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Wednesday, January 18, 2012 | posted by Ellie Kaufman |
As Global Playground continues to fundraise for Project Vietnam this holiday season, an extremely generous and personal donation has come along with the monetary donations.
Professor of Law Jayne Barnard recently donated three diamond rings to Global Playground’s efforts to build a primary school in Vietnam. Barnard taught both Doug Bunch and Doug Smith, now members of Global Playground’s Board of Directors, in her securities law classes at William & Mary School of Law and has been following her students and the success of Global Playground ever since.
The diamond rings come from three generations of Barnard’s family and include her grandmother’s engagement ring, her mother’s engagement ring and her own engagement ring. Barnard donated the rings after hearing Bunch’s pitch for the Vietnam project at a fundraiser in November.
“Doug was down in Williamsburg to make the pitch at one of my colleague’s houses,” Barnard said. “He said the line: ‘I will take your cash, I will take your checks, I will take your diamonds etc.’ He may have been kidding about the diamonds, but he planted the seed of an idea, and then I realized that I had three generations of diamonds.”
Barnard saw an opportunity to donate her family’s legacy to the education of children halfway across the world who will one day attend Global Playground’s school in Vietnam.
“It seemed to me that if Doug really wasn’t kidding, if he was willing to take the diamonds, then three items that represented a century of love in my family could go to a really good cause,” Barnard said. “It really made me feel terrific to be able to put my family’s property into one coherent contribution.”
Barnard has been following Global Playground since its inception.
“They have grown remarkably over such a short period of time,” Barnard said. “I am happy to be a financial supporter.”
Before delivering the diamonds to Bunch in Washington, D.C., Barnard let go of her family’s legacy in her own way.
“That afternoon as I was packing and putting the diamonds in my suitcase, I stopped and said wait a minute, let’s do this a little more mindfully,” Barnard said. “I pulled out a photograph of my grandmother and my grandfather, and I pulled out a picture of my parents on their wedding day. I looked over at one of my favorite pictures of my late husband, John, and me at our daughter’s wedding. I had a little moment with my grandparents, my parents, and John, of course. We all decided to let the rings go.”
“We are extraordinarily grateful to Jayne for her contribution,” Bunch said. This is perhaps one of the most heartfelt, meaningful contributions we’ve ever received.” The diamond rings belonged to Barnard’s grandmother Marian who married Walter Barnard in 1911, her mother Mary who married Clayton Barnard in 1937, and Professor Barnard herself who married John Tucker in 1983. The diamond rings will now be a part of Global Playground’s Vietnam project.
*This is the first of a series of articles about how individual donors are making thoughtful, unique contributions to Global Playground even in tough economic times.
Thursday, December 08, 2011 | posted by Ellie Kaufman |
Young Professionals in Foreign Policy interviewed Doug Bunch, Chairman of Global Playground, for their November Career in the Spotlight article. The article discusses the process of starting a nonprofit, working successfully in the nonprofit sector, and the future influence of nonprofits in foreign policy.
YPFP is a nonprofit organization whose goal is to “foster the next generation of foreign policy leaders by providing young professionals with the knowledge, skills, exposure, and relationships to tackle critical global challenges over the course of their careers,” according to their website. They are comprised of about 100 volunteer young professionals, a board of directors, and counselors who work to further their mission of promoting and fostering collaboration and communication among young foreign policy leaders.
The article can be found here.
Thursday, November 17, 2011 | posted by Ellie Kaufman |
Walking to class, a paper plate covered in whip cream suddenly smacks you in the face. While you are now thinking about how you are going to explain this to your professor, you have simultaneously contributed to Global Playground’s efforts at enhancing education through their many projects.
 The College of William & Mary’s service fraternity APO Nu Rho Chapter hosts one major philanthropy event each semester. The fall philanthropy, A-Pie-O, allows students to pay $4 to get members to pie their friends. All of the proceeds for the fall philanthropy are being donated to Global Playground.
“It was really cheap because whip cream and paper plates aren’t that expensive,” Aidan De Sena, Vice President of Philanthropy for APO, said. “We thought you could just get your frustration out by pieing people, and it would be fun to see your friends pied.”
