TYO is participating in GlobalGiving’s Global Open, can you help us win up to $6,000 in prize money?!

TYO Welcomes Nablus Center Director Wynne Mancini

Tomorrow’s Youth Organization is excited to introduce the latest member of our team in Nablus. Wynne Mancini has joined the TYO staff as the Center Director of TYO’s flagship center in Nablus.

Wynne’s professional background is in Arabic and the Middle East. From 2007-2008, Wynne studied in Damascus, Syria on a CASA fellowship and also worked with the Director of Public Information while interning at UNRWA. In 2009, she graduated from Georgetown University with a masters degree in Arab Studies. While at Georgetown, Wynne worked as a research assistant at the United States Institute of Peace, examining American involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her work experience in DC also includes consulting for the International Organization for Migration on their counter-trafficking publications.  Wynne initially became interested in the Arab World while living in France, where she worked as a paralegal in the Paris office of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP. She received her B.A. from Princeton University in 2003. She is fluent in French and Arabic.

Please join us in welcoming Wynne to our team!

Intern Journal: Learning from Each Other

Last weekend marked several important days here at TYO: Universal Children’s Day, our Open Day, and the passage of the midway mark for our fall internship program.

As I was surrounded by dozens of kids clamoring to have their faces painted as Spider-man, Batman, hearts, moons, stars, flowers, butterflies (a good Arabic lesson for me that day!), I found a moment to reflect on the past month and a half here in Nablus.

I have been trying to teach my students here at TYO as much as they teach me. Every day with them is a new learning experience, as a teacher, as a foreigner and as a person. I hope that I am doing my best, and that my students like me. They keep coming back, so hopefully that is a good sign.

I crafted a nine-week schedule for my drama class at the beginning of this semester, and it has absolutely flown out the window. Every lesson that I plan for them, assuming that it will take at least a week (two classes), has been consumed by them in just one class! Even when I think that my English explanation cannot be properly translated into Arabic and grasped by my students, they are always two steps ahead of me and ready to go. My goal is to challenge, entertain and inform them at least as much as they do so for me.

In the past few weeks my class has covered many of the basics of the mechanics of theater, including costumes, sets and scripts. For the sets, we painted a backdrop and made free standing trees, as well as cut out clouds, a moon and a sun to hang in the classroom. On costume day, the students used their creativity to design costumes representing characters (bee, tiger, police man, etc), and then performed in front of the class to see if their fellow students could guess their character. On script day, the students learned the basic format of scripts and turned a children’s story into a scene to perform for their classmates.

Considering how quickly my boys and girls are moving through my lesson plans, I hope that we will be able to put together everything we have learned to put on a production for the rest of TYO!

-Bieta

Bieta is an intern at TYO Nablus.

Announcing the launch of a TYO initiative blog, TripleExposure.net!

The “Triple Exposure” blog will chronicle the progress of the public art and photography project of the same name. The 2-year project aims to develops identity and awareness through photographic expression and public art, engaging children from our target areas.

By exploring TripleExposure.net, you can read more about the project, see photos of the children and their work, and learn the history and present situation of the incomparable city of Nablus.

-Doris and Kelsey

Doris and Kelsey are both former TYO Summer Interns and current Triple Exposure Project Coordinators.

 

Call to Action: Support us on Global Giving!

The Global Open Challenge

From November 24 – December 21, we are competing to earn a spot on the GlobalGiving website, and earn up to US $6,000 from Global Giving by being one of the top fundraisers in the ‘Global Open’ Challenge. The organization with the greatest number of individual donations will get $3,000, and a separate $3,000 prize will go to the project raising the most money. The second and third place runners up for both achievements will get $2,000 and $1,000 respectively. In order to keep our project on GlobalGiving longer term, and use their website for ongoing fundraising, we need to raise a minimum of US $4,000 from at least 50 unique donors during the Challenge.

Your support makes a difference

If you are planning to make a donation this year, please do so by going to our project on GlobalGiving between November 24 and December 21.

100% of your tax-free donation will be put toward the children of Nablus :

• $10 will buy 2 books for our child-friendly library
• $25 will buy 25 plates to serve hot meals
• $50 will provide shelves for either our library or kitchen
• $75 will buy 3 educational board games
• $100 will provide 4 bag bean chairs for our child-friendly library
• $200 will help fund a dishwasher
• $500 will buy a refrigerator

All donations given through this challenge will:

• Purchase kitchen equipment and food to offer hot meals for children and nutrition classes for mothers
• Build a child-friendly library with books and storytelling tools to bolster kids’ literacy skills, love of learning and tools for healthy self-expression.

We value all forms of help. If you are unable to make a financial contribution, please tell your friends and family about TYO. Help us raise awareness through your own Facebook, Twitter and blog accounts. Contact Chelsey (email to: chelsey at tomorrowsyouth.org) for more information on how to help.

Thank you,
The TYO Team!

TripleX Anime Video

The TripleX mural class made this anime film last week.

Triple Exposure, a new TYO project, develops identity and awareness through photographic expression and public art. TripleX uses art and photography classes to engage children ages 7 to 16 from our target areas.

2010 Spring Internship Program Recruitment!

TYO published its 2010 Spring Internship Program Application this week. We are recruiting highly qualified and motivated interns with experience in international travel and teaching to work at our flagship center in Nablus (West Bank, Palestine) this spring (late January – mid May).

