In 2021, Marina LeGree MC/MPA 2014 led the effort to evacuate more than a hundred people from Afghanistan after the country fell into the hands of the Taliban. and athletics to give young women confidence and leadership skills.
Under the restored Taliban regime, Navy personnel and participants were at risk. Marina led her team to evacuate those other people and, in some cases, their families. alumni network. Marina coordinated the efforts of the Harvard network and helped download visas from countries such as Chile, the United States, Ireland, Poland, Germany, Kazakhstan and Denmark. The effort secured the passage of another 135 people.
Working to relocate them, Marina says, “has been the opposite of everything I’ve stood for in Afghanistan: strengthening communities, creating change. I never sought to be a conduit for other people to leave.
Navy appointments with Afghanistan began after earning her master’s degree in foreign relations from George Washington University. Working first for the United Nations International Organization for Migration and then for the German aid company GIZ, Marina settled in Faizabad, the provincial capital and largest city in the remote and mountainous northern province of Badakhshan.
“I lived as Afghans live, which means that for a woman you can’t faint and you can’t move physically,” she says. “You can’t move as a woman, everyone will look at you. You can’t faint without judging yourself. “yourself, and it’s poorly ventilated. This part of the party is horrible.
He then painted for NATO and the U. S. government. The U. S. Army offered troops and the civilian corps of painters acting stabilization paints in local communities as a component of the counterinsurgency effort. During this period, a method for analyzing the stability of a given domain or region evolved, which was approved by the United States Agency for International Development and the Afghan government as a national popular for stabilization programming. As he progressed through his work and career, he also became increasingly discouraged by the point of corruption he saw within the Afghan government and the US. UU effort of the profession.
Looking for a reboot in his career, he frequented HKS where the concept of Ascend evolved.
“I needed this new group of peers,” LeGree says. I sought to surround myself with other people who had done other things and who encouraged me and who had other points of view, and that’s what I got. I had an Incredible complete elegance from other people who are lifelong friends and the other people who helped me start Ascend.
Since its launch in 2015, 20 to 30 women in Afghanistan have participated and graduated from Ascend each year. In 2018, Hanifa Yousoufi, a member of the Ascend team, became the first Afghan woman to climb the country’s highest peak, Noshaq, which rises 24,580 feet above the Wakhan Corridor in the Hindu Kush mountain range. Ascend has grown tremendously in 2021 and can accommodate 75 women and open the first women’s sports center in Kabul.
While the program in Afghanistan is suspended, Marina says, “We will stand firm there because the Taliban haven’t really said much about who will be allowed to do what. We can give female-only commands in the area we have, and we can also send commands via cell phones, which we’ve done pretty well anyway COVID. The mountaineering programme will be extended to one or two new countries; the variety of sites is in progress at the moment.
This award recognizes alumni who have taken a step forward in the human condition at the local, state/provincial, national or foreign level. produced a positive social change.
María Soledad Rueda García represented and led the activities of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Ethiopia as Chief of Operations from 2020 to 2021, one of the most sensitive humanitarian crises in the Horn of Africa. In the service of the clash in northern Ethiopia In the Tigray region, Sole, as her friends call her, had packed her bags for a three-day stopover when she was first immersed in the center of the crisis. danger by bringing in a foreign presence and ensuring that the ICRC’s operation in Tigray took place in the midst of an armed confrontation.
“In times of war,” says Sole, “all the barriers built fall and we place ourselves at the center of our non-unusual humanity. I try, infusing humanity into conditions where only horrors seem possible.
Born and raised in San Gil, Colombia, Sole instilled in her career the classes she learned from her mother, doctor, director of the local orphanage and head of household. “I grew up watching my mom paint tirelessly, training my sisters and me completely and with constant gratitude,” she says.
As a professional, Sole has cared deeply about the world’s toughest crises. She worked as a COVID-19 coordinator in Goma, eastern Congo; helped combat the spread of Ebola in Liberia; negotiated agreements between the Israeli and Palestinian governments on behalf of the other peoples of Gaza; and negotiated and secured larger situations in prisons and hard work camps in Myanmar.