The idea to donate the funds to Global Playground came from a challenge from Global Playground Chairman Doug Bunch. This amount will be matched by a $5000 donation from an alum of the College, A. Joseph Jay, III, ’03, J.D. ’06, and the money will be used to fund a Global Playground Teaching Fellowship for a William & Mary student.
“Global Playground is trying a challenge grant, if you raise five thousand they will donate five thousand,” De Sena said. “There are a couple of organizations on campus working on raising five thousand dollars, and Drew [Stelljes, Director of the Office of Community Engagement and Scholarship] asked APO individually if we could raise one thousand.”
The event raised about $300.
“It was a silly event but I think it was so different from anything else that that is why it was successful,” De Sena said.
APO Philanthropy committee member Sarah Klotz first learned about Global Playground in her Leadership and Community Engagement class. She helped orchestrate the event.
“If we could secure a spot for a William & Mary student that would be incredible, especially because Doug graduated from William & Mary and started [GP] with people from William & Mary, so it would be really nice to continue that connection,” Klotz said.
In addition to the A-Pie-O fall philanthropy, De Sena and other students on campus are planning a spring farmer’s market philanthropy event. They will work with students and the Williamsburg community to create a farmer’s market fundraiser with proceeds going to Global Playground.
“We think we can generate a lot of money from the farmers market, if we can use it as a way of bridging the gap between the community and the campus,” De Sena said. “We are hoping to have performers from campus to show what our campus has to offer to the community.”
Global Playground Intern Taylor Nelson and Beta Theta Pi Vice President Nick Hampson are also helping De Sena to coordinate the event.
“Right now we have been having meetings with Colonial Williamsburg and the Merchant’s Association to get that ready for the spring,” De Sena said.
Thursday, November 17, 2011 | posted by Ellie Kaufman |
Global Playground launched fundraising efforts for the upcoming Vietnam project on Nov. 7 with a kick-off event at the College of William & Mary hosted by Professor of Hispanic Studies George Greenia and Tom Wood.
In one evening, with a mix of faculty, administrators, Williamsburg community members, undergraduate and law students in attendance, Global Playground raised $8,168. The event was sponsored by Vinson & Elkins LLP, a law firm in Washington D.C., who donated $5,000.
“We had about 45 people there, which was excellent,” Greenia said. “It really shows how people rise to a level of personal commitment.”
The fundraiser emerged from a conversation between Global Playground Chairman Doug Bunch and Greenia in D.C. in September.
“Doug did most of the organizing, things came together very quickly,” Greenia said. “We realized between Doug and I when we built our complimentary list that there were scores of people involved with Global Playground in Williamsburg.”
President of the College of William & Mary Taylor Reveley, former Vice President for Student Affairs Sam Sadler, Student Assembly President Kaveh Sadeghian, and many other notable members of the campus community attended the event. Both Bunch and Domestic Fellow Ryan Drysdale visited Williamsburg for the fundraiser.
“It was one of the first opportunities I had had for the students to interact around a cause not only with other students, but with other professors, other administrators, and with other members of the community,” Sadeghian said. “It was a novel way for students and members of the community to engage with a cause relative to the way that we have typically done this on campus.”
Greenia agreed that it gave students a chance to learn in a different way.
“Its extremely valuable for undergrad and grad students to see how these things happen and how they are run so when it is their turn they see how to step in,” Greenia said. “You learn to be comfortable in that situation and know that it is okay to ask for money. You see what inspires the generosity of others.”
Greenia noted the recent success of Global Playground as an aspiring message to people and students on campus who hope to start successful projects of their own.
“I have been here for thirty years, and I have seen a number of student initiatives that emerged with great expectations and great commitment, but sort of folded when people graduated and moved on,” Greenia said. “This is a rare instance where it has only grown since it has been out of college.”
Reveley was also impressed with Global Playground’s growth.
“Global Playground’s recent efforts in Vietnam seem to be off to a very promising start,” Reveley said. “This project has the potential to do an enormous amount of good. It comes as no surprise, in light of Global Playground’s splendid track record, that its recent fundraiser in Williamsburg went extremely well.”
