So good morning, everyone, and welcome to the U.S. Institute of Peace. My name is Kevin Hovland. I'm the Executive – Deputy Executive Director at NAFSA. And it is a beautiful day here in Washington, D.C., although we're having some traffic difficulties. So congratulations to those of you who made it here. We are live-streaming today as well, so welcome to those of you who are not struggling through traffic in D.C. Welcome also to International Education Week. Today is the first day, and NAFSA is pleased to be sponsoring this event with our partners. We also, for those of you who might be interested, are sponsoring the Paul Simon International Education Award. That's also being live-streamed tomorrow at 4 p.m., so check that out if you're interested. For those of you who don't know NAFSA, NAFSA, the Association of International Educators, is the largest nonprofit organization dedicated to all things international education and global learning. We have 10,000 members around the world and across the country. And in addition to questions of mobility and global learning and student outcomes, we spend a lot of time thinking about the role of international education and peace building. And therefore, we are thrilled with the opportunity to partner on this event today. There's another event that NAFSA also sponsors that I would just draw your attention to, which is the Ron Moffitt Seminar on Peace and Global Civil Society. Some of our panelists have been involved in that, as well as Jeff from USIP. And that happens in conjunction with our annual conference late May, early June. I'd like to thank some NAFSA staff who pulled this together on our end, as well as Heather McLeod, who's not quite here yet. I think she's stuck in traffic. Breanna Phillips, thanks for all the good work. And as well as Tina Haggadorn from USIP and I'm sure untold numbers of others in both organizations who had a hand in pulling the complicated logistics together. I'd like to formally acknowledge our partners, the Alliance for Peace Building, as well as the US Institute of Peace, without you all, we could not obviously have done this. And especially USIP for hosting us in their lovely facility here in D.C. Finally, I'd like to introduce our moderator for today, Jeffrey Helsing. Jeff is the Acting Vice President for the Academy for International Conflict Management and Peace Building here at USIP, and I will turn it over to him. Thank you, Kevin. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the US Institute of Peace, and it's a real pleasure for us to be hosting an event that's focused on international education. The United States Institute of Peace was actually established a little over 30 years ago by Congress, and we were authorized and appropriated by Congress as part of the education committees. So education has been a primary part of our mandate over the years, and we, at this institution, have worked to link education and peace building, both in the programs we do here in Washington, but most particular the programs and the work that we do overseas. To our way of looking at peace building education, educators and educational institutions are a critical component of long-term sustainable peace building. So in societies where we are working, we are oftentimes working with education sectors. And education sectors oftentimes are very active actors in peace building work in societies that are in transition from war to peace. Some of the bravest, smartest, most entrepreneurial people that I have met are professors or teachers who oftentimes work in what we call under two hats, meaning they're sort of teaching by day and peace builders by night or any other free time that they may have. And that's true whether you're in South Sudan, whether you're in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Burma, et cetera. So oftentimes on the front lines of peace building are educators. And so one of the challenges for the peace building community, for the conflict resolution community, as well as the education community is how can we work to sustain, to support, to enhance the work that's being done by educators and how can education serve as a bridge to efforts to build peace around the world. And there are numerous examples and models of effective education efforts that are linked to peace building. And so for this panel, particularly with the focus on International Education Week, this panel represents those who engage with peace building and with education on an institutional basis. And really, this is at the core of the work of those who are represented here today. And so I think you'll find that we have a terrific conversation ahead of us. And we're delighted that we will be able to open that conversation up to those of you in the room, as well as those of you who are online. So with that, let me very briefly introduce our panelists. And I will introduce them in the order in which they will be speaking. First, Melody Greenberg, who's the president and CEO of the Alliance for Peace Building, which is not just an organization that is dedicated to peace building, but is a consortium of really active, very engaged organizations and individuals who are peace builders by avocation and peace builders by profession. And the Alliance is engaged in really cutting edge work on peace building and trying to advance and professionalize the field of peace building. Then next will be Shamil Idris, who's the president of Search for Common Ground, a global conflict resolution and conflict transformation organization that works in countless conflict zones around the world. The U.S. Institute of Peace is proud to both be a partner of Search as well as a supporter of Search. And Search for Common Ground is one of the most respected conflict related NGOs doing great work globally. And then Don Steinberg, the president and CEO of World Learning, which is one of the premier educational exchange and development programs both here and abroad. And World Learning is engaged in countless programs for young people, for educators in the United States and throughout the world. And then we'll hear from Kurt Patterson, who is actually the head of the engineering program at James Madison University. But as a sort of dual-hatted individual, he is also the head of the chapter of Engineers Without Borders, which is one of the most interesting, active student organizations that help students develop projects and programs for work overseas, oftentimes in conflict-affected areas. And finally, we'll hear from Fanta All, who is the assistant vice president of campus life at American University, where she's very engaged with study abroad and international education issues. But she is also president and chair of the board of directors of NAFSA. So she also is dual-hatted in a sense, very much lives and breathes international education. So I think this will be an exciting panel. As I said, we're delighted to be hosting this. And with that, Melanie, the floor is yours. Thank you. Just tell me how I load my talk. Sorry, everyone. Monday morning. Good morning, everyone. It is such a pleasure to be here. I'd like to thank NAFSA and USIP for being such wonderful partners in our joint mission for Peacebuilding. And to thank all of you for coming today, the beginning of Education Week, and managing through DC's terrible traffic this morning. I'm finding it very poignant to be here on the Monday after the terrible events this past week in Paris and Beirut. And in Paris especially, so many of the people who were targeted were young people who were gathered in a particularly integrated part of town to join together to celebrate music. And it was just at that point that those terrible events happened. And I think it's important to think about this because there would be a temptation for American students and for students around the world to want to shut down, to say, it's too dangerous a world for me to engage in. And I think as Education Week starts, we have to have exactly the opposite impulse that's only through engaging, through understanding, through having difficult conversations and for being a peace builder in every part of your life that we will change the narrative around the world and create peace where we're, unfortunately, seeing violence now. So it's important for all of us, I think, to think about that context as we talk today. So as Jeff mentioned, I'm with the Alliance for Peacebuilding, our mission is to advance sustainable peace and security worldwide. We're a global membership organization of 100 members working in 153 countries. And students are very active, and we really see a great part of our mission as training the next generation, not only of peace builders, but of people in a range of fields who can think about anything they do through a lens of peace and security. We foster collaboration and issues that are too large for any one organization to tackle alone, and we look forward to being partners with all of you in your own peace building and education activities. My job today is to give us a sense of context in which we're talking. My colleagues on the panel can give you wonderful examples of the dynamic peace building that they're doing around the world, but I want to talk today about important ways that the world is changing and the kind of environment in which our students are trying to make peace. At a very fundamental level, the nature of power is changing. Some of you might have read Moisa's Naim's book about this, but as we think about power, when I studied international relations in college, it was very much a state-centered model. But now power is devolving from governments into very powerful civil society and cross-border networks. This could be very positive where you can see anyone with a cell phone can start a social movement. It can also be negative, as we've seen with ISIS, with cross-border criminal networks, but how we can harness this new power that's devolved from government to mid-level and grassroots level is one of the great challenges facing peace builders in the future. The nature of conflict itself reflects these shifts, as we've seen this weekend, and we're not only seeing the standard models of civil conflict or interstate conflict, but how do we handle gang conflict, urban violence, cross-border criminal networks, and of course terrorism. In this new world order, civil society plays a power for role. And I'm not sure we all understand the real power that civil society holds and how we give our students the tools they need to harness that power. Some of the powers that civil society has in today's world are to connect. It's easier now to connect with anyone from your neighbor across the street to somebody far across another continent around the world, just through Skype or your cell phone. You can create. You look at a huge number of social media platforms, arts platforms, music, entertainment, peace, almost any academic enterprise. There are ways of building connections we never could have had before. Conflict transformation, we can transform dynamics of conflict, dynamics of power, dynamics of peace through new forms of communication. Civil society can inspire by showing new forms of energy. Civil society can consult. There's a wonderful program now called the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States, a very radical aid experiment which brings together donors, governments in fragile and conflict-affected states, and civil society. Civil society is built in through the whole process to consult with government and to think about the drivers of fragility. And finally, civil society can mobilize in ways that I'll talk about further in my presentation. Civil society action can take many forms, social movements, individual action, education, protest, and dialogue. Here are a few examples of civil society peace building. There are many people who still think about peace as something that happens between governments. But I thought I'd give you a few examples of how grassroots processes can transform societies in conflict. Fomble Talk is a very innovative peace building program in Sierra Leone. And it started soon after the Civil War there ended. And it uses indigenous peace building methods. Traditionally, enemies come together around a bonfire and apologize to one another and then move on from there as friends. And of course, that sounds very simplistic and there's a great deal of work that goes on to get the people to the bonfire in the first place. What Fomble Talk has done is that once these bonfire conversations have taken place, everyone is required to join some kind of collective, a women's collective, an agricultural collective, a jobs program, a youth empowerment program.  