“Bringing groups to their own greatness through service is one of my ultimate rewarding satisfactions,” says Sole.
His leadership skills have saved lives, adding oversight of a refugee camp of more than 15,000 Somali refugees fleeing chronic violence and lack of trust, as well as the worst drought in decades, and managing the influx of thousands of refugees along south Sudan’s border into Ethiopia. “Every moment I spent near populations connected through violence humbled me and demonstrated that my path is to serve and live a life guided by integrity, inspiration and light,” Sole said.
Despite the terrible brutality Sole witnessed, she remains positive and an inspiration to her classmates. They realize their ability to stay in touch, no matter where you are and the conflict around you. You sign up, ask where you can help despite your workload. and remains optimistic, they say. Among his most productive qualities, shared by an old man, is Sole’s capacity for empathy and the ability to see both sides of a clash to better reach a resolution.
“I met the bravest people in places devastated by violence and conflict,” he says. “I was taught the most important lesson: life is superbly cursed and inherently accompanied by hope. “
“Many other people around the world have answered the call to their power and have strived to help others in times of excessive need, when cases make it too difficult, if not impossible, to help themselves,” Sole adds. “To be a voice and a spark of hope for those who have been silenced through violence and confrontation is the ultimate humiliating privilege. It is to my peers and the public that we are honored to serve that I dedicate this award.
This award recognizes graduates under the age of 40 who have excelled as leaders or catalysts to replace or as Americans who make a significant difference to Americans, organizations, or governments. The recipients exemplify the public policy and public leadership purpose of the Kennedy School in the United States. and around the world through research, teaching, and direct engagement with policymakers and public leaders at all levels and in all sectors.
Robert Manson MPA 2004 is committed to building relationships and engaging with Harvard and connecting HKS alumni around the world. As a leader among HKS alumni, Bob, as he is called, freely provides his time with such abundance that it is easy to be two other people performing in Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Bob was not only president of the Harvard Club of Ireland for 4 years, but also regional director of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) for Europe, overseeing six countries for 3 years, and was recently elected to the HAA Executive Committee as a full member.
Bob’s focus on public service was recently highlighted at the HAA Alumni Leadership Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he was invited to host a consultation on public leadership. Nonetheless, he presented three case studies that included the Harvard Club of Ireland, the Harvard Club of Seattle, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education to inspire other clubs to adopt public service projects that can have a positive effect on their local communities.
This recent example of encouraging participation among HKS alumni is the newest in a replacement story since graduating in 2004. Just six years ago, Bob founded the Harvard Club of Ireland Nonprofit Scholarship, which encouraged through a Harvard Club of Australia program to choose nonprofit leaders in Ireland and send them to an executive education program at Harvard Business School titled “Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management. “Since its inception, seven scholarships have been awarded and their good fortune has attracted the attention of other Harvard clubs. in Europe.
While alumni and student engagement is a passion, Bob is also for long-term public leaders who would gain advantage from an education at the Kennedy School. from the UK, to inspire HKS applicants from Ireland’s public schools.
“I am incredibly honored to receive this year’s award, whose name is reminiscent of a young man who dedicated his short life to public service,” Bob said. “I like to say that volunteering and public service are not what I do; that’s who I am.
In addition to volunteering at Harvard and Kennedy School, Bob also continues to give back to his community. He volunteers with Special Olympics Ireland (basketball and golf programmes) and raises serial funds for Crumlin Children’s Hospital, Downs Syndrome Ireland and St Raphael Special School through marathons and ultramarathons (60 marathons and ultramarathons completed). His commitment to leading replacement within his community, and at HKS, continues to motivate his classmates and other alumni teams around the world, demonstrating that leading by example can mobilize crowds. to create replace.
“This award is committed to my classmate, Captain Oleh Khalayim MPA/ID 2004,” adds Bob. “Two months ago, Oleh applied as a portfolio agent at the World Bank in Washington, D. C. Today, he serves in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. “
This award recognizes alumni who have made a remarkable contribution to the Kennedy School network by volunteering their time, creativity and power and promoting the spirit of volunteerism and service at the school. It honors the memory of Julius Babbitt MC/MPA 2001, a member of the Kennedy School Board of Alumni Trustees, who served as director of the school’s student systems and president of the Kennedy School of New England Alumni Network.
