1. Name:                                   Kelly M. Kirschner

 2. Address:                                2478 Novus Street, Sarasota, FL 34237

 3. Email/Phone(s):                      Kelly@deeproots.or , (h) 941‑364‑5733 (c) 941‑928‑9978

 4. University attended:                Georgetown University (1993 ‑ 1998)

 5. Year of Selby Scholarship.     1993

 6. Amount of Scholarship           $800

 7. Impact of Selby Scholarship on me during my school years:

 

As I entered the spring of my senior year at Cardinal Mooney in 1993, 1 realized that I would soon need to make one of the more important decisions in my life up to that point. I had been admitted to every school that I had submitted an application and the decision was hanging largely on a balance between gut instinct and my expected financial health once I would graduate from college. From the financial health perspective, I ran the gamut ‑ from an academic full ride to a small liberal arts college in Tennessee to other well‑branded universities that despite their large endowments, did not offer much in financial assistance and posed a potential debt burden of over $80,000 upon receiving an undergraduate degree. My gut instinct, however, was narrow and focused and told me that I should go to Georgetown University, where I was accepted in the School of Foreign Service. Somehow as a teenager, as I still do now, I had a particular interest in international development work. For an undergraduate degree, it seemed to me then (and probably still today), that Georgetown had no rival in offering an exhaustive education in development, especially when you couple it with the opportunity to live in Washington DC ‑home to the State Department, the World Bank, the Inter‑American Development Bank, etc. When I applied, though, annual tuition, books, room, board and fees were approaching or exceeding $20,000 annually. Georgetown's financial aid office worked with me more than other schools, offering me some grants in aid, work‑study money, as well as low interest student loans. My final decision, though, to attend Georgetown really rested with my own ability to "raise tuition" by applying for local scholarships. My $800 scholarship from the Selby Foundation, along with local scholarships from two other foundations, allowed me the courage and confidence to say "yes" to Georgetown and jump into a college experience that I knew I wanted, These three awards, coupled with the help from Georgetown, brought the potential debt burden down to something that I felt would be manageable upon graduating. As if I were awarded by my leap of faith, my work‑study job in Georgetown's gymnasium led to an interview during my freshman year to perform a year's "apprenticeship" to become a team manager for the men's basketball team. While I would not receive any payment for this during my sophomore year, my final two years at school would be covered by a full scholarship ‑ covering tuition, room, board, books and all fees. Needless to say, I felt like I had won the most incredible grand prize on a television show. Making the experience all the more rich, my GPA through my junior year qualified me for a five year BS/MA program in which I would receive both my bachelor's and master's degrees simultaneously. The basketball program agreed and my scholarship was extended for another year. I still have dreams today about other academic programs I could have entered into and continued working for the team!) I should also add that by deciding to go to Georgetown, it enabled me to earn a summer internship for three years in the West Wing of the White House; a summer internship in the US Embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica; and an internship working on an archaeological dig in southern Mexico. So in retrospect, I cannot begin to say how grateful I am for my Selby Scholarship in 1993 that helped put me over the top to take the plunge and choose Georgetown.

 

8. Use of education to make positive impact on community/world:

 

Upon graduating from Georgetown with my BS in International Environmental Politics and my MA in Latin American studies, I wanted to work and live in a developing country full‑time, for an extended time. While there were a number of large multinational companies that were constantly on campus in 1998 recruiting, my vision of this work was one where I knew that I wanted to embed myself in a country and culture and discover different worlds. I did not hesitate, then, to throw my lots in with the Peace Corps. After a long application process, I was accepted and sent to Guatemala. In Guatemala, we went through three months of training with forty‑five other volunteers and then were assigned to different municipalities throughout the country. I was sent to the extremely remote municipality of Chisec, Alta Verapaz and was the first Peace Corps volunteer to ever be assigned there. This is strange in and of itself, because the Peace Corps has been in Guatemala since the early sixties, but Guatemala's thirty‑six year civil war had long found refuge in the lowland tropical jungles of Chisec that borders with southern Mexico, Belize, and a large mountain chain ‑ making it ideal terrain for guerrilla warfare. In 1996, Guatemala's Peace Accords were signed and after three years of consolidation, the Peace Corps decided that it was finally safe enough to send a volunteer to Chisec. A nine and a half hour drive from

