult Prize regional competition last weekend in San Francisco, and left the competition with something at least as good as a win: a path forward for their innovative project.
The team first beat hundreds of competitors to win a place in the 2014 Hult Prize Regional Finals in San Francisco, then proceeded to wow the judges there, who selected them as one of four teams (out of 47) to advance to the final round of the regional competition. The other three finalists came from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Hult International Business School in San Francisco, and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
The 2014 Hult Prize Challenge, a collaboration with the Clinton Global Initiative, was to design a sustainable business model addressing non-communicable disease in urban slums. Executives from Intel, IDEO, Google.org, EMC and Matternet were represented on the judging panel that supported the Monterey Institute team and voted them into the final round. The team was encouraged by the reception their idea received and plan to move their venture, Salud2, forward after graduation in May with a pilot in Mexico. They will be meeting with people from some of the organizations they connected with at the competition and are also exploring options with MIIS faculty and staff.
“It was an energizing experience for us. MIIS coursework and programs like the Frontier Market Scouts (FMS) and the Development Project Management Institute (DPMI) opened our minds and pushed our thinking to the level required to tackle today’s most complex problems,” says Amy Ross. The team sincerely thanks the MIIS faculty that supported them along the way and would like to congratulate the MIT team that moved forward from the San Francisco Regional Finals and will present their venture at the Clinton Global Initiative in September.
Student’s Team El Salvador Experience “Connected the Dots…Now I Have More to Offer”
Since its inception in 2006, Team El Salvador has provided 105 Monterey Institute students with the opportunity to hone their development and language skills while making a meaningful contribution to the lives of people in the Bajo Lempa region of El Salvador. This January, nine MIIS students were joined by two Middlebury students and, for the first time, a student from California State University, Monterey Bay.
Faculty director Adele Negro is the glue that keeps Team El Salvador together, but each year the leadership of projects is in the hands of students. The student-driven leadership model is, according to Negro, a key component of the program’s effectiveness. Another important factor is the consistency and longstanding partnership that has been developed and nurtured over the years with the two community partner organizations in El Salvador, la Coordinadora and the Mangrove Association.
This year, the students worked on four major projects:
- The “PLAS” Project, to help improve the functionality and implementation of the Local Sustainable Resource Utilization Plan.
- The Microcredit Project, to strengthen the administrative system of the NGO’s microcredit program under a new profit-based organization in order to improve its sustainability.
- The Public Spaces Project, to assess community perception and utilization of spaces and structures so as to answer the question: ”What makes for a strong, healthy, cohesive community?”
- A Photojournalism Project, to capture in visual and narrative forms the history, experiences and people characterizing the evolution of an eight-year relationship developed between Team El Salvador and its partners.
Many Monterey Institute alumni have spoken about the transformative effect their Team El Salvador participation has had on their studies and careers. Lauren Lambert (MAIEP ’15) appears to have a similarly meaningful experience: “While I have lived abroad on and off throughout my entire life, the three weeks I spent working in El Salvador contextualized what I am doing here at MIIS in a way that nothing else could have.” It “connected the dots,” and clarified how she can make the most of her time at MIIS, so that when she leaves she can have a more profound impact on what she sees as our shared “project human” – to leave this world a better place than when we arrived.
Student Teams Compete in MIIS Water Innovation Challenge
As our motto, to “be the solution,” indicates, a Monterey Institute degree involves much more than classroom theory. Monterey Institute students have numerous opportunities via immersive learning experiences to develop their professional skills by completing fieldwork and working on real-life issues as part of their class assignments. This spring semester, a group of faculty and staff from across the Institute has launched an innovation challenge for teams of students willing to tackle a true wicked problem.
The challenge, Nor Any Drop to Drink? – Securing the Future of Monterey County’s Fresh Water Supply, involves participating in a series of stakeholder conversations and workshops and working with teams to come up with solutions to a problem that is at once very local and yet global in its wickedness. As Professor Kent Glenzer of the Development Practice and Policy program says, it serves three main purposes: “First, it promotes interdisciplinary work among students, and stretches them to look across degree silos. Complex problems don’t lend themselves to single-discipline solutions. Second, it gives students a real-world laboratory for trying out what they are learning in the classroom. And third, it allows students to engage with local stakeholders – the powerful and the excluded – and forces them to find solutions that are acceptable by many. And it’s a great networking opportunity to boot!”
Ten teams have risen to the challenge and started to interact with stakeholders and experts. They have been tasked with coming up with ideas that are:
- sustainable across future generations
- progessive regarding economic growth
- affordable,
- socially,economically and politically just, and
- compelling to local stakeholders
A panel of external judges will select winners in late April. The team with the idea deemed best by the judges will receive a monetary award of $2,500.
Peru Practicum: Breaking Down Barriers Between Classroom and Real-World Development
Five MIIS professors took an introductory policy analysis course and turned it into an optional year-long immersive learning opportunity. Students have the option to enroll in a Peru-focused policy class in the fall, design a research project, conduct in-field research as part of a winter-term practicum in Peru, and then follow up by working with the information and data collected as part of a seminar in the spring, all while they are learning the tools of data analysis.
Linking faculty research, alumni activities, and students’ desire for practical learning experiences, this is a true MIIS community collaboration. It started with Professors Robert McCleery and Philip Murphy, who have been working on research on the links between poverty and isolation, and grew through connections with the Andean Alliance for Sustainable Development, a non-profit co-founded by alumni Aaron Ebner (MPA ’11) and Adam Stieglitz (MPA ’11) that is working on community development projects in the isolated Sacred Valley of Peru.
Professor Jeff Dayton-Johnson and his team of 25 International Policy Studies, Master of Public Administration, Master of Business Administration and International Education Management students looked at several dimensions of connectivity as it relates to a poor rural economy like that of Andean Peru. That included roads, telecommunications, connectivity to public services like health care and education, and connectivity via language (while the national language of Peru is Spanish, Quechua is the language spoken by most of the people in the study area).
Five students—Mario Guzmán-Soria, Josefina Lara, Luz Vázquez Ramos, Ximena Ospina, and Rafael Hernández—presented a preliminary report on major themes and initial findings to local authorities in Calca before returning to Monterey. Says Professor Dayton-Johnson about the experience: “This student-organized and delivered presentation in Calca effectively breaks down the barriers between the classroom and the real world of development practice. Our students took advantage of this opportunity to share initial findings from a field research project they had designed and carried out, to respond to policy makers’ questions, and to strengthen the relationship between MIIS and this region of Peru. I’m very proud of them and look forward to building on their work with another group of students next J-Term!”