Date: 2 November at 17.00-18.00
Venue: American Corner Debrecen, 19/D Bem Tér Méliusz Juhász Péter County Library
Guest Speaker: Rasha Awale, Jordan
In 2002 the Department of State established the Middle East Partnership Initiative. Aiming to advance stability and prosperity, the MENA region, one of MEPI’s program was the “Leaders for Democracy Fellowship”. The program provided early and mid-career professionals from the MENA region with the opportunity to complete training in participatory governance, conflict resolution, and political mobilization and communication. The participants spent around four months in the United States, gaining academic and practical experience, as well as networking with like-minded peers and professionals.
This series of presentations will track the journey of one of these fellowship participants, by highlighting the following topics:
Understanding the main concepts of Democracy in the United States, what is democracy, why it’s important and how to make it effective in our daily lives (conflict resolution, and negotiation skills).
About Rasha:
I have a master degree in American Studies and a Ba in international relations, in 2014 I have had spent around 4 moths in the United States as part of the State Department fellowship program LDF (leaders for democracy) which included spending 2 months in Syracuse University in NY studying about democracy and another 2 months as an intern in one of the US NGOs, I choose to do my internship in Freedom House organization where I was responsible on the media monitoring of human rights violation in the MENA region and I’ve also gave a seminar about “the Arab spring as a platform for women movement in the Arab world” this fellowship was for young activists from the MENA region me and another 23 youth activists from (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Aljeria) participated in this program to learn about democracy and to share our own experience, when I finished this fellowship I created a newsletter for all the alumni of the program that started in 2008 and has more than 200 alumna I have issued 3 issues of this newsletter and I was elected as a member of the advisory board of the fellowship from 2015-2016, I’m still the editor of the newsletter.
