 There's a lot of changes. Obviously, we're not going to be able to do that. We're trying to do this. No, no, no, we won't. We get $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. $1,000. We are actually meeting with a friend who I mentioned earlier. That was when we only shared about the local campus. So... And that's always the hardest part. Yeah. Very small. All right. I'll give you something. I can do that. Yeah. It's nice. Are you ready? All right. Morning, ladies and gentlemen. Let me welcome you to the United States Institute of Peace. My name is Bill Taylor. I'm the Executive Vice President here at the Institute. And I'm very pleased to be able to welcome you to this and introduce this good discussion here, which Esther is going to run. And I'm looking forward to hearing. She's assembled a great panel. It's very appropriate that we do here at the Institute of Peace this International Education Week. We've been doing... Esther, you'll be happy to know. Actually, you do know. She's been a longtime friend of the Institute of Peace. And she knows that the Institute really started off with a mission of education, international education, peace building as education as a tool in peace building. So the Institute of Peace has a proud tradition of this kind of work, which you've contributed to many times in the past. Congress created us in 1984. And since then we've been doing this kind of work. Jeff Helsing is the Dean of our Academy. And the Academy does this kind of work around the world. We have offices. The Institute of Peace has offices in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and Tunisia, in Burma, which draws on the kind of work and the training and education that Jeff and the Academy do. So this is... We're very pleased here at the Institute to be able to be a participant here. The focus of this morning's symposium is on how international education efforts can enhance communication and understanding among communities around the world as a way to strengthen diplomacy and contribute to the sustainable peace. So again, very appropriate that we host to this. The international education is an important tool for diplomacy. We will hear this morning about a number of efforts that promote inclusivity, build cross-cultural dialogues, and foster critical thinking. We've got experts from the diplomatic, peace building, and education communities here and up here. We're going to discuss how innovative approaches to learning and new ideas from the communications, business, and scientific fields can be harnessed to strengthen ties between communities in conflict and contribute to more resilient and peaceful societies. At the heart of USIP's education and training is our work with practitioners that I've already mentioned in combat zones, conflict zones, where diplomats and officials here or civil society leaders in zones of conflict come to interact and kind of learn from each other and from us. We're constantly looking for new ideas, tools, programs that can strengthen peace building, diplomacy, and help create bridges and links among communities, among peoples, and among nations. Many of the education programs discussed here today are significant contributors to those efforts. So I'm very pleased to be able to turn this mic and this panel and this event over to Esther Bremer, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of NAFSA, which you can see right up here. And she, in turn, will introduce the panel. Esther, as I've already mentioned, longtime friend of USIP, including when she was Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, and it's a great pleasure for me to have her back here. So Esther, over to you. Please welcome Esther Bremer. Thank you. Ambassador, thank you for that warm welcome. Good morning. It's good to see all of you here on this bright sunny morning. I'd like to thank USIP on behalf of NAFSA for the long partnership on international education and peace building issues. We're delighted to be back here in this beautiful location. Again, thank you for your hospitality. And I'd also like to welcome those who are joining us online. We are trying to be in the 21st century, so we are streaming, live streaming as well. So again, we look forward to a stimulating discussion. And indeed, as the ambassador has already indicated that international education has been an important part of diplomacy for at least seven decades. One of the great features of the current international system is the web of interlocking relationships that undergirds international affairs. Modern international society includes not only national governments, but also non-governmental organizations, corporations, individuals, and yes, colleges and universities. International education has been an important part of US foreign policy and the world that the United States shaped after the end of the Second World War. International education includes the exchange of students and scholars and internationalization of campuses. United States diplomacy helped shape the post-war world. Having lived through devastating world wars, leaders understood the importance of trying to build structures that reduce conflict and promote the peaceful resolution of disputes. The creation of a network of international organizations, the promotion of human rights, the elaboration of international humanitarian law, all were part of rethinking international affairs. The path has not been easy. From the rivalries of the Cold War to the horrors of interstate conflict, strife recurs, especially when leaders invoke provocations rather than investing in prevention. One of the enduring principles has been that the exchange of students and scholars can help promote international understanding, bind countries closer together, and widen the cadre of people who understand the larger world around them and who can bring this wisdom to decision-making in our societies. Now, as you well know, the former Secretary of State, Dean Atchison, entitled his memoir, Present at the Creation. Well, international education was also part of the creation of a new world. Studying and thinking together was part of building relations among nations. It is no accident that in many countries, international education programs are administered by foreign ministries, such as the State Department in the U.S. case. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman signed the Fulbright-Hays Act, and along with the Smith-Mont Act, helped shape U.S. policy on international education. Reflecting on his eponymous Fulbright program, Senator Jay William Fulbright has written, quote, the program aims through these means to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, a little more compassion into world affairs, and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship. He also commented, the preservation of our free society in the years and decades to come will depend ultimately on whether we succeed or fail in directing the enormous power of human knowledge to the enrichment of our own lives and the shaping of our rational and civilized world order. It is the task of education more than any other instrument of foreign policy to help close the dangerous gap between the economic and technological interdependence of the peoples of the world and their psychological, political, and spiritual alienation, end quote. Well, not only was international education present at the creation, NAFSA was there too. Founded in 1948, NAFSA stands on the threshold of its 70th anniversary. NAFSA's growth has followed the field. NAFSA was founded as the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors and as the name suggests, its core was international student advisers and administrators who were focusing on foreign students coming to the United States. NAFSA helped foster