What People Say
I fell in love with GIIP over waffles one morning in downtown Santa Cruz as I soaked in the ideas and energy of the table full of GIIPers describing their projects and their dreams for a better world. From the Central Valley to Nigeria, India and beyond, the young men and women of this extraordinary program have latched onto the digital revolution and aim to mold it into a social revolution worthy of Nelson Mandela, Hugo Chavez and Wangari Maathi. As a Santa Cruz grad whose watched the indefatigable Paul Lubeck nurture the program for many years, I am honored to be a small part of this great adventure.
Dana Priest
Author and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, The Washington Post
GIIP Global Advisory Board
We now have a President who started his political life as a community organizer. And according to the New York Times of April 10th 2009 “Community Organizing Never Looked so Good”. The GIIP program and the GIIP Fellows are part of this broad movement but are blazing new and innovative trails. What marks off GIIP is the way in which it combines community work, social and economic justice, the enormous potential unleashed by the infomatics revolutions and a ferocious commitment to internationalism. They are the wave of the future.
Michael Watts, UC Berkeley
GIIP Global Advisory Board
At some point in your life you want to be very sure that you are doing something that you will be proud to tell the grand children as they sit in your lap. GIIP is one of the rare experiences in any educational system that gives you that opportunity at the very beginning of adulthood. So when you are feeling sorry for yourselves with those tough projects due, and you could be wandering the fields of campus in the green of spring - remember how fortunate you are to have a program and a professor that offer so much.
Mark Headley
Director, Matthews International Capital Management
GIIP Global Advisory Board
Dr. Paul Farmer has said, ‘The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.’ Participants in GIIP have spent the last 10 years doing what they can to substitute a different idea, the notion that those of us with privilege have an obligation to the less fortunate. Rather than simply using their skills for their own direct benefit, GIIPers have tried to share those skills with others, to help the disenfranchised empower themselves. They have been trying to answer what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once called ‘life’s most persistent and urgent question: What are you doing for others?’ Their answers have been various—and always inspiring.
Alan Richards, UC Santa Cruz
Former GIIPers:
You should send your children to UCSC specifically so they can be enrolled in that program(GIIP)--after 1-4 years in GIIP, nobody wonders what they will be doing with their life and how they can help with technological inequality in developing countries. Chances are they will already be out of the country working on a GIIP-sponsored project. Yes, I'm serious.
Miles Reed
Imagine a career that allows you to manifest your passion. Imagine working with talented, dedicated and like-minded individuals. Imagine the synergy created when a team rallies to help bring positive change to the public. I imagined this when I joined GIIP. And then I met my colleagues at Center for Multicultural Cooperation. We mentor, motivate and create opportunities for youth to engage in their communities in creative ways. To live life with a sense of purpose is an immeasurable feeling...you must imagine.
Julie Caso ('07)
I place all blame on GIIP for the sordid path my life has taken! For the last six years, I have worked with the Center for Multicultural Cooperation (CMC), a CBO that is dedicated to creating youth leadership and service opportunities that connect generations, cultures, and communities. We are based in Fresno and Sacramento, and work with hundreds of young people at 27 sites to implement California Voices, a participatory media program. I’m currently serving as Development Director with CMC, and have the good fortune to call two GIIP alumni my co-workers (MaryJane Skjellerup and Julie Caso). CMC has also enjoyed a strong partnership with GIIP, which has led to hosting underserved Central Valley youth at UCSC through the yearly GIIP-hosted UC Technology Leadership Institute, and the creation of californiavoices.org, where young people in our programs are beginning to share the media they create and engage in dialogue finding solutions to the great challenges that face their generation.
I thank my lucky starts pretty regularly for GIIP – it allowed me to cut my teeth in the world of community organizing and get real world experience fundraising, developing partnerships, and launching programs. It allowed me to hit the ground running after college, and I’m extremely grateful to Paul, Kyle, and the dedicated GIIP fellows who taught me so much. Most importantly, GIIP gave me the knowledge and confidence to seek bold, creative solutions to community challenges, utilizing technology as a tool to achieve the broader vision. It’s an honor to have been part of something created and sustained by so many dedicated, hard-working people.