So when Ebola struck, Fomble Talk was able to mobilize their network to become an education program. And at a time when there was tremendous mistrust of government. For example, when the government was giving out soap for hygiene, people were thinking, no, they're giving us Ebola. Members of the Fomble Talk collectives, the women would go door to door with soap that they had made, which said Fomble Talk on it. And it created trust and it created public health. But as an example of how a peace building and social mobilization group was able to turn in crisis to an education group. Corruption is often cited as a cause, as a severe driver of violence. We often talk about it in terms of development programs and government level change. The fifth pillar, which is based in India, but is now spreading throughout the world, uses grassroots anti-corruption campaigns to change corruption patterns. So one of their initiatives is called the zero rupee note, where if you're a parent who's being asked to give bribes for school fees, if you're trying to build a building, you're asked to give bribes for a building permit. You wrap a bunch of these zero rupee notes around with one kind of small denomination note and you give it to the person taking the bribe. When they open it up, they see this note with a little text about corruption and people are educated to call their ombudsman or whatever powers there are where you can identify and broadcast corruption. Finally, grassroots processes and the development of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, it was a vastly different process in this year's SDGs and the Millennium Development Goals were 15 years ago. There was a huge grassroots campaign, partially online, where you could vote for which international issues mattered the most to you, to consultations in every continent to what civil society was invited. So at the goals, the very ambitious goals that were just adopted in September have real grassroots influence to them. In peace, we think not only of negotiation mediation, but peace is a system. And you think about all these different flower petals in our model here, peace is not only negotiation mediation, it's education, development, democracy, health, women's rights, atrocities prevention, business, security. And if peace is a complex system, then civil society plays a key role in that ecosystem. And at any point along this pedal, there are civil society actors who can influence the entire system in an outsized way. So what can students do? The basic building blocks of peace building are first to understand culture, to understand difference. And this, of course, is what NAFSA does so well, and all of the students who are engaged in learning about other cultures. You need to learn to listen to points of view different from your own. This seems very simplistic. But in a world where you can focus all of your media, all of your social media, all of your conversations, among a small tribe of people who think like you, learning to talk with someone else, to understand a different perspective, not necessarily to give up your own, but to put yourself in another person's shoes is a key skill. How you act in your own community can have a profound influence, have a conversation, work with community groups, identify in need, build a movement, or make a small change by connecting with others looking to reduce the culture of violence or conflict. And finally, learn how to connect the local to the global. It's impossible to segregate the two. I was in Minneapolis a few weeks ago talking with members of the Somali community there. And they're living every day. Conflict within their own communities is connected to conflict in Somalia. And teaching their young people to be parts, both the citizens of their own communities and to build resilience there, but also to make change in Somalia was a wonderful link of how these two were so closely connected. We all have the power to create peace. And I feel it's our responsibility as senior peace builders to give students the tools to harness civil society energy and to become leaders themselves. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you all very much. And thank you to USIP, the Alliance for Peace Building, and NAFSA for having me here today. It's really a pleasure and an honor, and especially to follow Melanie speaking, who's been really a giant in our field for many years. This event happens to come for us at Search for Common Ground right at the moment when we've been calling the lessons that we've learned internally around education for peace building. We do a what works session every month or so where our country leaders from around the world call in on a specific theme, and those who have really broken you ground in that theme will kick it off by speaking, and then everyone will sort of pipe in with questions and challenges. So we had our what works session on education and peace building last month, and we just produced on Friday, and I left plenty of copies for you all out front, this practical guide on emerging practices in design monitoring and evaluation for education and peace building. Now this is in particular around education for peace building in fragile and conflict affected states. It's the result of a research project we're doing together with UNICEF. Cover takes sort of 14 case study examples, seven of them in places where we work, our local teams in Yemen, in Chad, in Indonesia, and elsewhere. They're a total of 14 case studies also from other excellent organizations, and it really endeavors to provide very practical information, practical tips and tools and resources for all stages of the program cycle in developing peace building education programs in fragile states. So with that bit of advertisement, I actually want to shift a bit to very much directly pick up on what Melanie was talking about, which is international education and cross-cultural exchange in its link up with peace building today. I couldn't agree more with, and I find it hard to consider how anyone couldn't agree with Melanie's point that today individuals have more power than ever to really affect the security and stability of our communities. And the fact that the barriers, if they ever really existed between the local and the international, have really collapsed. And I think it is true that the events in Paris and Beirut of the last week are really just a demonstration of these collapsing barriers. And it's natural for people to react with fear and terror in the face of these kinds of things. I think the corollary that Melanie pointed out, that that same power for individual action rests on the side of building social cohesion and peace is also very much there and evident. And in that context where individuals are much more powerful to influence international stability and peace building, I think it becomes increasingly critical that we develop the kind of educational experiences for young people that develops in them the attitudes, the skills and the relationships to build a safer world and to problem solve in an increasingly interconnected world. Those attitudes being empathy and curiosity about the other. Those skills being cross-cultural communication and collaboration skills. And the relationships being relationships of trust across whatever traditional dividing lines there may be within or between societies. Now in that world where we wanna develop much more of those kinds of educational experiences for young people, there really are in my view two very pressing realities we have to confront. The first is how do we do this at a much larger scale? Much larger scale, orders of magnitude, not doubling or tripling, but orders of magnitude larger scale than we've ever done it before. And how do we deal with the fact that we're trying to foster that cross-cultural engagement in a world that is tremendously imbalanced where there are huge injustices that persist and that are motivating violence around the world? So on the first one, I think there is some there is some help for us in this effort in the fact that those attitudes, skills and relationships I talked about that are critical for peace building also happen to be some of the most critical skills, attitudes and relationships for employability in today's world. Why is that important? Because whether we like it or not, whatever drives shifts in education when those main drivers happen to link up with what also supports good peace building education I think we have to go with that flow. And so the fact that an increasingly interdependent world and an increasingly globalized economy, employers are looking for young people who have the ability to deal across cultures and to collaborate across cultures is critically important and it's helpful to us. Now over the last five years, before I worked at Search for Common Ground for 13 years and then I left for 10 years, I was at the World Economic Forum and then the United Nations and most of the last five years I ran an organization called Solia which was really pioneering a field that is now called virtual exchange. And virtual exchanges are simple to define. Their technology enabled, they're sustained not one off chat, sustained people to people education programs. There's a pedagogy to them. And the real power that we began to see at Solia in these kinds of experiences in our, I'm saying our because Solia and Search have now joined forces. In our programming, we were connecting young adults in the US, Western Europe and Muslim majority societies for what we call virtual exchange experience is something called the connect program. And this too I left out front for everybody, plenty of copies of this. This is essentially, I should have gotten the slide up but this is essentially what the platform looks like. It's sort of small group, almost like honor seminar style dialogues always with the facilitator where half of the young adults are from the US or Western Europe and half are from Muslim majority societies. And we specifically create the groups to try to bring together young people who otherwise wouldn't come in contact with one another. And if they did, for instance online in a chat room it could very likely go in a nasty direction in an unmoderated chat room. If you look at any news article just follow the news from Paris and see how the comments are flowing. So we would make sure we get the evangelical young man in Texas with the atheist in Paris and the Islamist in rural Egypt and the Imam in training in Saudi Arabia. And they're part of this cross-cultural exchange experience. We've been doing this now for more than a decade and what we've seen in that approach is that it's incredibly powerful, it facilitated well in fostering exactly those attitudes, skills and relationships. But we were growing at a rate of about 50 to 100 students a year which we saw I was going to be dead buried long before it had anywhere near the impact we wanted it to have. We worked a lot over the last five years with other partners recognizing there were other players in this field like Global Nomads Group, Iron and others to advocate for a new field to be created and fueled and catalyzed. And that field is the virtual exchange field. Some of you might know that President Obama in February of this year announced the first dedicated fund for virtual exchange. The US government for Arab governments and now the Bezos Foundation have all invested funds in this foundation and the Aspen Institute now administers that fund and has had its first call for proposals last month. The whole idea between that virtual exchange fund called the Stevens Initiative named after the American ambassador who was killed in Libya is to foster the largest increase in cross-cultural educational experiences in history to try and enable over one million virtual exchanges between Americans and their peers in Muslim-majority countries in the next five years. And there's no reason that it should be limited. This field should be limited to just those regions. Over time it should be much broader. This is one of the only models that I can see that is truly scalable and we're desperately looking for scalable models of doing what we're talking about because again if individuals are increasingly powerful then we can't afford to live in a world where less than 2% of young people participate in any kind of exchange experience or study abroad program. And where a huge proportion of those are between the US and Western Europe, which is nice but it's not exactly bridging our biggest divides. The second and last and I'll be brief on this one challenge that I think we have in addition to how do we increase the numbers and the diversity of participants in these kinds of programs is how do you deal with this when you're bridging differences across huge power divides? Anyone who's worked in this field, not for me, almost every semester, every semester that we run this program views come out from young people saying that the September 11th attacks in the US were a hoax and they were planned by the US and Israel. Every semester most of the groups have the view expressed that Islam is an inherently violent religion, that these aren't extremists but this is what Islam preaches. When those kinds of sentiments come out in an unmoderated fashion among young people who haven't had experience across cultures, they can be very polarizing and damaging. And one of my biggest concerns with the current preoccupation with countering violent extremism and radicalization is a lot of the policies tend to shut down free expression and stigmatize what young people are saying that is unpopular or virulent in some people's eyes. In fact, what we need to do is the exact opposite, create safe venues for those things to be voiced and engaged with. One of the most profound findings that we saw again and again from these virtual exchange programs and I think it holds for traditional or physical exchange as well, is that being agreed with is actually not that important to people in terms of shifts in their attitudes. Being respected and heard is all important. So we would have these groups where somebody would say something, throw a bomb into the room figuratively and not a single person agreed with them but because they were treated with real respect, listened to and engaged with as valued members of the small community, it has a profound impact on them. They become much more willing to engage in self-criticism, maybe consider how one's own community might be contributing to the conflicts that we're seeing in the world, all of that. But none of that happens when people come into a setting where they feel like they're on the receiving end of negative power dynamics and their narrative is simply not going to be heard or will be shut down. And so in that kind of world, I think it really needs to, we really need to, as