Zaher Gauss - Deputy Minister for the Ministry of Information and Culture, Afghanistan
Richard Harrill - Public Interest Law Institute, Hungary
Richard
Harrill is the founder of two international
non-profit organizations: Youth
Service International, based in Washington, DC,
and its European partner,
Demokratikus Ifjusagert Alapitvany (DIA),
located in Budapest, which he created
as an extension of his work with the Peace
Corps. He works at the Public
Interest Law Institute, overseeing the
management of the Budapest and Belgrade
offices, as well as contributing to strategic
planning and program
development.
Between 2003 and 2008,
Harrill was a visiting professor of political
studies at Bard College, where he
also served as the Director of Bard's Program
on Globalization and
International Affairs (BGIA). While presiding
over the growth of BGIA, he
helped to adapt the program model to the
Central European University in Budapest
and the University of the Witswatersrand in
Johannesburg. Harrill has been a
researcher on international
youth policy at Columbia University, Senior
Fellow at the Bonner Foundation, a
member of the board of directors of the Campus
Outreach Opportunity League, and
a Peace Corps Volunteer. He has also served as
a consultant on youth policy to
the International Foundation for Election
Systems, Open Society Institute, and
Ford Foundation. He has a BA and JD from the
University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill and has been with PILI since 2008.
Reuven
Gal serves as the general director of the
Authority for National Civic Service
at the Prime Minister's Office in Israel.
He was appointed to this position in
January of 2008, after being
invited in 2007 by the Israeli government to
establish a universal framework
for National Youth Service in Israel.
Previously, Dr. Gal served as the Deputy
National Security Advisor, for
Domestic Policy, at the Israeli National
Security Council, and then served
as a senior consultant to the
"Beyond all the other things that we all know - that it's serving the community while serving the individual by enhancing and empower, it creates and enhances the concept of good citizenship, which entails a reciprocal relationship between the individual and their state, society, and community." - Reuven Gal
Mae Chao - Officer in Charge of Research and Development for United Nations Volunteers, Germany
Mae Chao
is a Volunteer Infrastructure Specialist at
United
Nations Volunteers (UNV).
She serves as
a key presenter at many conferences about the
importance of volunteers to
achieving the millennium development
goals.
Among her recent engagements have been a
VOSESA conference in
Johannesburg in 2007 to discuss the crucial
role of volunteers to development
in Southern African developing countries, and
at the European Conference on
Best Practice in International Volunteering in
Dublin in 2008, where she
explained UNV's recent research to provide an
overview of the different policy
approaches' impacts on encouraging effective
volunteerism.
"Youth are a largely untapped asset for achieving the objectives that we so desperately need to accomplish in the world" -Mae Chao
Kamini Prakash - Director of Streaming of Citizenship Action for Pravah, India
Kamini
Prakash is the director of the Streaming of
Citizenship Action initiative at Pravah in
India. Pravah was
founded in the wake of the attacks
on the Babri Mosque in Aydohya in 1992.
The attacks on the mosques ignited the
already heated tensions between
Muslims and Hindus in India, and led to riots
all across the country.
A small group of youth saw the conflict
as a
means of opening up dialogue between these
warring groups, and saw themselves
as the solution to the violence. These
youth founded Pravah to teach youth in India
about conflict transformation - being able to
turn a conflict into a learning experience and
a chance to promote
peace and understanding.
Pravah has
grown since its original founding to include
service-learning and dialogue
programs for youth ages 13 to 17, as well as
hands-on programs for those ages
18 to 30 in areas ranging from working in rural
areas to lean more about
development issues, to engaging youth in
theater and the arts.
While many organizations seek the
answers to
the pressing issues facing society, Pravah
prides itself in its mission of
finding the right questions, and searching for
the very roots of the problems
that are facing youth, with the youth
themselves leading the way in this
effort.
"Youth service is important for
making young people more active citizens, and
taking more responsibility for
their communities.
Pravah helps youth to
see conflicts as an opportunity to understand
different perspectives, develop
their own stance on an issue, and take action
to resolve the conflict." -Kamini
Prakash
Hinrich Goos is the
project director of Freiwilliges Okologisches
Jahr, or Voluntary Ecological
Year, in Germany.
Run through the youth
parish of the Evangelical Church in the
Northern region of Germany, this
program was created as an alternative form of
civil service for Conscientious
Objectors. The
program was established
in 1993 to offer young people opportunities to
protect the environment while
learning more about ecological issues. FOJ
combines active involvement in the environment
with a year of environmental
education, and a year of personal development
and career orientation.
Goos also serves as a prominent speaker
in
all of Germany about the projects that the
youth engage in through Voluntary
Ecological Year.
Hally Haynes currently serves as the Director of Youth at the Ministry of Family, Youth, Sports and Environment in Barbados. Here, he oversees the ministry's three spheres of involvement with youth: The Youth Development program, which hosts programs locally across the island for youth ages 13 to 15; the Barbados Youth Service, which is a one year developmental training program for youth ages 16 to 22; and the Youth Entrepreneurship Scheme, in which the Ministry partners with financial institutions to provide career training to youth interested in business. T
GK Somba
Kivalya is the Deputy Secretary of the Ministry
of
Youth, Education, and Sports in Nairobi,
Kenya.
This is a government organization which
engages youth in service to
teach them to be self-reliant and to endow them
with job skills, while at the
same time reaching out to populations in need
in Kenya.
Enrique Ochoa has a degree in
Political Science from the University of Buenos
Aires and is currently finishing a Master's
Degree in International Relations from the
Latin American Social Sciences Institute.
SInce the foundation of CLAYSS, he has been in
charge of the International Relations area,
participating in the Iberian-American
Service-Learning Network, and he is now the
Secretary of the Talloires Network Latin
American Hub. From the year 2000 to this
moment, he has also worked as assessor in teh
Ministry of Education, promoting
service-learning projects at schools, academic
institutions, universities and youth
organizations. He has further experience
in the academic field, both
at the middle school and University level as
well as vast work in research and
workshops. CLAYSS is an organization based in
Argentina, with an objective to
contribute to the growth of a cooperative
culture in Latin America through the
development of service-learning projects.
CLAYSS offers trainings and seminars,
technical advice and assistance, research and
publications, and a network of
community service institutions, all relating to
youth service in Argentina,
South America, and around the world.
Furthermore, CLAYSS connects schools,
universities, and higher education
institutions that promote service-learning,
providing resources for teacher
training and for optimizing
projects.