In 2021, the Harvard Kennedy School Women’s Network (HKSWN) reached nearly 3,000 female alumni through more than a dozen events. The network’s good fortune builds on its developing international footprint and now celebrates 50 city chapters with a project to connect and magnify the efforts of HKS women and other gender non-conforming people in authentic, meaningful and tough ways. This includes activities such as greeting new HKS students, meeting prospective students, and scheduling informal organization assemblies.
“Around the world, our bankruptcies are connected through meaningful interactions and thematic debates, as we did when we were academics at HKS,” says HKSWN co-chair Theodora Skeadas MPP 2016. “For example, the Boston bankruptcy held successive small group dinners, and our London bankruptcy was busy, holding several other roundtables for students to interact on a variety of topics.
The global footprint now includes many U. S. cities. such as Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington DC; and foreign networks in Bangalore, Beijing, Bogota, Brussels, Cairo, Copenhagen (Scandinavia), Delhi, Guatemala (Central America), Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Israel, Johannesburg, Lausanne, London, Madrid, Mexico City, Manila, Mumbai, Nairobi, Paris, Rabat, Seoul and Singapore.
“The expansion of the HKS Women’s Network to more than 50 bankruptcies and more than 75 bankruptcy heads worldwide has enabled alumni to connect with others in their cities and regions around the world and, in doing so, has fostered the construction and impact of global dating. “Says Theodora.
HKSWN occasions have included: the HKSWN mentoring programme, gender parity in the maritime sector, a workshop on time management, a series on monetary literacy for Array and a series on synthetic intelligence.
“We are grateful to be awarded this year’s Netpaintings Engagement Award and very proud to be part of such an incredible organization of HKS alumni,” said Co-Chair Andrea Blinkhorn MPP 2016. “HKS Women’s Netpaintings was founded with the project of uniting, magnifying and helping the works of HKS alumni around the world and in recent years we have been able to strengthen our bonds with each other as members and help each other through complicated challenges. We look forward to continuing to grow and offer alumni with meaningful opportunities to bond with each other.
This award recognizes HKS alumni networks that have strengthened the alumni network and complicated the networks’ ties with the School.
This year, the HKS Fund Outstanding Alumni Award will be shared between two Americans who continue to donate to HKS while serving populations in need: Amelita Armit MC/MPA 1979 and Hamissou Samari MPP 2012.
Amelita is a retired civil servant who is actively involved in the network’s volunteer work. She has worked with the provincial government of Alberta and the federal government of Canada for over 25 years in leadership positions in industry and commerce, intergovernmental affairs, human resource management, adding Assistant Deputy Minister of Health and Social Services and Vice Chair of the Public Service Commission. To date, Amelita is the only Filipino to have reached the rank of Deputy Deputy Minister in the Canadian public service. He concluded his career in public service as President and CEO of the Parliamentary Centre, a non-governmental organization committed to strengthening parliamentary democracy and smart governance practices around the world.
Hamissou is a Senior Program Officer in the Monitoring and Evaluation Division of Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a U. S. government foreign aid and advancement company. Hamissou is also a co-founder of LiftTogo, a nonprofit with a dual project to help African immigrants to the United States achieve their higher education goals, while increasing the budget to provide curtains to school-age youth from low-income and suffering families. to succeed in parts of your local Togo.
Amelita, who has donated to HKS for more than 30 years, and Hamissou, who has donated every year since graduation, have a similar percentage interest in giving back to HKS and making sure incoming students and school systems have the investment they want. succeed. ” My donations are my way of saying ‘thank you’ and giving it back, so that existing and long-term low-income scholars can have a chance to achieve their dreams,” Hamissou said.
“I understand what the Kennedy School stands for: the importance of public service and public policy leadership in our democratic society,” Amelita says. the contribution counts, big or small: time, money, resources, etc.