we try to scale up, also have our thinking really influenced by knowledge and experience and how you bridge these divides across these real power dynamics because they really do exist today. And throughout history, there have been periods of relative peace, Pax Romana, Pax Britannica. There are a lot of people in today's world who are not eager to see what they would consider a Pax Americana. People want peace to be developed within the context of advancing justice, not just quelling violence while injustice continues. And that's not a small thing for us to take into account as we try to expand exchanges. So thank you very much for your time. Well, thank you. And it's very hard to follow these two remarkable presentations, but I will try in part by reinforcing a couple of the points that have just been made. World learning as an organization was actually founded in 1932 for the express purpose of using intercultural exchanges to forestall conflict. Our founder, Donald Watt, saw that World War I was gonna be repeated in Europe. He didn't know when, but his goal was to send young Americans to Europe to try to understand what was going on the continent and to send Europeans to the United States so that if indeed conflict did emerge, we could put the pieces back together again. From that very simple route, we've now had more than 200,000 people participate in our programs, which are now increasingly not European based, but going into developing countries and in particular into conflict related countries. We've been pleased that actually four Nobel Peace Prize winners have participated in the programs over the last 20 years, that being Jody Williams, who led the landmine movement, Wangari Matai, the head of the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya, Taurkar Karaman, the woman's rights advocate from Yemen, and most recently, Khalish Satyarthi, the children's rights advocate from India. I wanted to reinforce the point that both Shamil and Melanie made regarding this visceral reaction that we all feel when we see what has occurred in Paris or Lebanon. This reaction that says the world is a dangerous, messy place, and I want to withdraw. And it's a very natural reaction, but it's obviously one that we have to resist. If you look at world learning programs, every time Ebola emerges in West Africa, we lose students who would be traveling there. Every time we have a shooting at a mall in Kenya, same reaction. Every time an earthquake occurs in Nepal, the same reaction. And yet what's very clear is unless Americans have the opportunity to travel abroad, to do home stays, to do community service, to study languages in those environments, we're gonna turn into a xenophobic country. Donald Wadd, our founder, had one premise that he used to operate under, and that was you learn to live together by living together. And as such, we at World Learning, we sponsored the experiment in international living, which sends American high school kids abroad. Again, they stay with local families, they do community service, language training. In a number of those cases, they actually study peace building in South Africa and Korea. We also then send 2,000 American college kids abroad. And they do the same community service, they study locally, they study peace issues in countries like Rwanda, Uganda, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia. We have a master's program at our campus in Brattleboro and here in Washington, where we teach peace building and conflict transformation, as well as global development issues and international education. We also run a program called Contact, where we bring peace builders from a variety of countries together. And in the case of Asia, we bring them together in Kathmandu, Nepal, and they compare notes and they challenge each other, exactly the way that Shamil was just mentioning. Finally, we bring delegations to the United States. We bring Pakistanis and Indians together and they travel around the United States. They see that these are not the stereotypes of the populations that they have been raised with. We bring Palestinian and Israelis together. We bring Cuban high school kids to the United States and they see the good, the bad and the ugly. They actually spend a week in Washington where they study Jeffersonian democracy, they study peace building, they study conflict transformation and they study race relations and they see the challenges that the United States faces. Equally important, we're doing international education abroad and so the concern that we're all expressing regarding Lebanon, which was a tragic experience and I'm a little concerned that the stories about Lebanon were on the fifth page of the New York Times and the stories about Paris are on the first page of the New York Times. It reflects a bias in this country. But the reality is that more important than the bomb that went off in southern Lebanon is some of the work that the international community is doing there. In the case of world learning, we are working with 300 communities impacted by Syrian refugees and we're building educational opportunities in those environments. In Lebanon, the estimate is up to 2 million refugees from Syria in the country. Country has 4.5 million people. We freak out in the United States when 80,000 Central American young people come across our borders and yet in this environment, the Lebanese people have accepted about a third of their population without a xenophobic reaction. But we're concerned that that may not last and so what we're doing is we're building the capacity of schools to handle the influx of Syrian kids. We're training teachers specifically in how to deal with the trauma that those individuals feel. We're helping communities to put together peace and conflict transformation, mediation capacities so that when there's a fight over squatting on land or using electricity or water or jobs, there is a mechanism to handle that. And so this is really peace building in action through international education. We're doing similar work in Pakistan where we're training 90,000 teachers along with International Rescue Committee, Creative Associates and a couple of other groups. And the specific purpose of that is to build basic literacy capabilities in the regular schools, to build the capacity for parents to choose to send their kids to an excellent educational system as opposed to sending them to madrasas where they will learn other things. And these systems are open to girls, they're liberal, they compete with the madrasas and they provide a quality education. And I will say that when we decided to go into this program, my board was very reluctant. We had not been in a situation like Pakistan before. And so I went out and bought 25 copies of the book, I Am Malala. And I sent each member of the board a copy. And I said, read this book and if you don't believe that our mission in international education and building girls' rights to education and combating extremism around the world is consistent with our involvement in Pakistan, please let me know. And let me assure you no one did. I'm not sure anybody read the book, but it did work. So just to conclude, the vision of international education that we have is not one where the United States sends students abroad to teach, to educate the world, to share American values. The five principles that Donald Watt established at the beginning of the organization still apply today. He said, go abroad, expect the unexpected, turn crisis into an adventure, be quick to observe, but slow to judge. He said, go to learn and not to teach. And as I said before, he said, learn to live together by living together. Thank you. Good morning. It's an honor to be able to share with you a national initiative that operates at the center of three very compelling challenges. This first one, I'd say is in a way addressing this issue of how can we change or affect the odds for peace. It's probably one that you're familiar with. These numbers are often shared to underscore some of the basic need challenges around the world. Certainly these people tend to struggle with this sort of cycle of disease, resource depletion, and the human suffering that is attendant with those things. What I wanted to posit today is that addressing these sorts of challenges are foundational prerequisites to peace building and certainly sustaining peace in communities around the world. The second challenge that I wanna mention for this particular initiative is actually this question of how do you engage engineers in this arena? While the profession and our students are highly regarded and hardworking, the reality is that few of them participate in international programs. The numbers for study abroad are sort of optimistically about 2% of engineering students a year participate in study abroad at their campuses. This third challenge is can you pull this off with volunteers? And so again, at least dealing with young people, the current trends are mixed. The rates for volunteerism are down in the US, but the volunteerism that is being done is often this sort of episodically shorter term, kind of one-off volunteer opportunities and they're often situated in a very local circumstance. So I'm happy to report that engineers without borders have been operating within these challenges and as I'll show you in a bit, achieved quite a bit of success over the past decade. So I wanna address a few of the big picture outcomes, the approach of how this is done and then a very particular component of impacts that's occurring from this organization. So let's start with the membership. And I wanna show this very simple table just to underscore a couple of things. What can happen in a little more than a decade? And particularly for the students attending, this is a good example of how somebody with an idea can have a big impact. There's now almost 16,000 members of EWB USA. The work that is undertaken in EWB is in about 40 countries to date, a little more than 300 communities in those countries and collectively about 700 projects have been pursued in those locations. I shouldn't mention it's a little bit of a preview of the approach, but these community relationships are predicated on at minimum of five-year engagement. These are not intended to be sort of show up, do some good and then leave. So, you should know that most of these projects are the requests of the communities themselves and this chart in some ways is a reflection, I guess, of a global picture of what people around the world are asking for. The kind of basic need is again and again and again, usually access to water, reliable, safe, clean, sustainable supplies of water. You can see some of the other projects deal with food in the agricultural sector. Sanitation is one of those basic needs that if you can deal with it, you might be able to eliminate a good deal of disease and suffering, structures, things like pedestrian bridges, could be drainage systems, roads and so forth and then some energy ones as well. So those are the top categories of project work that's been undertaken. Let me share with you how these projects tend to unfold. First, step back perhaps and think about the mission and then we'll provide some context for the project work. So the two real points of EWB's existence is to one, try to be of assistance to communities around the world and then through that, develop this generation of strong engineering leaders and have this global mindset, a willingness to engage and participate. I'll also mention that everything I've showed you so far is really from this first of four initiatives that EWB currently undertakes. So these international community projects are really the heart of EWB and that's where it got its start. More recently it's added these other three. Yeah, there are issues in the US in terms of access to those same kinds of resources and so there is now a domestic program. It's got about a year or two of experience so far is up and running. The Engineering Service Corps, I'll just mention briefly are engineering professionals. These are not students, but engineering professionals with good deal of experience and development and they are now offering their services pro bono to NGOs and governments around the world. This last one is a global engineering leadership program that had its first start last year in Panama and then upcoming there's another version of this occurring in Costa Rica. These are students from around the world converging to learn more about these topics. So let's go back to the projects. The projects are executed through chapters, chapters of EWB and as Jeff mentioned, I am the faculty advisor to the EWB chapter at James Madison University. So this breakdown of these chapters is now about 300 of them nationally. About a quarter, a little more than a quarter are groups of professionals. The DC area has two that I know of. There's DC professionals and there's one now for Northern Virginia professionals, but the vast majority of them are students, university chapters. And so if you do the math, there's about 200 universities in the US, 200 colleges of engineering that have an EWB chapter now. That's why you're starting to see this sort of plateauing of the chapter creation. We've got pretty good penetration, so to speak, amongst the universities that have engineering around the country. Very rapid growth. This is typically how a project might be executed. There's really three important phases. At the front end, somehow the community gets a hold of the EWB chapter and that's a more complicated process that I wanna go into here, but just know that it's the community reaching out for a chapter. The three stages of a project, assessment, then design and implementation, and then some sort of monitoring near the end, and