The guests in attendance at the event spoke to the wide range of people that are attracted to Global Playground on this campus and in the overall community.
“It was created by William and Mary students and continues to attract the interest of a broad spectrum within our undergraduate and graduate communities, from classical studies, to government, to religious studies, to modern languages, to the law school; it has earned the active support of an astonishingly large number of faculty and administrators as well,” Greenia said.
Although this was Greenia’s first direct involvement with Global Playground, he admires the organization.
“Their reach is truly global, which means it retains its flexibility and responsiveness to specific local situations without becoming engrossed in a single social or political situation,” Greenia said. “The mission focus is savvy and tight: education and children, period.”
Tuesday, November 01, 2011 | posted by Ellie Kaufman |
Global Playground has launched fundraising efforts for the latest project in Vietnam. With the help of Global Community Service Foundation, Global Playground plans to build a four-room primary school in the central mountain village Khe Sanh in Quang Tri province, Vietnam.
The school will provide a safe learning environment for 140 students in grades 1 through 5 with a total of eight teachers, but the school is expected to grow. Currently, the students who will benefit from the new school study in two shifts in a day on a flood-prone area at the edge of an erosive riverbank with crumbling walls and broken furniture.
“They have to study in a flood-vulnerable down-graded 2-room school,” Central Vietnam Representative for Global Community Service Foundation Tam Xuan Nguyen said. “They are studying in an unstable mood as the school is quite weak now and the yard is muddy from the flood. Some kids have dropped school for a while because of these factors.”
Nguyen, currently stationed in Dong Ha, Vietnam, works for GCSF. GCSF is an NGO incorporated in both the United States and Vietnam that works to alleviate poverty in Southeast Asia by establishing sustainable, community-based projects “focusing on improving access to health care, education, and income-generation activities,” according to their mission statement. Tam sees the benefits this school can provide for the community every day.
“The new school will help to decrease illiteracy rate for the local children in ethnic minority areas by encouraging more young children to attend school. Their parents will feel comfortable sending their children to a better school like that,” Nguyen said. “The school will be a pride for the local people.”
While Vietnam does have a literacy rate of 90 percent among boys and girls, the ethnic minority groups that live in more isolated parts of the country suffer from educational inequality. The main problems these ethnic groups face include annual flooding that causes the schools to close, widespread poverty, unexploded landmines from the Vientam War, and the remnants of Agent Orange which causes a host of health problems.
This school aims to help the Pako and Van Kieu ethnic groups.
“It will help decrease the rate of school dropout among students. More children will complete the primary education and have better chance to enter into middle school education and high school education,” Nguyen said. “This will bring a brighter future for the little village because the younger generation will have higher education than their parents.”
The new school will consist of four classrooms, a toilet, 72 desks and chairs at a total cost of $46,368. The community plans to contribute materials and land for the construction of the school, but fundraising in the United States will be a major component to the success of the project.
“We chose this school to help because it includes all of the factors such as ethnic minority, education, life quality, rural areas, and disaster vulnerability,” Nguyen said. “The school will not only bring better schooling conditions to the ethnic minority children but also provide safer place for education and cultural nurturing, and equality in sex and education opportunity.”
Fundraising for the project is currently underway. Global Playground will hold a fundraising and awareness event at the College of William and Mary on November 7.
“This will be the fifth project in Global Playground’s five-year history, and it will extend the network of Global Playground to another needy part of the world,” Global Playground Executive Director Edward Branagan said. “This project will present another opportunity for a future Fellow to engage the students in Vietnam in cross-cultural dialogue with other children in the world.”
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 | posted by Ellie Kaufman |
Global Playground was mentioned in a recent blogpost from Building Tomorrow with an update on two children studying at one of the schools supported by Global Playground in Buwasa, Uganda.
Click here to read the post.
