By Diane Rubino, Adjunct Faculty, Columbia University and New York University, and Fulbright Specialist alumna
The rise of a parliamentary government from the ashes of a fallen Soviet-bloc state in Bulgaria held the promise of an immediate leap to freedom of the press. But the road for the country’s journalists is uneven.
In 1990, the Bulgarian Communist Party ousted its leader, reinvented itself as the Bulgarian Socialist Party, and won the first free elections in 60 years. The country had begun its transition to democracy, with a new constitution guaranteeing freedom of the press.
Fifteen years later, Bulgaria’s press was ranked 35th out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index 2006. In this annual index, Scandinavian nations merit the lowest numbers, authoritarian countries the highest.
But a lot has changed and systemic problems, including monopolistic ownership of the country’s media and distribution networks, means Bulgaria has slid into 111th place. Source
Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) journalist Rossista Kavaldzhieva described her home to me as “a post-communist country with a toxic atmosphere.”
The Multiplier Effect of Public-Private Efforts An ebb in press freedom is a manifestation of complex social problems that take time to resolve. Interventions are essential on multiple levels; an all-hands-on-deck approach eliciting the combined strength of public and private partnerships is critical to address knotty issues.
The U.S. Department of State responded with a grant for the English for Journalists program, led by the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG). Working journalists from private-sector and government-financed news agencies had the opportunity to sharpen their language and journalism skills.
Media Literacy
Media literacy programs typically teach citizens how to make informed decisions about the information they consume. With this knowledge, people are better able to determine for themselves which news sources are credible. But the “why” of an outlet’s variability is typically omitted from the conversation and often assumed to be fueled by bad actors, profiteers, or fringe groups.
This supply-side media literacy program helped Bulgarians who operated outside these stereotypical categories to enhance the quality of their work with instruction from AUBG’s Journalism and Mass Communication faculty. Building their English language skills also expanded journalists’ access to English-language resources.
I co-led a storytelling workshop with Fulbright Scholar Jesse Scinto; it was part of the 15-week program, which Kavaldzhieva described as “an oasis.”
Leap of FaithThose of us who travel the world with State Department grants head to our destinations with knowledge, experience, and – equally importantly - a leap of faith, hoping and believing that our efforts matter.
Kavaldzhieva says the training did make a difference, pointing to her ability to “Defend the truth in the strike of the Bulgarian National Radio journalists in 2019.”
The strike was in support of BNR host Silvia Velikova, “known for her tough interviews and probing questions”. Velikova was suspended a few hours before the airing of a program focused on Bulgaria’s judicial system, notable for corruption. But Kavaldzhieva and her colleagues swiftly rallied, forcing management to reinstate Velikova.
Kavaldzhieva also reports that her English for Journalists experience took from the physical to the metaphysical. “Studying in this program, which challenges participants to explore fundamental issues related to journalism ethics, religious reporting, conflict reporting, and business reporting in an international setting, and meeting other great professors, provoked me to start studying Theology at Sofia University,” she concludes.
This is just one example of the vital impact of State Department-funded projects - in this case a public and private partnership - across the globe.
Recently, scientist Dr. Benjamin tenOever, the Director of the Virus Engineering Center for Therapeutic and Research (VECToR) at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, joined the U.S. Embassy France in a Facebook Live event to discuss his lab's research and collaboration with the Institut Pasteur, which began during his time as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Paris in 2015-2016.
Check out his talk here:
Two scientists who met through the J. William Fulbright international exchange program are part of a worldwide hunt to find existing drugs that can be used to treat the COVID-19 virus.
As a U.S.-France Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair in spring 2015, Benjamin R. tenOever first worked with Marco Vignuzzi’s laboratory at the Institut Pasteur in Paris while also teaching a complete history of virology at the École normale supérieure, an institution of higher learning, also in Paris.
The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program of the United States government to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.
When tenOever returned to the U.S., he and Vignuzzi created the Pasteur-Mount Sinai Joint International Unit between their two institutions, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and the Institut Pasteur.
Since then, the two labs have worked together on the Zika virus, the chikungunya virus and influenza, learning from the other’s research and working in tandem to find treatments.
Now, while other scientists work to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, their unit is collaborating with the University of California, San Francisco’s Quantitative Biosciences Institute Coronavirus Research Group, the Olivier Schwartz lab at Institut Pasteur and other national and international labs to find preexisting, Food and Drug Administration–approved drugs that will treat COVID-19 symptoms.
“We’re all working as a team to try to find a solution to this problem,” tenOever said. “It’s really amazing what a world community has formed because of this crisis.”
Both labs obtained samples of the virus from their respective governments. They studied how the virus infected cells and, in turn, how the cells responded to the infection. With this knowledge, they are testing FDA-approved drugs to find which suppress symptoms of COVID-19 and which have no effect.
“Each of our labs has expertise that is complementary to one another,” said Vignuzzi, noting that “sharing research accelerates discovery.”
There are thousands of drugs to test, which requires all hands on deck from labs around the world. Some tests take up to 12 hours to see results, so labs can run tests in certain parts of the world while others begin to run another test elsewhere.
“We are one team and we are doing it all together,” tenOever said.
Vignuzzi said the international nature of this research “reminds us that despite it all, we are one world. At times like this pandemic, people need to hear this.”
The Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair Award that made possible his work with Vignuzzi “really enhanced our capacity to better understand virus dynamics in regards to how they interact with the host,” said tenOever. “It was so clear that we worked well together and it was a great merger of American and French science.”
This story was originally published on ShareAmerica.
For award-winning artist Kunle Adewale, going to college seemed like a distant dream. "I never thought I would go to college. My dad told me what I can’t be and what I can’t do. But I said, 'No, I want to go to college.' [I took the college exam] Seven times in seven years. If I had given up, I would have never met President Barack Obama," he told us.
Kunle, who is currently in San Francisco as an Atlantic Fellow for the Global Brain Institute, credits his Mandela Washington Fellowship for giving him exposure to a bigger world and opening doors. During his appearance on Mentor Talks on April 15, 2020, Kunle recalled seeing friends who had big-time jobs driving expensive cars.
"But life is not about what you drive -- it's about what drives you," Kunle told us. "And what drives me is making the world a better place." Kunle's passion for using arts to improve community well-being and health also drives him. As CEO of Tender Arts Nigeria, Kunle has impacted over 15,000 people through his arts in medicine programs in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and the United States.
Learn more about Kunle's story, his latest Arts in Medicine Project in response to COVID-19, #ArtResponds, and why he says "the future is not cut and paste" on this episode of MentorTalks, which you can watch above or on our Facebook page, @internationalexchangealumni.
Kunle Adewale, CEO/Creative Director, Tender Arts Nigeria
Kunle Adewale is a development practitioner and an artist by profession. With over a decade experience as an artist and in education, Kunle founded Tender Arts Nigeria in 2013, a social enterprise which positively impacts children, youth and adults by focusing on art education, talent development, and civic engagement. He has impacted over 15,000 beneficiaries through his art programs in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and the United States. Kunle is an alumnus of the Mandela Washington Fellowship program, and was recently shortlisted by the World Bank as one of the 68 Social Inclusion Heroes from all over the world, as the only World Bank Social Inclusion Hero from Nigeria.