then next steps, which is usually, okay, we finished one project, what do we wanna do now? Just some quick shots of what that might look like. Assessment, yes, there are some technical aspects that are assessed upon arrival in the community, but a lot of this is listening, understanding the needs of the community, even though the upfront piece of contact is the community expressing what it is that they think they might need. Then the project will move into an implementation. There's a design and build phase to most of these, and if things are working well, there are both locals and, and we'll call them the visitors, working side by side. And if it's gone really well, they've been designing side by side. And then this evaluation stage, which is generally a lot of listening. How has this gone? Has this resolved the needs that you have? Do you have a way to make this sustainable? Does it seem like it will be sustainable? For the impact, let me mention a few things. I wanna focus on the students, because this has been truly transformational. If you don't know engineering, this has been truly transformational to the study of engineering, the offering of engineering curricula, and then certainly post-graduation opportunities. So one thing to think about is how this is stretching the learning of typical engineering student who's involved in EWB. One is this issue of being very focused on the user and what their needs are. This human-centered design is very different approach. It's very collaborative, usually engages the community in a way forward. The design that is executed has to be at least at a level that is sufficient to meet U.S. or international standards. Engineering profession works around standards where we need to make sure that these infrastructures are safe and reliable, but done with a way that's appropriate. And one of those things that has to be appropriate is are the resources available locally? Can this be constructed locally? Those challenges are sometimes extreme. And then lastly, this point of community engagement, and that works both ways. It's one of engaging engineering students in the community but also engaging the community in the work of engineers. It goes both directions. This has been revolutionary. As I've mentioned for engineering, if you know anything about engineering, we struggle to have 20% women in most of our programs. EWB participation more than doubles that. It is consistent phenomenon. You go around to those 200 chapters. You see a very similar phenomenon at every university. I wanted to conclude with a little bit of deep exploration, the question of why do people participate? There's now with the legacy of EWB exceeding a decade, there are now some real scholars digging into this question and beginning to reveal why. Why do individuals show up? And one issue here is the kind of personality traits. And so this is recent work from Amy Javernick-Will and Caitlin Litchfield at University of Colorado. And they looked at these personality traits and they compared EWB members to engineers who are not in EWB. And they look for significant differences in these personality traits because there's this sort of mythology that the engineers that are in this are very extroverted and so forth, very different. What they found was really just these two qualities that are significantly different and in a higher way. That's good news perhaps. That these EWB engineers tend to be a more agreeable personality and open and it may be reflective of the kinds of students who tend to step forward for these sorts of things but this has really involved thousands of participants, so fairly robust study of so many things. And then there's the motivation to study engineering important for the engineering profession for sure. And just note that perhaps the easy ones to understand and not so surprising is this cadre of student very interested in being an engineer to focus on social good and community development. And so EWB gives them an expression for that need. Some kind of work I can do that can do a little good in the world is a big driver. So let me summarize EWB about 700 projects to date nearly 40 countries, 15,000 engineers and others it's not just engineering students and engineers but broader array of professionals, 15,000 strong. The impacts I think are people are getting some real experience, they're making real contributions and it's a more inclusive form of engineering. I would conclude perhaps with the hardship of knowing what does contribute to peace. My time in the field working with communities I believe that these projects are tilting the odds for the communities to sustain peace. I will say though that there are some secondary benefits a little more closer to home that it may be also adding some level of peace to the profession and then also simply the state of mind of the individuals who do this work. Thank you very much. I do not have any slides. Good morning everyone. It's wonderful to be here this morning and I have to stay in my role with NAFSA. One of the things that I think is probably most important is to constantly ask ourselves how do we get this work done but more importantly understanding that we can do this work alone. And so being here this morning and having this partnership with the US Institute of Peace and the Peace Building Alliance I think is an incredible reminder that in order to do this work it really requires partnership and it's great to have also search for common ground here, world learning and the engineers without border here at this table to illustrate the point that in order to do this work we have to do it together. As I reflected on the comments from my colleagues I think there are a couple of takeaways that I'd like to kind of start with. One is this idea that really this is not about teaching this is really more about learning and I think Don made an extremely important point about the fact that if we're gonna engage in this work constructively and if we're gonna engage in the real work of international education it is not simply about teaching our students it's really helping our students to learn and learning in more critical ways than they've ever done before. We also heard about the importance of the fact that as this work continues we have so much work to do the needle does not seem to be moving no matter what. This morning as we're having this conversation here our colleagues are talking about open doors and they're talking about the data. My interest in being here this morning is to really look beyond the numbers. It's great to hear that we have more international students coming to the US. Good to know. Good to know that there's still that we're having an increase in study abroad students. The reality of it is the so what question? Really? So what? That we have more international students coming to the US. So what? That the number of American students going abroad has increased. When we know that the realities are that there are so many more students out there that are not having this form of education. That is a reality and that is the challenge that we're constantly having to grapple with. And so to be able to have a conversation about what is the intersection of international education to peace building I think is a fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves. And it is a conversation that requires many people being at the table and ensuring that we have the right people at the table to have the kind of conversation that is needed if we're going to make inroads. So my comment this morning are really around sort of four critical elements. One is this whole issue of how do we grapple with the social construction of realities? What does that mean for our students and what are the implications? What does it mean that we had the kind of tragic situation that we did in Paris last week? But as Don mentioned, we also have had this in Beirut. What does it mean that at the end of the day when we look at just sheer numbers the folks who have suffered the most from this are those in the Middle East? And yet we're silent about that. What does that say about the world that we're in? And what does that say about what lives we privilege and why? These are conversations that we have to have because with the absence of not having those conversations come at a real cost and it comes at a real detriment to the overall education of our students and really to our societies. And so as we're having this conversation I hope this week that for those who are teaching in this subject matters that they will have the courage to in many ways deconstruct what the media portrayal of information is. That they'll have the insight to ask ourselves the question of for the students who are studying abroad those who have the opportunity to retreat because they can get on a flight to come back home what does that mean for those who don't have those opportunities? That have to stay in the throes of it and have to learn on the ground and have no other option but to learn in that manner. What does that mean for our field? What is the implication for the work that we do? So the first most critical element in our work has to do with the social construction of realities. How we construct those? In what ways we do them? And for what purpose and what intention? That's the first and most important I would say critical issue that we have to grapple with. The second has to do with the fact that when we look at the numbers of students who are going abroad, when we look at the number of international students who are coming to study, we have to ask and have the courage to ask ourselves what form of education are we really providing? What is the education that we're providing and how do we know that it's working? That's a question we have to ask ourselves. It's not enough to say that we have international education. It's not enough to say we have to put our students on planes and they need to get somewhere else. We know the danger of contact theory. It's not enough that they're there. What are they learning while they're there? What kind of inroads are they making while they're overseas? Don and others provided some insights on what are the mission of organizations but also more importantly, what do we know what happens to them when they're on the ground? Kurt provided the example of what is the real benefit of volunteerism when it's done well versus what is the danger of volunteerism which is still prevalent within quite a few of our programs. Where we say, well, you know what? The goal is to get you abroad without understanding that it is not enough. It's not, the goal is not to get them abroad. The goal is for them to learn about the other and to learn about the others in ways that increase their emotional intelligence. So it's not enough to get them on planes and get them out there. How is it as a result of them being in those different environment, what is it that they're learning and how do we know that as a result of what they're learning, they're increasing their emotional intelligence so that their portrayal of the other is not one that continues to be one of vilifying the other but it is really about understanding that the other is very much like me but also different from me and that they have both of those insights simultaneously when they're studying abroad.  I think we have a lot of work to do in international education as it relates to the curriculum. The reality is the majority of our students will not step foot outside of the territories that they were born in and that they're gonna be educated in. So what are we going to do about that? Shamil talked about the benefit of virtual education. I'm a big proponent of virtual exchange and virtual learning. Not to say that it is a substitute to being able to actually being there and being present but we know from research and we know from data that when you start as soon as you can to plan the seeds of opportunities and possibilities for students, the more you can hide in their awareness, the more you can hide in their curiosity, the more you're likely to have them to begin to engage potentially in different ways. So there is room for a lot of more work and we have to be able to do more of that work. What does it mean that we still study international relations and absent from international relations are conversations about race? What does that mean? What does it mean that we're still in 2015 and we talk about international relations and absent from conversation of international relations are conversations about gender? Where's the role of intersectionality in that work? And yet, Dawn mentioned that as we look at Nobel Peace Laureate, many women have been recipient of that. Wangari, Matai and others were recipient of that. What does it mean to have the absence of gender and race in the discussions and in the work and the teaching that we're engaging in? We have much more work to do because that absence speaks volume about the fact that there's a lot more that is missing within the work that we do. So we have to ask ourselves the question, what are we teaching? From what perspective are we teaching it? What knowledge are we privileging and why? And what are the implications over the long haul if we're talking about peace building? We also know that with peace building, there must be some conditions in place and it's about human security. Fundamentally, we're talking about human security. So as we send our students overseas as our students come to our parts of the world and so forth, what is it that we're doing? What, how are we teaching? How are we explaining to students the fact that the nature of human security continues to be the most dangerous threat and that we cannot accomplish our work around peace building if we do not first and foremost address