Thursday, October 13, 2011 | posted by Ellie Kaufman |
 Instead of only seeing each other in magazines, Global Playground’s Virtual Playground allows kids around the world to share their lives with each other directly. To support the ongoing development of its Virtual Playground and cross-cultural initiatives, Global Playground this month submitted an application to the Ashoka Changemakers / Google joint Citizen Media competition in global innovation. Global Playground believes this is an excellent opportunity to share its greater vision and plan for development of the Virtual Playground. Having already reached many milestones in the pursuit of this important goal, including the recently launched Moment of the Week and the Teaching Fellows blogs, the Ashoka Changemakers competition provides an opportunity to take the Virtual Playground to the next level.
The Virtual Playground holds to a single vision: to give children around the world a place to learn, play, and work together through online games, lessons, and activities, cultivating relationships that will help forge a more united planet. The Virtual Playground will serve children from 6-18 years old who live in different countries, speak many languages, and emerge from vastly different cultures. Some students have grown up with access to technology, others have not. Some have extensive experience in a school, others are attending a school for the first time. For children in resource-poor countries, the opportunity to acquire computer skills, to become familiar with information technology and social media, and to interact, teach, and learn from other children with similar concerns and solutions is critical to granting them access to a world of ideas, people, and education. For youth who already have greater access to technology, the Virtual Playground provides an opportunity to gain cultural awareness, broaden global perspectives, and demonstrate the similarities in children across the planet, thereby engendering a vital and rarely afforded paradigm shift in their world view, one that can help foster cooperation, learning, and support across borders, languages, and societies.
The model offered by the Virtual Playground replaces passive absorption of sometimes irrelevant information and creates a rich, immediate, and direct cultural exchange among youth globally. Current efforts to increase cultural awareness and connect children with the world around them are limited to the distribution of magazines, the discussion of books and pictures, and the viewing of random websites. The Virtual Playground places interaction, learning, play, and connection directly into the hands of children around the world. Instead of passively looking at pictures, students capture images in their home neighborhoods and share them with each other. Instead of reading about foods, behaviors, and customs, children in these countries can cook together, describe their day’s activities to each other, and even play a virtual game of soccer. Children in Honduras will solve algebra problems with children in Cambodia. Children in Uganda will make art and write stories with children in the United States. Through the Virtual Playground, children will transcend the current paradigm of passive recipients of facts and images in favor of actively using information technology and social and digital media to interact with each other, learn together, and co-create. With sufficient funding, Global Playground anticipates full connectivity to the Virtual Playground at all Global Playground schools by year-end 2013 and active participation at all Global Playground schools, including those in our expanding network, within five years. You can view Global Playground’s Ashoka Changemakers / Google Citizen Media competition entry here.
Tuesday, July 05, 2011 | posted by Garrett |
Global Playground has selected two new teaching Fellows for the upcoming school year: Hana Livingston and Adam Levin. Hana will replace Ryan Drysdale, who is finishing up his yearlong teaching fellowship at Huay Puung Mai School in Thailand where Global Playground unveiled a library in early 2009 and made a contribution of technology during spring 2010. As for Adam, he will be the first Global Playground teaching Fellow at a technology center in El Progresso, Honduras that Global Playground constructed in partnership with Students Helping Honduras in 2010. Both will spend a year living abroad and advancing Global Playground’s mission.
Upon graduating in May from Loyola University Chicago with a B.A. in International Studies and minors in English, French, and Asian studies, Hana was inspired to apply for a Global Playground fellowship due to her interest in education and international development.
“Connecting children in developing countries to those in developed countries through education is an incredible way to foster tolerance, empathy, and the ability to see things from another, unfamiliar perspective. I believe that empowering our children through education is the key to creating a better world,” said Hana, who has worked as an educator in both the United States and China.
After graduating from The College of William & Mary in May with a major in International Relations and a minor in Hispanic Studies, Adam saw a Global Playground fellowship as an opportunity to combine all of his interests. Due to his experiences in Argentina, where he was involved with human rights issues related to Argentina's most recent dictatorship, and in Central America, where he worked for Habitat for Humanity, he sees education as a way to give people a voice. In particular, Adam believes that "access to education and the opportunity to connect with youth from all over the world will allow Honduran youth to develop their own voices, which will ultimately give them the skill-set to do whatever it is they want to do."