Interns will cooperate with TYO staff before their arrival in Nablus to develop a variety of activities for children, youth, and adults from the Nablus community. These may include: afterschool workshops for sport/drama/journalism or other activities for children and youth, evening English classes, and weekend recreational activities. Upon arrival, interns will work full-time leading the programs they developed, supporting other interns and TYO staff, and evaluating the impact of their programs throughout the spring.

Read more about the program and download the application (PDF) today – it’s due by December 6, 2009.

Good Luck!

TYO Celebrates International Children’s Day

Yesterday, TYO celebrated United Nations’ International Children’s Day. About 200 community members, including children and parents, came to TYO’s Open Day to enjoy an exciting array of activities, including art and sports activities, face painting and debka.

A special thanks to all the  TYO volunteers who did an incredible job orchestrating the day and leading activities.

TYO in Sin City!

What a thrill – over 3,000 people took part in a magnificent evening showcasing Arab music and culture in Las Vegas tonight, thanks to Dawn Elder World Entertainment and host, MGM Grand. The evening was coordinated in honor of International Children’s Day, and designed in the service of Arab children worldwide. Read more in our last post here.

I might be partial, but the most exciting part of this event was a 90-second highlight of TYO as an example of the type of work to be supported by the initiative. A huge thanks to TYO partner, Students of the World, for their help getting the video together in time! Check it out – TYO kids, staff and volunteers LIVE IN VEGAS!!

A triumph of humanity, not of technology!

The first ever World Innovation Summit for Education put on by the Qatar Foundation in Doha last week was a great success. The intelligent and forward-looking ideas and programs discussed throughout the conference represented a ‘triumph of humanity, not of technology’ – a phrase coined by Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, in the Wednesday morning plenary with regard to their aspirations for the now-ubiquitous micro-blogging platform.

Having the rarely paralleled budget to fly and accommodate 1,000 delegates from all over the world undoubtedly helped QF to gather the varied, dedicated, talented and truly global audience. And while certain aspects of the event were quite un-innovative (i.e. traditional conference format, limited wireless accessibility in session rooms), overall, the 3 days of discussion were extremely valuable, promising great things for WISE 2010 and beyond.

I found the Innovation plenary on Wednesday morning particularly interesting, and in the name of the event’s overriding theme, wanted to share some highlights from that session. Professor Sugata Mitra of Newcastle University wowed the crowd with his ‘Hole in the Wall’ – an experiment demonstrating the value of ’self-organized’ learning for children of all backgrounds, in all contexts. Between myself and colleagues from Birzeit University, hopefully Prof Mitra will join us in Palestine very soon to help us replicate the lessons he’s learned to promote intellectual curiosity and self-learning among at-risk and hard-to-reach children. One colleague made the valid point that teachers would never be irrelevant or unneeded. It is not enough to provide kids with access to information: we must provide some guidance to shape and direct their learning. In the ideal case, I absolutely agree. However, Professor Mitra’s method (learn more about his striking results here) is a wonderful option for communities who otherwise have no access to education.

“Mediators,” not teachers, are required for Professor Mitra’s work – not repositories of knowledge, but rather warm individuals who admire children’s natural curiosity and drive to explore the world around them. Again, I would be the last to make all teachers redundant. However, in hard-to-reach and low-income communities, this is a very interesting supposition. Perhaps programs like Teach for American (and soon Teach for All) can lead to successful hybrid models of trained teachers and ‘just-good-smart-and/or-dedicated-people’ as ideal brokers of learning in usually marginalized communities.

Another important tension that surfaced throughout the event, and particularly during this session, is that between public and private provision of education and related services. One panelist made the valid point that this is an old and tired debate, which we must move beyond toward a widely accepted consensus that it can be neither one nor the other. New partnerships are required to adequately provide the access and quality that all children in the world have a right to (as laid out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which celebrates 20 years today under the shadow of 70 million children out of school). Alex Wong, director of the World Economic Forum’s Global Education Initiative, made a valuable point based on his experience in Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and Rajasthan, that governments, at the Ministry level, need to hold ultimate responsibility and oversight for the field of education. However, he endorsed without reservation the essential value of engaging private and civil society partners as sources of innovation, increased coverage of remote areas and insurance of education’s relevance to eventual economic activity.

Finally, Biz Stone asserted that all beings on earth learn through play: a message that I particularly appreciated, coming from the early childhood and non-formal education sectors. His message about Twitter’s massive success was also familiar to TYO: wait to see how people use a technology or service in order to advance its design. This advice resembles TYO’s needs-based approach to implementing our programs on the ground, based on an original mission and vision.

Great video coverage of the event is available on the WISE website, and some fellow participants (Times Ed correspondent Michael Shaw and educator/blogger Tom Barrett) have done a good job of covering various aspects of the event. Despite the predictably vague laundry list of ’strategic priorities’, we are hopeful that WISE members will challenge themselves to integrate the conference’s lessons in their work. Further, the recurrent mention of early childhood education was inspiring – while it didn’t come out in the Final Declaration as hoped, it was a real pleasure to meet so many like-minded folks. Keep your eyes on this space for further news about the evolution of partnerships developed at WISE 09!