these issues fundamentally of human security. Those are the kinds of things that we must embark on and we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean to internationalize our curriculum? Internationalizing our curriculum is not simply about throwing a couple of elements within the curriculum. It's about the fundamental overhaul of the curriculum if we're gonna do this work in the way in which it needs to be done. We talk about engaging our students and we talk about engaging our students in difference and understanding difference and how they in many ways conceive the other. I think about that a lot. I think about that a lot because also I think embedded in that is that we're not going to be able to find the answers with our students just sitting in classes. We have to think about engagement in a fundamentally different way. We had some examples at the table about the importance of community-based learning. I'm a major proponent of community-based learning and I do think that our education abroad must have at its center community-based learning and research. Now why does that matter? It matters because it goes back to this issue again of it's not about teaching, it's about our students' learning and sometimes the best way to learn is to understand that it's not that we have the answer is that those answers are within those communities. What we are able to do is on the ground ask pertinent questions, ask difficult questions and from those questions have the trust that within communities exist the answers to that. And the more we can work with our students, the more we can work with our scholars, the more we can work with our policy makers and others to understand that fundamentally at the level of community is where much of the answer is. The better we're going to be in doing the kind of work that we want to engage with international education and that is a fundamental role that I think we have. So as I sit here this morning, I would say a couple of things. We have multiple challenges ahead of us. And the first thing we have to ask ourselves is international education for what purpose? Not international education, the activity, but rather than international education from a perspective of outcome and impact. The second question that we have to ask ourselves is how is the curriculum reflective of that or more importantly what is the absence in our curriculum that is reflective of much more work to be done? What does an internationalized curriculum mean? What is the role of intersectionality in the curriculum? The third element has to do with the importance of community based and experiential education. It is not enough that our students understand this cerebrally. They need to understand this at the level of the heart. They need to be able to connect the head and the heart. And in order for our students to be able to connect the head and the heart, we need to do more than have the classroom infrastructure. We need to be able to connect that to the communities. We need to be able to connect that to the realities that are on the ground. And the more we do that, the more I think we're going to be in a better position for the work that we do. And so I would say again with the beginning of international education week, this is an opportunity for each and every one of us to really renew our commitment to a different form of education and to an education that is much more holistic than what we've had. To an education that is much more critical about even the work of international education than we've been willing to have. And that at the end of the day, yes, we have a challenge, but I also think we have a real opportunity to make a real difference if we're willing and are able to ask ourselves these fundamental critical questions. Thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning and I look forward to the discussion. Thank you to each one of our panelists. I think we had a very rich set of presentations and many interesting topics and ideas to pursue as we go forward with our discussion. I wanna make one observation and then I will take the opportunity of having the mic to ask the first question. But the observation is that everything that you heard reinforces one of the essential skills that we use in the training that we do in US Institute of Peace Programs, whether it's training of peacekeepers, whether it's training of young leaders in our generation change program, whether it's training of diplomats that we're gonna do in a couple of months in Vietnam. And that is the essential skill of listening. And it is something that has to be at the heart of peace building work, international education, developing community-based learning and that part of the challenge is to ensure that in fact that learning is something that reinforces dialogue as opposed to debate. And too often we get caught up in the need to sort of win an argument or make a point or be right or even feel that, well, we know better or we know something that you don't. And so the skill of listening is something that all of us in peace building and engineering and education study abroad is something that really needs to be reinforced. So with that in mind, I'd like to ask our panelists a question that in many ways is something I've been wrestling with over the weekend because I have a colleague who's in Lebanon who's been talking about the tragic bombing there. One of my best friends is in Paris currently who's in the music business, not in the peace building business and some of the conversations that have emerged from their interaction with others. And one of the things that concerns me is that there's a resistance to at this point in time when we have these terrible events and these tragedies there's a resistance to mutual understanding. There's a much greater effort to in a sense see this as us versus them. And some of the language, some of the analysis, some of the so-called expertise, tends to in fact see this world as a zero sum game. And in the light of this where there are some who would argue that cross-cultural experiences may in fact reinforce cleavages because there are those who don't want mutual understanding. There are those who see sort of exchange as something as a means of conversion, of sort of the American way of life or the Western way of life, or that in fact to be open-minded about different beliefs and identities. Simply the act of, as Sharma talked about, is about engaging with people because they want to be respected. There are some who would argue that that then sort of opens up an excuse for the other when in fact these are just extremists and they're radicals and they want to kill us. And so in a world where that kind of language continues to really proliferate around these tragic examples of violence, how can then those who are educators, those who are working on peace, how do we work to in fact make the case for the impact of the kinds of programs that we're supporting, the kinds of programs that we're building? How do we in a sense sort of in our own way not counter violent extremism, but in fact counter those who see peace building as something that's soft, that enables a sort of violence or violent language who enables those who would take advantage of the goodwill or the good goals that we've been talking about this morning. So that would be my initial question and then we will open it up to the audience here. And the audience who are online. Don? So I think a lot of it is about language and I will relate a story when President George Bush was first responding to 9-11, his language regarding the axis of evil which pilloried not just individuals but three countries. The use of the language war on terror struck many of us who were in the administration at that point as inappropriate. And I was the deputy director of policy planning at the State Department at that point and a draft came over and we pointed out that this wasn't the proper response. That the proper response was to look very closely at the roots of the challenges that we were facing. And at the State Department we went in and we looked at the connection between instability abroad between disempowerment of women in Afghanistan between all of the issues of human security that Fanta was describing, between economic growth and the absence of job creation for young people. We were looking at the absence of political response by leadership, the destruction of civil society and we're seeing that even more and perhaps one of the things that worries me most at this point is the closing space for civil society all around the world. And finally the absence of transitional justice in many of these situations coming to grips with the past and the abuses. And we all know, for example, in Afghanistan that one of the roots of the Taliban coming to power was American support for the Mujahideen. And so we were trying to argue that this narrative was wrong. It was simply not a question of a war militarily against terrorism. It was the need for a full bodied response along the kinds of initiatives that every one of our panelists has been raising. Unfortunately, I think we're still in that paradigm and I think what it's going to take is exactly the kinds of programs that we're talking about here. And as Shamil says, it's not a question of a few more students participating internationally. It is a question of taking this to scale, big time. I am deeply concerned by the statistics that Fanta was citing and I will stress that they're not only the overall numbers are bad in terms of Americans willing to see the reality of what's going on internationally, especially during the period when they're most receptive to this, i.e. during high school and college and as graduate students. But what's also deeply disturbing is the absence of people of color who participate in study abroad. And there's a new initiative. We're working with Spelman and Morehouse to expand African American participation. We're working with Haku to expand Hispanic participation. But it's also the LGBT community. It's also racial and religious minorities. It is the people with disabilities who do not participate in these programs. And we have to enlarge that so that indeed Americans do understand that there is a different reality out there. Yeah, Sean. Three things. I think one is, I think we should be, those of us in this community should be much more aggressive and assertive in challenging the demand for proof and metrics. Now, on the one hand, I think with Melanie sitting next to me, I'm very proud that we work very closely with Alliance for Peacebuilding on this design monitoring and evaluation portal for peace builders. Many people probably in the room were among the 5,000 members of that community where we were constantly looking at what is the latest state of the art in designing, monitoring and evaluating the impact of peace building programs, including education for peace building. This guy that I just shared with you tries to push that envelope a little further on design monitoring and evaluation. But I think we should be really pressing for a leavening of the demand for metrics. If we're trying to create a world that's more stable and secure, we should be looking at every intervention and which ones are proven to produce the more stable and secure societies. Military approaches, inclusive, nonviolent approaches and everything in between. So I'm very happy to be called to task for approving the influence of our work, but I would like a dollar for dollar match of a comparison on these kinds of things. I think just philosophically, I think we should also be much more assertive the way Gandhi was and others about the power of aligning your means and your ends that it's pretty difficult to create a just world through unjust means. So there's a real power and integrity to that. That's a very strong place for people to stand. But even separately from that philosophical sort of orientation, I think the results are actually quite there and increasingly being documented. I think we have to enable people to mourn and get over the shock when the immediate aftermath of these kinds of horrible events that's very natural for people to recoil. And I think what we found and I would imagine most of the effect, you know, world learning is very deep programming and the provision of emotional experiences for people are so critically important. The emotional experience of being accepted and heard of being, you know, and not just the rational argumentation. We all know that you can use the same statistics to make 180 degree different points and people actually do this. You see this again and again when you plop the same facts within two people who think completely opposite things. Those facts are used to reinforce exactly what they were saying. And so for me, this whole notion of how do you scale this up is how do you scale up the emotional experience of engagement with the other as a positive experience, as a affirming experience? And those are, I think, some of the ideas that we're trying to press here. Well, thanks for the softball question. First out the door. So I want to talk first about the listening component because I think that that's a theme that all of us need to do much better. And it sounds so basic. It's one of the hardest things in life. And this brought to mind for a number of years I trained congressional staff, Senate, Congress and very, very conscientiously Republican and Democrat around the time the government shut down a couple of years ago. And I wanted to put an active listening unit into the training, but I was getting feedback that maybe that sounds too kindergarten-y. So I asked my husband, who's very good at these things, if I could come up with another name for it. And he suggested the term forensic