One important part of their role as Fellows will be to help students in Thailand and Honduras connect electronically with students at Global Playground’s other project sites around the world and with students in the United States. Both Hana and Adam understand the importance of this cross-cultural dialogue and hope that it will promote a sense of tolerance, understanding, and curiosity within and among this global community of youth.
Friday, May 20, 2011 | posted by Garrett |
Chairman Doug Bunch and Secretary Doug Smith are co-recipients of the Taylor Reveley Award from the William & Mary Law School Association. The Taylor Reveley Award is given to alumni for outstanding commitment to public service. Bunch and Smith have received the award for their work on behalf of Global Playground. Read more...
Friday, May 13, 2011 | posted by Garrett |
Five years ago, Global Playground was just a dream – a dream that one day, kids from all over the world could play on a virtual playground where they would be free to be kids. A dream that schools could be places where kids would be free to explore their curiosity and engage their peers halfway across the world in cross-cultural dialogue. Five years later, that dream has become a reality.
Since its inception in May 2006, Global Playground has provided educational opportunities to over twelve hundred children in four countries. The organization’s projects have spanned the continents of Africa, Asia and South America, making possible the education of children in developing countries and promoting the importance of cross-cultural exchange.
As its first project, Global Playground partnered with Building Tomorrow, a non-profit organization with experience building schools in Uganda. Together, the two organizations built an eight-room primary school that accommodates approximately 325 children in the greater Kampala region of Uganda. The school gives students the opportunity to advance to a grade level of P7 (about 7th grade) in a part of Africa where the average child only has about 3.5 total years of schooling.
Global Playground’s second project was a middle school in Cambodia. Working with American
Assistance for Cambodia, and with matching funds from the Asian Development Bank, Global
Playground built a five-room school in Cambodia’s Kandal province. Since its opening, the Cambodian Ministry of Education has maintained the school, empowering the local community in which Global Playground operates.
In January 2009, Global Playground moved quickly, and completed the construction of a library in
Northern Thailand’s Mae Hong Son province in only seven weeks. After raising the funds needed to
build the library, Global Playground then enlisted the help of the Samsara Foundation, a non-profit organization whose efforts are focused on education in the region, to construct the library. Today, Global Playground’s first Teaching Fellow, Ryan Drysdale, is living and working at the school on a one-year assignment to further the educational opportunities of the school’s students and connect the students with schools here in the United States. You can follow Ryan’s blog on Global Playground’s
website to learn more about his experiences.
Global Playground’s most recent undertaking was completed last spring in Honduras in the small
community of Villa Soleada, near the city of El Progreso. More than 200 children benefit from GP’s new technology center, which houses five new computers, educational software, broadband internet and a full-time tech instructor. Students in Villa Soleada are using the center to engage in cross-cultural dialogue with students in New York, Connecticut, and other parts of the U.S. and with students at GP’s other project sites around the world.
In addition to building schools, libraries and technology centers, Global Playground recently launched its Virtual Playground, an internet tool that enables students from all of GP’s sites to interact with each other and with students in the U.S. “We don’t just want to build schools. We want to connect children with children,” said Edward Branagan, Global Playground’s Executive Director, in a recent interview. Virtual Playground enables this connection through blogs, Skype, and photo and video sharing via an online platform. Teachers in the U.S. are strongly encouraged to explore GP’s Virtual Playground to discover for themselves how their students can interact with other students in developing countries. More information and a Teacher Toolkit (PDF) can be found on Global Playground’s website.
Global Playground is proud of the organization’s first five years of bringing educational opportunities to the developing world, and looks forward to growing and taking on new projects. This month, Ryan, Edward, and Global Playground board members Doug Bunch and Doug Smith are in Southeast Asia, checking in on the projects currently in place as well as investigating new project sites. Global Playground is always looking for volunteers, donors, teachers and schools, and partner organizations interested in helping the organization accomplish its mission to raise awareness and share resources with people of the developing world to create educational opportunities where they do not exist. If you have an interest in becoming involved, please visit Global Playground’s website or contact Global Playground at info@theglobalplayground.org.
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