Nineteen year old Youth Ambassador Keven Leyes was on an entrepreneurship and innovation training program when the coronavirus crisis hit. As part of his research, he developed an application connecting donors and volunteers so that they could provide supplies to hospitals as well as emotional support to members of vulnerable communities. Community projects, like Kevin’s, are at the core of the Youth Ambassadors Program. Kevin’s hard work and focus on bringing communities together has also been noticed by Argentina’s leading daily newspaper, La Nacion, who also covered Kevin’s story. Keep up the great work, Kevin! 

In February, Marizeth Beato was one of the 50 students selected for SDQ Creates, an innovation and product design boot camp led by Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative (YLAI) alumni Emil Rodriguez and Jeremy Losaw, along with design sprint experts Eric Gorman and Julia Jackson of Wily LLC. Marizeth co-founded Open Air DR, a collaborative team working to develop open-source, low-cost health safety products to combat COVID-19.

Through the boot camp, Marizeth learned design sprint methods and developed a prototype for ventilators using Particle, an Internet-of-Things cloud-based hardware, and a software platform. The ventilator helps infected patients that need breathing assistance but do not yet require intubation, addressing a crucial supply challenge for hospitals. Their ventilator design is being used and tested in a local hospital in the Dominican Republic. You can read more about this initiative here: https://medium.com/@wearewily/a-team-of-makers-fights-covid-19-in-the-dominican-d5e989a19404

Franco Goytia, a 2017 YLAI Fellow and the co-founder of CASPR Biotech, an Argentine startup, has developed a Covid-19 test using CRISPR gene editing technology. The U.S. patented kit detects antibodies in less than an hour at approximately half the cost of a polymerase chain reactor - the current standard for Covid-19 diagnosis. A similar test developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in early May. Both Grid Exponential (a Latin American biotech company) and IndieBio (the largest biotech investor in the world) have signed on as investors in Franco’s CRISPR technology. Way to go Franco!

Dora Racca, a Fulbright Scholar and 2020 Ph.D. candidate, was a part of a group of scientists from CASPR Biotech that traveled to San Francisco, California to upgrade the company’s Covid-19 test kits. Currently, Dora is developing a microfluidic platform to process the test results on-site, avoiding the need to send samples to labs. Keep up the good work, Dora!

In the face of the many challenges that COVID-19 presents to our communities at the local, national, and global levels, we turn to good acts and deeds in humanity for motivation. A U.S. Department of State Sports Envoy Tony Sanneh and founding executive director of the Sanneh Foundation in Minneapolis-St. Paul steps up to support his community when most in need. 

Shortly after COVID-19 hit the United States, longstanding Sports Envoy Tony Sanneh and his team at The Sanneh Foundation initiated a "grab and go" meal kit program working with food banks in his home city of St. Paul, Minnesota. With school closures and negative effects on the local workforce, the Sanneh Foundation began offering free nutritious lunches and dinners to the community. The organization also ramped up its workforce development support to help parents and youth navigate additional resources online. 

During this time of turbulence in the wake of George Floyd's death, the Sanneh Foundation continues to serve as a leader by promoting unity, respect for diversity, and solidarity. 

Tony previously led soccer programs in Bolivia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Cyprus, Pakistan, and the UAE on behalf of the U.S. Department of State. The Sanneh Foundation is a former U.S. Department of State and U.S. Embassy Port-au-Prince grant program partner for its community soccer/health programs in Haiti. Tony is a leader supporting social change with a focus on at-risk youth, nutrition, and preventing violent extremism among others. He supports the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs' youth outreach programming at home and around the world.

As the coronavirus spread around the globe, Fulbright alumnus, M. Affan Javed decided to use his organization, Peaceful Puppets, to share healthy habits through diverse, kid-friendly means. In 2015, after winning the Davis Peace Building Prize, Affan created Peaceful Puppets, an organization aimed at sharing peaceful messages with children to create a better future for everyone. Using his skills as a puppeteer Affan galvanized his organized company and has been able to share reliable information and resources. His puppeteering has also focused on spreading awareness of healthy practices to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

You can learn more about this amazing Peaceful Puppets here.

