Fellows' Follow-on Activities: Benjamin Franklin Institute with Asia

One of the inherent challenges to educational exchanges is ensuring that individual transformations during an intensive experience can be sustained and new learning integrated and used in the home context. To address this concern, the Benjamin Franklin Summer Institute with Asia has included a follow-on component to it’s U.S. based program. The Institute is hosted by ICAR and the Alliance for Conflict Transformation and sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State.  In the summer of 2010, the program brought together thirty six teenagers from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and the U.S. to help participants develop a deeper understanding of global issues, a sense of civic responsibility, and leadership skills that would allow them to become agents of positive action within their communities.
Recent follow-on activities helped Fellows put into practice the knowledge they acquired and provided a bridge between their time overseas and their home communities. The objectives of the follow-on activities included: to examine the insights acquired by Fellows throughout the Institute take shape in the projects; to enable Fellows to see the relevance of what they learned to the reality in their respective communities; to allow Fellows to demonstrate leadership skills and become `ambassadors` of positive change; to allow Fellows to become familiar with the challenges of moving from action planning to implementation.

During the four-week U.S. program, the Fellows with the help of their mentors gradually ‘built’ a project to be implemented at home, including a diagnosis of existing needs and exploration of possible courses of action. As part of the process they were asked to identify strategic goals, the specific steps they needed to take, resources needed and ways to acquire them, potential partners, challenges they might face, as well as a timetable for completing their projects. The result was an interesting bouquet of small-scale initiatives that ranged from community service and campaigns to increase environmental awareness, to fundraising for less privileged fellow citizens and organization of educational workshops. Illustrative is the case of Rokhan Shafi, who, in the aftermath of the catastrophic floods in Pakistan in August, 2010, was able to put his newly acquired skills into practice and utilize the network of his BFSIA colleagues in order to raise funds and provide relief to families affected by the floods.

Of course, a number of challenges emerged during the implementation of the projects, including difficulties in communication between mentors and fellows (e.g. lack of regular access to internet), time constraints as many Fellows found themselves caught between their projects and school work, and insecurity on the ground (especially in Afghanistan). Nevertheless, a high number of fellows did successfully carry out their projects, taking their initial steps towards becoming active members of a vibrant civil society.