Beyond his reasons for giving, Hamissou focuses his generosity on the systems he believes can evolve to cope with the demanding situations of tomorrow.
“I make my living trying to perceive how and why some progression tasks succeed or fail compared to others,” he says. implementer of the allocation to manage it well enough to achieve the greatest impact, regardless of the duration of the grant. Over the years, HKS has established a remarkable roadmap making sure that the budget moves to the spaces that need them to the fullest and with genuine potential.
Giving back to HKS to generate learning opportunities for public leaders is not just an aspiration, but everything Amelita revealed in her time at the Kennedy School. the components. In today’s language, the terms are ‘healthy dialogue’, ‘inclusivity’, ‘collaboration’, all of which was part of my learning experience at the Kennedy School: my classmates came from other professions, from other countries, from other degrees of government, and I benefited from all the diverse perspectives they brought to the School,” says Amelita.
Together, Amelita and Hamissou assist in public policy and leadership of the Kennedy School so that others can live in safer, freer, fairer and more sustainable rich societies. They have experienced this project firsthand and, through retribution, are creating a replacement for the next elegance of public leaders.
This award recognizes alumni who have demonstrated a long-term commitment to the Kennedy School network through their committed annual aid of any amount. The winners, which include the strength of alumni participation and philanthropy, show that donations of any amount can be a great success. an effect on students, the university and alumni. Individuals are appointed and decided through the members of the Executive Board of the HKS Fund.
Vilas Dhar MC/MPA 2016 is described through his classmates as visionary, tireless, inspiring and passionate. In the long term for all, Vilas advocates for technologies and policies that generate social and economic opportunities to create equity.
“My vision of our longest term is one in which the generation amplifies humanity, our creativity, our ingenuity, our curiosity, our kindness and our generosity,” says vilas.
Vilas championed a new cadre of paintings for virtual display, literacy, and mastery that bases the creation and use of 21st century technologies on the principles of inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA). Through his paintings with organizations such as The Hidden Genius Project, Per Scholas, and the Education Design Lab, Vilas supports the creation of new participatory mechanisms to incorporate underrepresented voices into political and technological decision-making.
“It is imperative that we emphasize honoring the concept that generation can be a democratizing force, but to do that, we want a determined will,” Vilas says. “To realize this potential, we will have to come together with a common goal of making sure that the technologies being built are the ones that really serve us all. AI can generate a transformative update to address our most urgent global challenges, but it will require cross-sectoral discussion and collaboration. “
Vilas is also a leading voice for justice and the democratization of synthetic intelligence. At the base, he envisions a long term in which the generation amplifies the most productive facets of humanity rather than employing it to create divisions and sow hatred. Technology, according to Vilas, deserves to help harness the creativity, kindness and generosity of the world.
“The challenge we face today is to build a democratic and inclusive public discourse, one that reaches technologists, ethicists, users, to build the long-term AI-based that humanity deserves,” he says.
As an advocate of using generation for social change, Vilas stores his perspectives as widely as possible, participating in foreign forums, giving feedback to the media, writing educational articles, and attending speeches. His passion for raising awareness is fueled through a commitment to serving and helping humanity in an era of technological progress. Most recently, Vilas was revered through the World Economic Forum and named a Young Global Leader for his work.
While he goes out of his way to count and direct verbal exchange about generation and politics, he is also incredibly convenient and is known for spending his days temporarily moving between projects, such as running with villagers in India to adopt mobile apps to plan a more successful harvest. With social activists in Africa, drones and citizen reports to help track the climate across the continent, and with librarians in small towns helping high school students complete their studies in the midst of a pandemic.
“The opportunity of the twenty-first century lies at the intersection of stakeholder engagement, guilty innovation and a collaborative vision to address shared global challenges,” he said.
This award recognizes graduates who have obviously explained a challenge and provided a virtual or technological solution that includes measures to measure impact. Their virtual responses are sustainable and have the prospect of evolving. While the answers may be early prototypes, they will have to have been tested with the end-user community.
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