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 the capital (four and a half by dirt road), to enter Chisec in 1999 was to travel back in time a number of centuries. Chisec's isolation was both tragic and incredibly beautiful. The illiteracy rate in the municipality was one of the highest in the entire Western Hemisphere, with more than 75% of the adult population being unable to read. More than 80% of the population lived below the UN defined level of poverty ‑ existing on less than S2/day. At the same time, the lack of roads and communication with the outside world (in 1999 there were four community telephones for a municipal population close to 100,000 spread out over 2,000 square kilometers and no satellite, cable, or broadcast television entered the area), created a world that was sufficient unto itself 90% of the population was dedicated to subsistence farming and close to 60% of the land was still covered by virgin rainforest. I was assigned to work in Chisec's nascent Municipal Planning Office and the local, Mayan indigenous mayor was who I reported to directly. Needless to say, I quickly became a local expert, devouring all social, historical, and economic data on the area that I could, as our office began to work on the task of prioritizing Chisec's most urgent development needs. During my time in City Hall, we wrote grant applications for over two‑hundred rural projects (electrification, introduction of potable water, digging of wells, installation of latrines, construction of schools, construction of rural roads, etc) and received funding in excess of $1 million to execute over half of the projects. Beyond bricks and mortar, though, I quickly realized that the most effective way for the people of Chisec to deal with their extreme poverty and the fast‑approaching modernization of the world, was through education. Separate from City Hall, I began meeting with local citizens and we socialized the idea of creating a non‑profit organization dedicated to transforming the future of Chisec through local education. The idea took root and we created the local NGO that came to be known, "SANK" ‑ the Mayan Q'eqchi word for a leafcutter ant ‑ one of life's strongest, most agile, efficient and collaborative specimens. One of our first projects, then, was to address the population of children shoe shiners ‑ kids who typically would never spend a day in school and were most susceptible of falling into trouble ‑ sniffing glue, drinking alcohol, joining criminal bands. Shoe shines in Chisec traditionally cost 25 cents, but SANK, with agreement by the mayor and local parents, "unionized" the child laborers and raised the cost to 50 cents. Beyond this, we created a uniform, policy; a strict set of rules and guidelines that prohibited fighting, the use of drugs, etc; and a calendar of monthly meetings both with the children and their parents. Finally, we created a scholarship program for every shoe shiner and all of their siblings ... as long as they were abiding by the rules of the Union, SANK would provide each child with a scholarship that would cover the cost of school inscription, uniform and supplies. Perhaps one of the proudest days in my life was to accompany some of these twelve‑year old boys on their first day to elementary school, where none of the shoe shiners were embarrassed by being so old in entering first grade, but were so proud and happy to enroll. 2005 marks the fourth year of the Union and it continues to go on strong. What's more, there has been a palpable transformation in Chisec with the local perception of the shoe shiners and their parents ‑ where as before they were seen as the pariahs of local society, there are now seen as some of the brightest children in school and young entrepreneurs who have a great amount of street sense. In 2002, 1 helped fink SANK with www.deeproots.orp, ‑ a 100% virtual, US‑based non‑profit, dedicated to raising money for scholarship programs in the developing world. Through our association with Deep Roots, we were able to raise more than $6,000 annually which enabled SANK to grow the scholarship well beyond the shoe shiners, but also include children who were able to finish elementary school but did not have the means to get through more expensive middle and high schools. In only three years, SANK and Deep Roots have already funded over 300 academic scholarships. Finally, I also worked with SANK on starting a Mayan Q'eqchi Indigenous Video project. Recognizing that with over 75% of a population being illiterate, it was clear to us that academic scholarships would only go so far in helping to transform the area. To reach the masses, then, we decided to take advantage of the latest, inexpensive video technology and we began to create educational videos in the Mayan Q'eqchi language (most of the population in Chisec only speak Q'eqchi). Securing grants from the AOL foundation and a small, family foundation in Texas, we started MGM studios in the jungles of Chisec. Educational videos on topics such as no‑burn farming, the importance of education for women, or conservation of local forests have been made and already shown to over 30,000 people throughout the municipality ‑people who watched with rapt attention as they saw the first motion picture in their lives with their neighbors on the screen speaking their language. In November of 2003, we were invited to present on the video project at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in Chicago.

 

A Peace Corps volunteer assignment is for two years. After completing my two years, I extended my service for an additional six months. After my extension, I accepted a job with Idaho State that allowed me continue to work in Chisec on a participatory community conservation project whose aim was to legalize the land of twenty‑five communities, while also creating a protected corridor of rainforest that emptied into a large national park that was home to jaguars, tapirs, and a host of other endangered flora and fauna. Through this work, we spurred the development of a completely new economy for local populations ‑ in the shape of ecotourism. Information in English on some of the sites can be found on www.visitchisec.com. I returned to Sarasota in the fall of 2003. Today I am the Chair of Deep Roots Guatemala scholarship program and a member of the board of the local United Nations Association. I can only say that I was empowered by the Selby Foundation in 1993 to embark on a course where I learned how beautiful and valuable it is to empower others through the gift of education.