Five undergraduates and one graduate student were selected to receive the 2014 Summer Travel Awards. These awards allow selected students to take part in a community service project or civic participation anywhere in the world. They are modeled after Raoul Wallenberg’s experience travelling to observe and learn from people of all kinds and shape a…
Tag: Summer Travel Awards
Lucy Zhao
I spent my summer with The Kenya Project, a program I started my freshman year that brings an interdisciplinary group of University of Michigan undergraduates to Kithoka, Kenya to partner with locals to start small-scale businesses. We challenge ourselves to take the theory of creating impact we talk about in school classrooms and actually apply…
Layne Vandenberg
This past June, I traveled to Meru, Kenya to continue working on a grassroots, social entrepreneurship and human-centered design experiment called “The Kithoka Soap Initiative” (TKSI). I originally laid the foundation for TKSI in the summer of 2012 alongside Dr. Karambu Ringera, founder and President of a Kenya-based non-profit organization named International Peace Initiatives (IPI).…
Paul Stromberg
This summer I worked for an Indigenous radio station in Guatemala. During this trip I used my experience at WCBN to help this station update much of its equipment. All of this station’s equipment was 20 or 30 years old, so it was in need of fixing, which I was happy to do. Much of…
Carolina Fuentes Diego
This summer I had the opportunity to live in Berlin, Germany. I worked with Allegro Grundschule, an elementary school near central Berlin. I assisted with classes and homework through the end of the school year. During the summer the school provides all-day care and we had field trips and activities for the children. The school…
Kaylee VanDommelen
This past summer I had the incredible opportunity to go abroad to Tanzania with World Endeavors. I lived with a host family in the city of Arusha and worked at Tengeru Hospital. Living with a host family allowed me to further my knowledge of Swahili and further my understanding of the local customs and culture.…
Michael Williams
I am a native of Detroit and a senior at the University of Michigan in the Honors program for Afroamerican and African Studies. As a Spirit of Detroit Award recipient, I dedicate my academic research as well as professional and community service involvement to better understanding urban and social inequality and working to fight against…
Emma Lawrence
This summer I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Kolkata, India, two major cities in an area where millions are threatened by groundwater contamination of arsenic. I learned Bengali, the language spoken in this area and met with researchers at six universities and three different non-governmental organizations who are working on arsenic mitigation projects in Bangladesh…
Kelsey Duinkerken
This past summer I worked at the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Centre was started in 2004 as an extension of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, which was created in 1999 by Mr. Mandela as he retired from the presidency. As an archival intern I worked to make collections and documents…
Katherine Klaric
I spent this summer in northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina as an international teaching fellow with Bosnia Initiatives for Local Development, a youth-orientated educational non-profit active in the Tuzla-Doboj region. I helped implement two summer institutes offering free courses in English Language, Business Skills, and Information Technology to over two hundred and fifty high school and…