2016 Kosmos Seed Grant Recipients | Official Announcement
April 5, 2016 Kosmos Community News
We are honored to receive the 2016 Kosmos Seed Grant for the Activist Ashram, our year-long global fellowship program that is launching this year. Our intent is to bring together a collective of activists, community leaders, organizers, bloggers, journalists artists and others to help create a shared global vision for the post-capitalist world whilst remaining grounded in their local actions and work. Importantly, this will include both materialist and spiritual aspects. – Alnoor Ladha
Project NEWS (Native Engagement within Systems) is intended to promote civic engagement and social change by empowering the voices of Native people through digital storytelling projects. Our project will provide assistance to Native American individuals who are currently active in the Community Engagement Teams (CETs).
The CETs are deliberate groups of individuals, led by Native Americans but including non-Natives, working on some aspect of social and civic life in the area. There are currently three CETs – American Indian Youth Issues, American Indian Health Issues, and Integrated Cultural Events.
Pacem in Terris and Wilmington in Transition are thrilled to receive this important Seed Grant. It will help shape a new and focused effort on transforming our community, and serve as a prototype for other community efforts. Here is what we will be doing:
Working with other neighborhood organizations and institutions in the low-income, multi-racial community in which we are located, we will implement a neighborhood-focused TimeBank and develop and make available to the same neighborhood a guide to local resources.
featured photo | Chicago Wisdom Project
“Ultimately, the challenge is one of necessity for now and the future. We need more leaders making decisions from a deeper place of wisdom. That’s it in a nutshell – the more dialogue, conversation, understanding and engagement on raising children and leaders to lead from within, a place of reflection, understanding, awareness, consciousness, the better the world will be.” – Kosmos Seed Grant Donors, Kellner and Bailey Siegfried
As part of it’s 2016 Kosmos Seed Grant initiative, Kosmos has selected five Applicants as 2016 Projects of Promise. Kosmos is looking forward to the possibilities of collaborative association in the year ahead and to supporting these projects in numerous ways, through editorial, mentoring, publicity, and networking.
By last year, we had spread our presence to 7 universities around Uganda but were stretched to the limit. With a staff of 2, it was not possible to scale further without placing more responsibilities on students to run activities on their campuses.
Fortunately, the grant from Kosmos Journal enabled us to run a 4-day training camp in August last year for 102 students from 15 universities. Along the idyllic shores of Lake Victoria, we trained these students to become ‘Uniters’. They would lead activities on their campuses in order to engage more students in social action and global citizenship…
The result: we are currently helping 85 projects with consultancy, and 15 of them have partnerships with international volunteers– in large part thanks to Kosmos Journal!
We gathered some ideas to consider about civic engagement:
There are many ways in which people participate in civic, community and political life and, by doing so, express their engaged citizenship. From volunteering to voting, from community organizing to political advocacy, the defining characteristic of active civic engagement is the commitment to participate and work for social changes that can improve the conditions of life and bolster the chances of success for children, families, communities and our world. Civic engagement can be a powerful process that moves people toward greater self-efficacy. – The Alliance for Strong Families and Communities