Brandon Wright
I can say without reservation that the practical, real-world, work experiences that I was able to undertake because of my GIIP project gave me, among many other things, a unique edge in applying to graduate schools. After three years in Mali, I came back to the US, spending most of the last year doing volunteer nonprofit work and laboring over grad school applications. I was accepted just last week for a Masters in Public Policy degree at the Goldman School of Public Policy (UC Berkeley) for Fall 2009. I plan to focus specifically on market solutions to encouraging the growth of renewable energy. From small, grassroots NGO’s to large, international organizations, I saw the entire hierarchy of nonprofit development work in Bamako (Mali), witnessing firsthand the challenges at every level. At “ONG JIGI”, where I spent the first year and a half, one of the highlights was the 'SIDA est visible: fait-toi une image' project that I helped manage. This inventive project involved creating a multimedia AIDS awareness exhibit for schoolchildren, who were brought in by bus from all over Bamako. Extremely successful and popular, the project was exciting to the students, yet its real strength was that the project director was given enough freedom to tailor the operation to her needs on the ground. My time at JIGI, among many other things, taught me the importance of project autonomy.
Erich A. Huffaker ('05)
As I look back on the past four years of my academic career, it is without question that GIIP has had a profound affect on my life. My initial intentions to join GIIP was based on the simply perception that I wanted to 'go some where and do something.' I soon realized that this a lot easier said then done. My 6 month stay in New Delhi, India was one of the best times of my life. While I was there, I interned with an NGO called Butterflies where I taught street children computer skills. The difficulty in this was not so much learning or teaching the children technology, but it was to figure out a way to bring all the children together and keep them interested. The night shelter was chaotic with kids yelling, fighting and screaming, and I had to create some order to get something done. GIIP teaches students to expect the unexpected. However, GIIP also instills a level of confidence to deal with unexpected issues in the field.
In GIIP I was able to teach two technology labs to students, be a teacher assistant, and meet amazing motivated students. Like in most situations, it was not the end product or the final grade that made it all worth it; it was the process. It was the people I met along the way, the inspiring guest lectures, professors, and incredible fellows that I had the pleasure to meet and work with. Being involved with GIIP is one of the best decisions I have made in my life!
Dmitry Kogan ('09)
I am writing to you from the Central Gonja District Assembly office in Ghana’s Northern Region, where I am working on a one-year assignment as an Overseas Volunteer/Staff through Engineers Without Borders Canada. I am here because of GIIP and the inspiration it gave me to pursue my interests in international development.
GIIP's combination of development theory and praxis motivated and empowered me to take the knowledge with which I had been blessed and make a difference in the world. Also as an undergrad and after graduating from UCSC in 2004 I worked as a paid intern and later as a part-time employee with the University of California Atlas of Global Inequality, a project based out of UCSC’s department of Sociology. This project mapped indicators of global inequality and provided brief synopses of these indicators and their implications. With this work the awareness of the extreme inequality of wealth and health between the developed and developing world further strengthened my desire to be an agent of change.
Immediately after finishing my undergraduate degree in sociology I began a 5 month internship in Nigeria initiated through GIIP. This internship was two fold. I was an intern with Academic Associates PeaceWorks (AAPW) whose headquarters was in Abuja, the Nigerian capital and had field offices throughout Nigeria. Much of the work done by this organization was focused on conflict resolution in the Niger Delta region. I also worked in the city of Port Harcourt, leading training sessions with representatives of local NGOs in basic web design and graphic design programs. These trainings were a follow-up to a previous GIIP training program led by a GIIP fellow a year prior.
Working in Nigeria and Port Harcourt in particular, fueled the flame of my desire to continue working in international development and to deepen my understanding of the complexity of global interactions. Upon returning to the U.S. I immediately began planning my next global excursion and decided upon traveling to Venezuela to strengthen my Spanish and to enhance my understanding of petro-states. After spending three months in Merida, a city nestled in high in the Andes near the Colombian border, I decided that I needed to further my studies of international development and I planned to obtain a graduate degree in the field. In the Fall of 2006 I began my studies at the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science and in 2007 graduated with an MSc in Development Management.
GIIP served as a foundation and launching pad for my future studies and now my current job with Engineers Without Borders Canada. Thanks GIIP!
Gato Ian Gourley
While with GIIP, I facilitated digital video and digital storytelling class, ran Sustainable Environments working group, and was concerned with coalition building between GIIP and the larger environmental groups on campus and in the community. My internship in Kenya, allowed me to do PR work for three months at Sustainable Aid in Africa, a water provision and sanitation organization along Lake Victoria in Western Kenya. After proving myself there, I then graduated to do video work for the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, and had the pleasure of debuting my documentary-short, “Bamboo: A Poor Man’s Timber No More!” to an audience at a side event for the 2006 International Panel on Climate Change. Taking on these leadership roles and learning-by-doing, has been invaluable in all that I have done since GIIP. I feel empowered to do what I want and confident that I can figure out how to do it.
Katie Roper ('07)
