Submitted by Steve Stevens,
Commitment Information
Because of the huge success of our previous Global Awareness camps, it is our commitment to make another camp in the summer of 2009. Our goal is to raise funds of $1400 with the help of Seattle Tashkent Sister City Association, the Center for Foreign Languages in Djizak, the Macfarlane family in Seattle, WA and Hendrix College by May 30, 2009, which will be enough to recruit 40 students (if the amount raised exceeds $1400 then more students will be recruited). The amount raised will be spent on: the rent of facilities and office supplies and transportation expenses. We also plan to hire highly qualified alumni of US State Department exchange programs as faculty members on volunteer basis. We will train them and provide them with transportation and an internet research refund. In association with faculty members we will create activities, workshops, and interview prospective students. We will admit 40 (or more depending on amount raised) students based on their answers to interview questions. Only students ranging from fifteen to eighteen years old will be admitted. Our project is critically important to all youth in Djizak, Uzbekistan, therefore, our goal is to involve as many youths as we can in our projects. We will focus on selecting new prospective students, however, additionally, we will let our previous alumni to volunteer in our workshops or select them as team-leaders based on an interview. We will provide the students with pencils, crayons, pens, markers, posters, folders, scratch paper, notebooks, drinking water, materials for team flags, fruits, baseball and Frisbee equipment, shovels, hoes and water for planting. The camp will last for five weeks, six days per week and two hours per day. Four of the six days will be in-class informational courses with in-class group workshops from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm. The other two days will be outside-classroom workshops from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm and/or from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm. And in the end of the camp, successful graduates will receive a certificate of Global Awareness Projects. The alumni of our project will be required to pass on the knowledge that they have obtained by volunteering in local communities and environmental institutions, educating the younger students at their schools and communities, organizing environmentally friendly projects such as planting trees, collecting plastic bottles and paper for recycling, cleaning rivers and streams, etc.
We are proud to cooperate with the Clinton Global Initiative and would like to note that our group leader, Dmitriy Nurullayev, who is the campus representative of CGIU and has participated in the CGIU meeting 2008. The list of our sponsors and partners of two previous camps includes the Embassy of The United States of America in Uzbekistan, the United States Department of State, Seattle Tashkent Sister City Association, the Center for Foreign Languages in Djizak and the Macfarlane family in Seattle, WA. This year the Seattle Tashkent Sister City Association has notified us of their willingness to fund a summer camp in 2009 and in further upcoming years in amount up to $400. The president of the association, Dan Peterson, says that he will review the grant proposal for the summer camp 2009. Hendrix College is also a potential contributor of funds for our camp in 2009 with minimum of $800. The Macfarlane family has agreed to partially fund our projects in the future. As for faculty members, we have a list of at least ten US State Department Exchange program alumni who are in agreement with the State Department to participate in volunteer activities through out Uzbekistan. We have talked to six alumni in Djizak, and they have showed their enthusiasm to become our faculty members. Moreover, other alumni in other regions of Uzbekistan have contacted us asking to include them in our list. These alumni are in a regular contact with the Department of Public Affairs at the Embassy of the United States of America in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Together they organize volunteer events such as cleaning national parks, planting trees and helping farmers to restore their lands, fundraising money and collecting equipment for orphanages, and so on. We will encourage our staff members to propose projects similar to our camps to the Department of Public Affairs at the US Embassy in Uzbekistan. Because our two previous camps were very successful, high school students (as participants) and college students (as team leaders) are looking forward to a summer camp in 2009. Since students will be able to participate in our camp classes completely free of charge, and since the classes, which we will teach, will be very different from high school and college classes, students have a great interest in participating in our project. One of our plans is to establish a Non Governmental Organization of Global Awareness Projects.