engagement. But what we ended up doing with this group was we just asked a very open-ended question. How has the government affected your life wherever you grew up? As people talk from everything from they lived in the Bronx and got food stamps and public assistance to they lived in Montana and their main form of association with government was the Bureau of Land Management or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. And for the first time, and we did this in pairs and each side had to really listen to the other side. And they kept coming back and saying, wow, it's the first conversation I've had in a long time. I wasn't thinking of like the next point of the debate. I was just listening and I started to understand like why somebody has a conservative kind of framework coming from how they interacted with government or why you had a more liberal framework. So I thought that was a very powerful example of how hard it is to get people to listen but the power can have in a transformative way. And I was thinking about that again this weekend is of course I was glued to my computer and one of the pieces that I found the most powerful was a jailhouse interview with a member of ISIS who's now in jail in Iraq. And Scott Antrim and another researcher were interviewing just listening to the stories of how these people got radicalized. And it was a very, very nuanced story. It wasn't the axis of evil. It wasn't a kind of fundamental view of Islam. There was this incredibly powerful web of connections of a young man who grew up during the US occupation who was soon seeing a Shia agenda being put forward who lost his job, who was one of 17 children trying to provide for his own family. And he was brought into this in a kind of complicated way through his family and his larger kind of clan. But we need to do so much more of that listening that there's so many reductionist narratives going on now about countering violent extremism. We have to understand a whole way of thinking that's really sometimes alien to us here in the US. There aren't very many opportunities for it but I think until we do more of that we can't even think about how to engage most effectively. And I completely agree with Don and Shamal that the space is closing. It's illegal for many peace builders now under the material support laws to even be having these conversations. And so I think we also need to be lobbying for more space to do this work. Well, thank you and we'll now take questions. Siri and Angela will bring around Mike. So if you have a question raise your hand and then please identify yourself and if your question is directed to a particular panelist. So not theoretical. So Kurt, I am not an engineer but now I wish I was because your presentation was so cool but I am very good at connecting people to resources and I'm wondering how I would, I know a lot of engineers and I know one in particular here that I'm taking up in DC and he goes to UDC so I'm wondering how I would put him in touch with you. Well, that's easy but I don't know what the intent is but in terms of connecting, this is an engineer who's thinking of being involved in EWB and the good news is at least a half dozen chapters within the DC Metro and that would be a starting point. There are the two professional chapters I mentioned earlier and then several of the local universities have them as well. So there's extremely local points of engagement and if there's something else that you wanna contact me for then I'm happy to take the next step. Yeah, that's easy enough. My name is Alexander Jesu Dasan. I'm the president of Madras Christian College based in Tamil Nadu, South India. I'm very happy to be here with you this morning to listen and to interact on this panel discussion. Our college is a 178 year old college formed by Scottish missionaries and as a part of our 170th year celebration we have formed a center for peace studies and we have developed a peace education curriculum back at the Madras Christian College and we hope that that would be made available to many colleges in the country to be adopted because as a structured form of peace education I don't think that is available in a country and we are with the help of the United Board and we are going ahead on that. I'm very happy to be here with you this morning because I've got many takeaways from this panel discussion to be incorporated appropriately in the kind of content that we are going to be developing. Number two, in terms of internationalization we do have a number of colleges and universities which are coming from the United States to the Madras Christian College and what they really say at the end of the international program is that they've always have had a life changing experience and there I find a head to heart connect. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, Don. You know, one of the things we haven't talked about Fanta alluded to it is the type of international experience you get because increasingly, unfortunately, study abroad is perceived as two weeks in Cape Town with a group of a hundred people traveling around the city or going off to some campus in Western Europe and what you do is you sit in a classroom with a hundred other students and that is considered international education. That does not result in the transformative impact that we're talking about. A number of institutions including world learning do it in a different way. You take small groups, 15 students in general, you do home stays, you do community service, you study language, you don't live in big hostels, you don't take classes at big universities, you do independent study programs that are based on some global issue whether that's climate change, whether that's how indigenous people are dealt with, whether that's social justice, and that's where you get the transformative experience. I love the story of one girl who actually participated in our experiment program for high school kids and she was from the Upper West Side of New York and from a very wealthy family. And she was taken to Northern China and she saw the poverty and the difficulties in that environment. She then was taken up to Mongolia and we put her into a yurt by herself with a pad of paper and she was asked to sit and reflect on one question and that is what does privilege mean and what are the responsibilities that come with privilege? And she wrote an essay that just blows you away and when I asked her what the takeaway from it was, she said, I left the United States as a high school girl and I came back as a global citizen. Yes. Agnieszka Pateńska, I am at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason and I direct the master's program there and we have a lot of field-based courses that we tried around precisely for this reason to get people to not only open their minds but also their hearts, to engage them emotionally at different levels. But there's this huge challenge that we're facing and I don't think we're particularly unique in that of scaling this up and in particular making these sorts of experiences available to students who do not have resources because you are in a context of American education, higher education where costs are going up tremendously to really do these deeply engaging programs. Abroad is frankly expensive and so I'm just looking for if you have ideas about how this particular, the bike can be improved in some way to make these sorts of experiences available to students of color, to students who do not have the financial resources to pay the four or $5,000 for a trip that allows them that kind of exposure. This is, of course, I'm coming from a state university where this in some ways is, I think, particularly challenging. Thanks. Thank you. Fanta, you want to take that? You've touched on a really important point and that is really this issue of what the economic barrier to the experience and how this continues to be a pervasive issue with the line of work that we're doing. One of the things that I've been pondering a lot more is really where is the opportunity and possibility for public-private partnerships and what would that signify and what would that mean? I do think that there's an opportunity to better leverage that than I think we have done in the past. It will not solve the overall problem of the scaling up that is needed within that but I do think that there are opportunities within the public-private partnerships and ways to be able to engage them much more fundamentally. The other question that I think also has come up in many instances is that we've seen with these kind of experiences that you've talked about. We've seen two schools of thought, right? We have the economic barrier, which is real for a lot of students but I would say the other major barrier is the mindset, right? Which is sometimes much harder to be able to kind of crack that knot in many ways and I think some of that goes back to what was asked earlier from our moderator, which has to do with the kind of rhetoric that often is out there and the kind of what I would say the danger of revisionist history that in many ways continues to create I think a lot of these barriers that are there as well and I think for the students that we wanna see go and have these experiences, we're facing both the economic and the mindset as well and those are two major challenges that I think we have. Part of it has to start with the curriculum and what we do at the front end to kind of in many ways I think create much more of that open door and space and then I think the second thing has to do with the way in which we continue to finance these opportunities. I've been also saying that in some cases we don't have to go very far for our students to learn these lessons and I think this idea again of how do we connect the local and the global is a really, really important part of it as well and I'm not sure how well we're leveraging the domestic sphere in the learning for our students as well and that's the other element that I think we have to really pay attention to because I'm very concerned that a lot of times our students think that these problems are happening out there only when in fact they're starting here and the connection between the global and the local I think is fundamental. I was just gonna add on that last point. It's one of the reasons I was one of the programs I didn't get into at all this sort of domestic programs that EWB is now starting. It was partly those latter points, the sense that yeah it's not just out there and wherever there is that have these kind of issues and secondarily this scale issue. There are not good answers at least from the EWB model other than the sheer growth, right? Numbers of chapters, that's how you get scale but I will go back to the point of how you might finance and this is just an example of the reality. So I showed you the number of projects. A reasonable question would be well how do those come to be, right? I mean in terms of if you think about infrastructure at some point somebody's gotta pay for it. So I will tell you that one I listed some of the learning that is achieved through EWB participation. One of the bits is many of the students become master fundraisers and that all these projects are primarily through fundraising and it's often through private industry donations, could be personal donations. Some of these cheap projects might be 10 or $20,000. You might have to raise $50,000, $100,000 to achieve some of these projects. So they're not trivial amounts. I will only offer it as simply a different way to see the same challenge that there is maybe a different source of money rather than asking the students to dig even deeper into their pockets. So to be very practical, I too just came back from Minneapolis but I was there to talk with major corporations and I talked with a major food producer who said if you can arrange for study abroad programs focused on food security, we'd be delighted to help you finance it. We talked with a major company involved with medical supplies who said if you can figure out a way to get STEM students to participate in this program, we'll finance it. Another thing that we did with the experiment for international living, which is a high school program, we partnered with UBS who gave us a very substantial amount of money to send 125 young men of color from New York City on the experiment for free. And that kind of a program with the private sector engaged can really transform things. And so you probably ought to be reaching out to those community leaders, both civil society but also the private sector in this community. I'll just add one more thing to that about reaching out. Go back to Shamil's point of I would definitely underscore the need and value of evaluation, particularly of some of these outcomes that could be of interest to people that might have money to give. Mr. Dole. My name is David Dole from MIT's International Science Technology Initiatives and I wanted to ask a flip side of that. Shamil, I was very inspired by your assertiveness regarding the need to scale up. So if I gave you a billion dollars, a five billion dollars right now, we've figured out the financial thing. What are you gonna do with it? I mean, honestly, I don't think I need that much for what I'm talking about.  