With all the misinformation surrounding the coronavirus, is the world in danger of a vaccine-related info war? That’s the question the New York Times was trying to address when one of its reporters reached out to exchange alumna Rhys Leahy and her colleague, Neil Johnson.

Johnson and Leahy, who studied Persian in 2014 as a participant in the Critical Language Scholarship Program (CLS) and studied in Russia during 2011-2012 as part of the National Security Language Initiative for Youth program (NSLI-Y), lead a research team at George Washington University. Their team did a study that mapped the online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views; it was recently published in the science journal Nature, a leading multidisciplinary science journal in the United States. 

Leahy and Johnson “expected to find a strong core of ‘vanilla’ science — people saying that vaccines are good for you” — but that’s not what they found at all, Johnson told the NYT. “We found a real struggle online, where the public health establishment and its supporters are almost fighting in the wrong place.”

From the results of their study, Leahy and her team hope that their insights “can inform new policies and approaches to interrupt this shift to negative views.”  

YSEALI Alumni in Thailand engaged almost 400 people with the “COVID-19 Hack the Crisis Thailand” - a rapid-response COVID-19 online hackathon that included virtual workshops, networking events, project-pitching, and a seed-funding competition in collaboration with the Ministry of Health of Thailand and private sector partners.  Participants at the event worked in developing and pitching community-based solutions to the global pandemic, including prevention of misinformation and disinformation, access to mental health support, and channeling charitable contributions to those in need.  The program, funded by the Global Engagement Center (GEC) at State, harnessed the ideas and U.S. experience of exchange program alumni, particularly Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) members. Thailand’s eLeaders Initiative alumni, Sitta “Sindy” Marattanachai and Radtasiri “Bes” Wachirapunyanont, initiated the virtual program.  The two alumni credit their YSEALI Professional Fellows experience with building their skills and networking capacity, which they used to develop the virtual hackathon emergency decree and self-quarantine procedures to limit public gatherings and in-person collaboration.

Hack the Crisis, held from April 16 - May 1, 2020, gathered 55 institutional partners and collaborators in both the public and private sectors. The active participation of Royal Thai Government agencies, including the National Research Council of Thailand, the Thai government’s COVID-19 Information Center, the Office of the Public Sector Development Commission, the National Innovation Agency, and the Faculty of Science of Chiang Mai University, has helped to scale up the program.

Santiago Castro first attracted widespread attention after being selected for the Youth Ambassadors Program in 2020. The Youth Ambassadors program requires that all participants do community-based projects; Santiago’s project involved launching a platform so his school could provide virtual classes, following implementation of a quarantine due to the coronavirus.  

Santiago trained 35 teachers in his school to use Zoom, Google Classroom, and Google Docs; prior to his training, many of them were unfamiliar with these online tools.  Through virtual tutorials and videoconferences, he also helped 250 high school students transition to virtual classes, walking many through the process step-by-step.  

Learn more about his project through his Instagram video:

Even before the coronavirus created a challenge for educators and students, Cecilia Carolina Muňoz, a 2017 alumna of The Fulbright Program, was tackling issues outside the classroom that affected how she taught English in the classroom in the town of Bandera, Santiago del Estero in Argentina. Poverty, addiction, and a lack of clean drinking water are just some of the issues the town faces.

Muňoz, who did her Fulbright training in innovative strategies for teachers and the use of technology in the classroom, came up with a game plan: survey her student and reinvent her classroom techniques to awaken her students’ interests and motivation. Thanks to her use of “cutting edge ICT, gamification and flipped classroom techniques,” Muňoz has succeeded. Her methods are also helping keep students inspired and engaged during coronavirus times, and have won her a nomination for the 2020 Global Teacher Prize.

Muňoz is one of two Argentine teachers chosen from among 12,000 teachers from 140 countries for the prize, which is also known as the “Nobel Prize for Education.” You can learn more about Muňoz and her nomination for the Global Teacher Prize in this video:

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