ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON- Two groups of Bard College students have been awarded 2024 Projects for Peace Summer Grants, which provide student leaders awards of $10,000 to implement a Project for Peace, typically over the summer. Bard students Ifigeneia Gianne ’25, Noa Doucette ’24, Leonard Gurevich ’24, Mujtaba Naqib ’24, and Antonios Petras won for their project “Creative Play in Malaysia,” an initiative to create immersive workshops and performances around the mediums of music, theater, and storytelling with the goals of helping refugee children in Malaysia to articulate their emotions, encourage their self-expression and build community. Bard Conservatory students Blanche Darr ’25, Aleksander Vitanov ’25, Lexi Lanni ’26, and Fredrick Otieno ’28 won for their project, “Musical Mentorship Initiative Kenya,” to establish a music mentorship program in Nairobi, Kenya, in which Bard students will teach music lessons and establish a creative partnership between Bard and the Ghetto Classics Program in Korogocho, an area of dense poverty in Nairobi.
Bard students Gianne and Doucette witnessed firsthand the challenges faced by displaced children during a study abroad experience in Malaysia. As of January 2024, Malaysia has some 186,490 refugees and asylum-seekers registered with UNHCR. Inspired by the fieldwork and relationships they started while abroad, Gianne and Doucette, along with Gurevich, Naqib, and Petras, initiated their Projects for Peace proposal,“Creative Play in Malaysia.” The first phase of their project will offer in-person collaborative creative workshops, aimed at fostering direct engagement and interactive learning, at three schools in Kuala Lumpur—Agape Mission School, Elom Community Center, and Fugee School—and will reach about 300 school children. The workshops they’ve designed will engage children in the exploration of music and sound, theater techniques and bodily experience of movement, and storytelling, recording, and sound editing for podcasts. “These facets of art underscore its transformative power, making them vital tools for personal growth, advocacy, effective self-expression, community building, and empathetic communication. We believe in the transformative power of art and performance as a medium of expression and communication beyond words,” write the project leaders. The second phase of their project is the creation of a set of activities, a kind of curriculum, which include a detailed list of ‘games’ aimed at integrating the arts into daily academic routines and introducing some new teaching techniques. While in Malaysia, they will collaborate with teachers on this curriculum, respecting the existing cultural and academic frameworks, discuss how it might be incorporated into the students’ learning, and adjust it based on feedback. Committed to an ongoing dialogue with the children, teachers, and school administration, the group plans to launch an online forum with the schools and children for continual communication.
Initiated by Bard Conservatory students Darr, Vitanov, Lanni, and Otieno, the Projects for Peace proposal, “Musical Mentorship Initiative Kenya,” builds upon two student-run Trustee Leader Scholar projects at Bard—the Musical Mentorship Initiative (MMI) founded in 2020 by Vitanov and co-led by Darr and Lanni, and Musical Mentorship Initiative Kenya (MMIK) founded in 2023 by Otieno, a viola student from Kenya. Their project will establish a musical mentorship program as a collaborative partnership between MMI, MMIK, and the Ghetto Classics Program (GCP), which serves more than 1,500 children in Korogocho, one of Nairobi’s largest slums and home to approximately 300,000 urban poor. Bard student mentors will teach individual private music lessons, offer personalized high-level music instruction in strings, winds, voice, percussion, and other instruments, and organize masterclasses, presentations, and music performances for the children in the program. Mentors will also donate much needed musical instruments including oboes, French horns, violins, recorders, and bassoons to the children in Korogocho. At GCP, children share a limited number of instruments, many in poor condition and in need of repair, which hinders progress for the young students who cannot practice at home. An even bigger problem is GCP’s teacher to student ratio, which cannot facilitate individual learning. MMIK plans to provide pedagogical workshops to the teachers in GCP, in order to improve the teaching methodology and potential of the program. MMIK will also organize an online mentorship program to help facilitate ongoing individualized music instruction and access to world-class professional musical education for young children, which is an extremely rare opportunity in Korogocho. The goal is to keep this program running for many years to come. “Music, with its ability to transcend linguistic and cultural barriers, can be used as a powerful peacemaker by fostering unity across diverse individuals,” write the project leaders. “While our project focuses on Korogocho, it also serves as a blueprint for unifying people from varied backgrounds in different locations. The purpose and community that music provides is also an incentive for the children in GCP to not turn to a life of crime, drugs, or violence on the streets of Korogocho. Our initiatives stand as a beacon of hope—instilling discipline, perseverance, patience, and empathy in the youth, as well as forging the next generation of aspiring artists.”
Otieno, an alumnus of GCP and one of the project leaders, adds, “Growing up in the third largest slum in Kenya, Korogocho, means that you are exposed to the darkest side of the world. Joining Ghetto Classics gave me a choice to live a different life. The exposure and the people I met through Ghetto Classics supported me and made sure that the dream of becoming an architecture student and viola player in a school like Bard College was no longer an impossible dream to reach. I managed to change my life through music and I know that someone else in Korogocho can also change their life as long as they have a skill at hand. With these children getting these opportunities, they are pulled away from their normal life and shown a different dimension of being in a slum. They are helped to shape purpose and build dreams for themselves.”
Projects for Peace was created in 2007 through the generosity of Kathryn W. Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist who believed that today’s youth—tomorrow’s leaders—ought to be challenged to formulate and test their own ideas. The Summer Grants program encourages young adults to develop innovative, community-centered, and scalable responses to the world’s most pressing issues. Since its founding, Projects for Peace has funded more than 2000 projects in more than 150 countries.