They could do more in-depth programming. That'd be great. But the U.S. government puts in $580 million or so a year into exchange programs. It took several years of making the case in a million different ways to get about 1% of that allocated towards virtual exchange. It's a no-brainer. When you look at the fact that, when you look at the educational impact, when you look at the fact that the students who go through that program are, some of them are students, not only who don't have access or resources, but who might not have even been interested in engaging internationally. Who, when they first have the interaction after two weeks, complained to their professor that there's a Jew in their group. Should they be worried about this? Or a flip side who say, there's a kid in my group of interns at Al Jazeera. Isn't that the al-Qaeda media outlet? Literally, that happened on Baylor University Open. The kinds of young people that get engaged in that kind of programming. And if we could put in about $30 million into that kind of programming, you'd be at such scale of those kinds of interactions. And that'll light a fire. All those young people, so many of them then go, oh, wow, I would love to, oh, they're programs that world learning runs that I could apply to. Others, we need to light a fire at that level of scale. And about that money, an amount of money would enable you to do it for young people who otherwise wouldn't have access or wouldn't even realize that they could be interested in that kind of an experience. So that's what we would like. And you look in, last thing I'd say is in this country, I think Donald was, I don't know who was saying it, but these are very much issues playing out at home, especially on race relations. And you look now, so the University of Missouri president steps down. Why did he step down? Well, because of students protesting, but really because the football team said, we're not going to play. And so the university is gonna lose a million dollars a week if we don't play. We see on American campuses all over, you have these flare ups on race relations. Somebody puts the swastika up, this happens all the time, every semester on so many campuses. Somebody, I don't know how many years ago, 20 years ago I got the idea that every incoming class that a university should read the same book and then have a discussion group. And a lot of universities adapted that. I did that. I know a lot of people who did that. I would love right now for any university that's concerned about social cohesion on campus to run for all the incoming students a virtual exchange experience with each other, where you get the inner city kids, the rural kids, you get the religious and the secular, you get the different races and that you run those small discussion groups in the summer before they all come onto campus.  Because I think these are the kinds of things that really are scalable, they're feasible. They actually don't cost a crazy amount of money. Yes, ma'am. I would like to speak, if somebody can speak about the role of arts education in facilitating empathy, understanding, non-verbal dialogue in peace building. And another question would be, in this world where metrics are so important to get funding, how can we kind of go beyond aggregate data and really explain what's happening, which the numbers might not show and still obtain funding and prominence? Really quick. When I talked about emotional experience with the other, some of the, not the only, but some of the best ways of enabling that kind of emotional engagement is through the arts, through music, through those kinds of experiences. In our programming, when we enable the students to move from those facilitated dialogue sessions to what we call a media module where they all take the same clips or the same photos and they edit a brief news piece, if they've been really polite to one another up until that point in the curriculum, that's when it really breaks because they've all taken the same pictures and told really different stories. You take the images from Paris right now, what are the stories that different people around the world will tell about that event? And that's not necessarily arts, but it's creative expression. It's editorial engagement. So I think that those kinds of things are very powerful. On the metrics, really quickly, we worked with the SACS lab on your campus at MIT Neuroscience lab. Melanie's worked a lot with us as well on developing tools for gauging increases in self-other overlap, basic measure of cross-cultural empathy. How much does, you see your own identity group overlapping with that of another? And does that change as a result of this engagement? Because self-other overlap increases in that have been proven to correlate to all kinds of behaviors we wanna see. Greater willingness to help others, less willingness to support violence against others. And so we're able to actually show these things, even if not that, we can do it at an aggregate level, but we can actually do it at the student by student level, but by developing and piloting some of these creative measures. So I think that, I don't even sound like it's over, but I think it's there. I was just gonna give you some hope that good engineering can't be done without art. I mentioned human-centered design. One of the key tenants of that is empathetic design. It's empathy on the front end of who you're working with. But I also mentioned that, you know, there's a real opportunity. Infrastructure in some ways are these physical monuments of people coming together, of achieving something together. I believe, and I think the best teams that do these projects understand that everybody benefits if the infrastructure is beautiful, whether it be a building like this that we're in, or whether it be a latrine that you designed for somebody in South America, in a village. That beauty, aesthetics shouldn't be an issue of, well, because that's a cheap thing or inexpensive thing, you don't get that. But because this is tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, okay, we can afford those things now. I think art and at least engineering, which is my world, go hand in hand to achieving this sort of delight, this well-being that I think a lot of us strive for in our lives. Hi, Ruth Roman, Atlanta National. So I have two scenarios here. I see at my school, my Saudi students, my Venezuelan students, my South Korean students become brothers and sisters by the end of their term. And I see that as peace-building. On the other hand, events like the ones from last week make me wonder, what else can I do to bring awareness without bringing debate, bringing dialogue without bringing debate? When my daughter and I were watching the news and we saw all the steps that France was taking as a reaction to what happened, and my daughter went, that is so wrong, that is a wrong way to go about it, bombing, that it's just violence, that's not the way to build peace. And I asked her, well, what is the way? And she said, dialogue. So however, I'm listening to this, I'm thinking, okay, dialogue, how do we dialogue with this? What would be your answer? How would you dialogue? How would you create dialogue as opposed to debate? Mellor? Well, I think one of the key things about dialogue is that it's open-ended. And even though it might be facilitated, you have to kind of let it go where it takes you. I'm thinking of a really, this actually gets back a little bit to the arts. There's a really interesting, very small scale now, artistic experiment, where former journalists for the Washington Post have set up portals, they're really shipping containers, and they have a video link to Tehran. So you can just go in as a Washington member of society and talk to someone on the other end about everything from your motorcycle, your girlfriend, how you feel about the Iran nuclear deal. So you might not see that as peace-building, but it's a way of just trying to understand how ordinary people are viewing this. And ordinary people and children and young people often have that right initial instinct, what, we're bombing them, that's crazy. But we have to listen to a wide range of views, and it's not always easy. And why I think the facilitation that Shyamal talks about, where the difference between a chat room with all the invective and a really respectful, facilitated dialogue, it's a safe space. I wonder could I quickly just give you an answer in the arts question. I think that peace-building over the last five to 10 years has really privileged the highly technical. It's part of our trying to create our field as being seen as kind of hard and effective. But I think that we've tended to underprivilege the arts in that, although there were people doing wonderful work at the intersection of arts and peace-building. And I'll just give you an interesting example. I was in Hawaii last summer for the systems engineering lab. Some of the world's top systems engineers and peace-building systems experts were there. And part of our challenge is to work on local Hawaii, Hawaiian kind of complex problems. And so we had a number of different presentations of how would you illuminate using data and visualization these complex systems around food security, health, obesity, culture. The one that got most people talking and that really helped illuminate the problem was a painting that a local teenager had done that used symbols from all of the different kind of cultural and religious artifacts of Hawaii and showed a man who was kind of divided down the middle of one hand kind of being very kind of American mass media, the other being very traditionally Hawaiian. And it was only through that artistic representation that it got everyone talking about the deeper roots of the issue. And so I think we have to be much more conscious about how we blend the arts with the technical. I would just say quickly two things. One is the flip side of the cacophony and the nasty is being too eager to get people to empathize with one another. I was talking about power dynamics because one of the most damaging things you can do is push somebody who feels victimized to empathize with the people they see as victimizing them. And when you're caught in this vortex of a conflict where both communities see the other as their victimizers, it's a very challenging place to be. So need to open up some of that space for expression of anger, for the expression of, and creating that safe spaces can be tricky. But I wanna try to rush to reconciliation. I'd be looking to proliferate those safe spaces for true engagement and dialogue in ideally with some manner of facilitation. The other thing I would say is, with those students you talked about from those backgrounds, I mean, I don't know. I imagine if you asked them that question they might actually have some really better ideas than I would have. So I agree entirely that you can't come at these issues directly. You've gotta come at them from an angle. I was thinking about this the other day. We brought 20 Japanese high school students to the United States with 20 Korean high school students and they were studying civil activism throughout the United States and they traveled and they came back to Washington. And I asked, so what was the dialogue that took place between you? And they said, well it was pretty stunted at the beginning but we actually, at the end, talked about comfort women in World War II and the Spratly Islands. And so, and then they looked at us and they said, we know that's why you really brought us, right? And to some extent it is. It's the same reason you bring Palestinian and Israelis together, not to talk about the Middle East peace process but to talk about child education around the United States. Same with Pakistanis and Indians. So it's hard as Shamil is saying to try to take this on so directly, especially when it's fresh. If I can also just make a quick comment on the monitoring and evaluation question. For those of you who know my experience at USAID, you know that I'm Mr. Monitoring and Evaluation. I do believe in time-bound measurable goals. I believe in feedback loops. I believe in the capacity to do longitudinal studies. But I would just remind you, how do you do a monitoring and evaluation survey on the value of educating Jody Williams with an SIT graduate degree who goes off and then starts the movement that bans landmines internationally and ends the crisis of 15 to 20,000 people being impacted each year and ends the tragedy of countries using these weapons. How do you measure that? I can't put a value on it, but I sure know it's important. Wangari Matai who leads the green belt movement for women's empowerment and environmental protection in Kenya and then it spreads throughout the continent. How do you value that? They say a cynic knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing and I agree. Hi, my name is Karen Gladbach and I'm with the Pan American Health Organization, WHO's Regional Office for the Americas. And I have a question. The virtual exchanges is something very new to me and very intrigued by. And I'm wondering, I know when people write things virtually, they say things that they would never say face to face. And as you pointed out, that's probably a value. My question is more about the concern of that. How do you de-escalate conversations that come about when you have that kind of open virtual environment? And I imagine the facilitators have to be very skilled in methodologies and doing that, but how does that happen? Our facility, you have to go through 25 hours of training to facilitate for us and it's intensive and then you get coached during your actual facilitation as well because it's a challenging environment. Our particular program, there are more and more programs and I'm hoping now with this fund that's been launched that there'll be a proliferation of new entrants into this field and some of the people in this room might become some of the leading experimenters in different virtual exchange methodologies. There are sort of three components to it. There's the platform that you use, our platform I showed you. So it kind of lends itself to, you're almost like in a small, you're seeing each other and that has real benefits. It has some drawbacks too. You need higher bandwidth to do that than to just do the text. The second element is the pedagogy that's underneath this all and we have a couple of weeks of standardized experiences that the students have, but the vast majority of they're eight weeks together. They do weekly sessions two hours a week for eight weeks. The vast majority of that, the last six weeks is entirely self-directed with the facilitator. So young people get into the issues they want to with each other. Because of the nature of the demographics they tend to gravitate towards issues like, you know, women's role in society or what I think about religion and what impact does religion and politics have in your country? Because this is what it seems like to me, that kind of stuff. And then the third element of it is the quality of the facilitation. And this is a critical component. Interestingly, once people are sitting across from one another, we usually have the opposite problem. People are overly polite. They think they're going to be hated. They think they're going to be shut down. And so we work a lot with our facilitators. We call it sort of steering into the curb a little bit. Because the goal of this program is not to enable young people to have easy conversations. It's really to enable them to have difficult conversations well. And so when a student comes out and says, and you can see, they can open up private chats with each other. You know, in addition to the main chat in the middle that anyone can contribute to. And some of the most interesting things happening in those side chats. So they're all different kinds of facilitators tools. They're over a hundred exercises that they can pull from depending on the dynamics of the group. So the facilitation is heavy. So it's not as scalable. We were talking about it. It's not as scalable as something where you just you get a platform that's exciting, that meets people's needs. Everyone's going to rush to it. You go to a billion people in a couple years because facilitation costs. But there are other models. Different organizations use different models. And so you'll get different answers to your questions. And I'd be happy to talk after this as well about that. And several of the models usually include having it integrated in the curriculum. So that you actually have some foundation knowledge, for example, into cultural communication and others to help kind of create some structure to it as well. So there are lots of different models that help address that. We have time for two questions. I'm going to take them both at the same time. And I'm going to take man in the front and then the woman right back there. Yes. Anzol Afab from the Budapest Center for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities. We are coming in Europe to a situation where peace building actually is needed inside the continent. It's very much needed inside several countries that are experiencing because of the migration wave, both coming from east, so Ukraine and from south. What are the means and the challenges that you see? And maybe the opportunity is to use in different of your platforms or ideas in this realm that is Europe, that is I think more and more not used anymore to do peace building inside the European community and we are now facing the problem then. And we'll take your question and then we'll have the panel answer both. Yes, please. My name is Jacqueline. I'm a grad student in the International Training Education Program at AU. And I'm curious to sort of going back to what Fonto is saying about the global local collaboration and I was just wondering if the panelists had any ideas about what sort of roles community colleges have in this sort of internationalized dialogue that we're having. Thank you. Okay, what I'll do is just then go down the row and enable our panelists to answer the question or provide a concluding comment. So Melanie. Thank you. On the European question, tremendously complex, I would say just two things. The first is I'm concerned that the migration question is seen only as a migration question and the impact on Europe, but the need for us as a global community to resolve the peace building questions and to resolve the conflicts where they're starting that it can't only be the European question although that's very important. And the second is what I haven't heard as much coming out of Europe is the engagement of young people. How are they envisioning the future of their continent? How do they think about intercultural kinds of communities? And if there's some way that we as an educational and peace building community can tap those resources, I would just love to explore that, but this could be a subject of a whole seminar in itself. On the question of the local to the global, I think that universities are the ideal platform for that because along any issue that students might be studying within their majors, looking at leadership questions, there's both the technology, the kind of intellectual bandwidth, the frameworks to really examine, how do conflicts that appear to be over there, how are they resonating here? How does your work in your own community have ripple effects? How, if you're interested, can you make very direct connections? So I think that they're critical tools and that might be a very interesting conversation for us to have at future future NAFSA meetings. On the Europe front, we have an office in Brussels and we're working, we're increasingly, we're a lot of back and forth with the office of the mayor in Amsterdam and we're working in Norway and Netherlands on some specific ideas around this. They're all different contexts, but I totally agree with Melanie's point. Some of what you see, and this is what I was talking about, the closing down of space or the stigmatizing of certain kinds of expression, when you start seeing discussions in the UK, for instance, around identifying the markers of nonviolent extremism, let's identify them before they go violent. Well, a lot of those markers, symbolize entire communities that share anger at certain policies or whatever. And so when you start doing that, some of the alienation that we know breeds radicalization, I would say gets sort of augmented. And so how do you open up the spaces for engagement and the safe spaces for dialogue between whatever community it might be and those that it's sort of divided from. And we need this desperately in the US. You know, I was at a meeting where we were talking about sort of zones of conflict and zones not conflict. I was saying, we have like a 200% increase in enrollment and hate groups when we elected the first African-American president in this country. And we've had now people being shot and killed in churches because of the color of their skin. I mean, you just look at the last year of events in this country. So I would say on all of these fronts, we need to be bringing to bear a lot of this kind of program. I mean, something I'm sort of most eager for us to be doing at Search for Common Ground is more of that work, both domestically and frankly in Europe. Lastly is on the higher education space. I think Fanta will know this better than I will, but it's one of the biggest trends in higher education is internationalization. It's sometimes driven for different reasons. Sometimes it's another pool of income for people who pay for expensive American education, but one of the really valuable things of it's one of those spaces in the U.S. where you're getting increasing opportunities for engagement abroad. And so I'm suspecting that initiatives from young people on college campuses will be among the more exciting and breakthrough innovations in this space. And I don't mean to keep beating the virtual exchange drum, but take a look at what the Aspen Institute has just announced with the Stevens Initiative and apply for a grant if you've got an idea of something you want to pilot on your campus. So I'm tempted just to say ditto because I agree so strongly with what was just said. One of the points in Europe that I would address is the need to not think that a single solution works in each situation. I think we tend, even as we look at the process of taking things to scale, we need to recognize that each situation is different. It has an historical perspective. Why was the initial response in Germany so different from responses in other settings? When we talk about Lebanon and the programs we're doing there, you have to remember that in Lebanon, their experience with refugees means the Palestinians who they put into camps with very tragic responses. And so the response in that environment is different. I think in every situation, you have to talk with local people, listen very carefully. We have another expression we use at world learning, which is nothing about them without them. And that is the need to incorporate local ground truth and local perspectives into everything you do. I'll address the second question. In regards to the local opportunities, universities are extremely well positioned. If you think about it, they have abundant, bright minds and abundant energy. I will add though, a real need, and that is to get our minds off campus, right? That I would say there is, and most campuses is just sort of this inward attention that students and faculty as well, I mean, we need to be aware of the communities around us and to think through how do we better understand what's happening in the community around us before we ever engage with some great use of our energy and mind, I think it starts with awareness. And I think there could be much more of that. If I heard the second part, you had a request about community colleges. My quick comment here is I do spend a good deal of time talking with sort of my peers at community colleges. And it does bring to mind a recent comment I heard from some of the faculty at one of them was the challenge of doing much of anything outside the classroom. And an expression that a lot of that challenge was due to the fact that they are not residential in design, that is the students come for class and then they leave. And that sort of fracturing of the student community makes it very hard to do things that kind of I'll say aren't the required things, whether they be student organizations or could be opting into international education. So I just wanna maybe conclude with some realities of our universities and the students there that there are some challenges, some solutions about challenges certainly they're hard to overcome. I'll go back to the first question. I think you really posed your question in an interesting way for me, which is really how do we build peace within? Which I think is a fundamental question. And my colleagues I think have really answered it in the way I would have certainly thought about it. There's two element that I would bring to this. One is that I think right now as I hear the debate and it's the sociologist in me that sort of is ringing here. As I hear the debate, there's often this debate of assimilationism and multiculturalism and sort of the polarities there, right? And I'm always very cautious of binaries. I'm one who really, really have an issue with binaries in general. And so that to me becomes a very simplistic way and a reductionist way to kind of explain a complex set of issues is one. The second element has to do with the fact that I think in this instance, as in many instances that we're facing around the world, is really what is the role of community? And what is the role of community development? What is the role of community leaders in these conversations? And how do we bring them to the table in more productive ways and engage them in much more fundamental ways? I think becomes a larger question that really does need to be asked. The third element from my perspective has to do with the fact that I, one of the things that comes up often is that whenever we face these very challenging times, we have a tendency to infantilize people. We tend to think that they really don't have a sense of what's going on or if they do, that they probably don't have a sense of how what might be some potential solutions. And I'm very cautious, particularly around policy, dimensions, when we tend to infantilize people in trying to find solutions. And so as I think about what's going on in Europe, I think one of the things that resonates for all of us is that this is not a European problem alone. I think we all understand that and begin to appreciate that. And I think some of the lessons that can be learned from there I think are very applicable within our own communities as we're seeing some of these disinfranchised groups. And what does it mean for us as a community when we're bringing them to the table in ways that are much more fundamentally different? And so I think this is a real time for all of us to think in different paradigms about how we really get to the root causes of these issues is one of the things that comes to mind for me. But I think your question is really important about how do we build peace with him? Thank you. And I want to take this opportunity to thank NAFSA for taking the initiative for this panel as a way to kick off International Education Week. I also want to commend NAFSA for their really strong efforts to incorporate peace building into the work of and the exploration of international education. I think they've added a great dimension to the debate and discussion about peace building. It's an honor to have the heads of these terrific programs that the U.S. Institute of Peace is always happy to partner with and support. And I think you've gotten a very good indication of some of the really terrific work and initiatives in peace building from our respective panelists. So with that, please join me in thanking them and thank you. Thank you.