a profession around the field of international student programming and administration. In the 1970s, NAFSA expanded its work to education abroad. More recently, NAFSA has also supported internationalization on campus to bring global learning to those who may not travel. And as part of Education Week this week on November 14th, NAFSA conferred the Paul Simon Awards for Campus Internationalization. As we will discuss in the first panel, international education was crucial to building the transatlantic community. In this panel, we will recall the role of international education in forging transatlantic relations and repairing relations after the Second World War, as well as the importance of education in building the European Union and reconnecting Europeans at the end of the Cold War. Education was important in building the New Europe and the European Union. Indeed, transatlantic destinations still dominate U.S. study abroad. Forty percent of U.S. students who study abroad go to four countries, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. As we will discuss in panel two, not only countries in the transatlantic region, but many around the world have integrated international education into their diplomacy. Countries beyond the Atlantic realm appreciate that international education can create political, diplomatic and economic seniors that bind countries. In the third panel, we will hear more about international education and foreign policies of China and Brazil. Countries grappling with conflict have looked to educators to help build or rebuild their societies. In the third panel, we will discuss international education and peace building. Over the years, NAFSA and USIP have been thinking together about international education and peace building. We welcome the latest iteration of our work and we look forward to our discussion. Now, those of you who spent any time in international organizations know you go from your period of chair to speaking in your national capacity or vice versa, so I think I've gone from speaking in my national capacity on behalf of NAFSA to chair. So in that capacity, that is my honor to welcome the panel. What I'd like to do is introduce all of our panelists and invite each to speak. After this, we will have a period of question and answer. On my immediate right is Sharon Hudson-Dean, who currently serves as Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State. A 23-year veteran of the U.S. Diplomatic Corps and member of the Senior Foreign Service, she has served in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nepal, Georgia, Russia, and Australia. She received her Bachelor of Science from Georgetown University and Master of Arts in Political Communications from Johns Hopkins. Sitting to her right, Ambassador Caroline Vitini currently serves as the European Union Delegation's Deputy Ambassador to the United States. Prior to joining the delegation, Ambassador Vitini served as Chief of Protocol with the rank of Ambassador at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Stockholm. And of course, many of us know her from her period from 2004 to 2008, when she was Deputy Chief of Mission at the Embassy of Sweden in Washington. She received her Bachelor's in Business Administration from the School of Economics at Gothenburg University. Sitting on her right, Dr. Dan Hamilton is the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Professor and Director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. And I had the honor of working with Dan for many years at the Center. Welcome. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Associate Director of the Policy Planning Staff for two Secretaries of State. He also served as the Representative of the Secretary of the National Security Education Board at the Department of Defense. He's been involved with over a dozen U.S. and European foundations and educational organizations. And during the summer, he served as the Dean of Valdezeg German Language Village, the oldest and largest German residential immersion program in North America, sponsored by Concordia College in Minnesota. Again, it's an honor to have our opening panel, and I turn over the floor to Sharon. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's really a great honor to be here and to be with this illustrious panel to discuss such an important topic today. I will make a quick note, I feel that I should add for my bio that I just finished up three years in Latvia, and the Latvians will be celebrating their Independence Day on Saturday, and so I want to make sure that I mention them because it is a country very close to my heart and a very good U.S. ally. I would also add a personal note that I have had a long professional relationship working with NAFSA, have incredible respect for the organization. As a junior officer in the late 90s, I worked in the Russian Federation, where part of my duties was to be in contact with all of the educational advising centers throughout Russia, and I went to visit many of them, spoke with them about the work that they were doing. So many of them were one-person volunteer corners in a library or a school. Usually it was a middle-aged woman who really wanted to help the young people of her community, and NAFSA provided a lot of opportunities, trainings and resources, and really helped all of these individuals feel connected to something much larger, which you described so eloquently, the world of international education and how it brings us all closer together. And now I have a few prepared remarks. For decades, the State Department has conducted people-to-people exchanges to build mutual understanding, to foster long-term connections, and to reinforce the strengths of the transatlantic relationship. Strong transatlantic relations are vital to our national security and economic prosperity. The United States and Europe work closely together on all major foreign policy goals and issues. Our partnership and coordination are key components in achieving ambitious goals to create a more prosperous and secure world. We remain committed to working with our European allies to counter terrorism around the globe, to defeat ISIS, and to support the Afghan government and its security forces in their efforts to build a stable and secure nation. The United States and the EU have the largest economic relationship in the world with nearly $3 billion in goods and services traded per day in 2016, and investments exceeding $4.5 trillion. Our trade employs 15 million workers on both sides of the Atlantic. This transatlantic relationship is built on the confidence that we can speak candidly to one another, even when we disagree. Exchanges between the United States and Europe help foster this relationship, everything from students to professionals to diplomats. They provide people with the skills and connections needed to solve global issues, and they encourage open dialogue at the people-to-people level, even when the relationships between governments is strained. Public diplomacy, citizen diplomacy, people-to-people diplomacy, all of these terms relate to one core idea. While relationships between nations are formalized through treaties and agreements, they are built and sustained by individuals of all walks of life, including teachers, students, athletes, artists, and entrepreneurs, as well as the families who welcome foreign exchange students into their homes. I'd like to share a few figures to illustrate the magnitude of these exchanges. I know many of you are familiar with some of the most recent data, but it really says so much that I'd like to repeat it again. The 2017 Open Doors Report shows that for the second year in a row, over one million international students studied in the United States. Of these, 92,000 came from Europe, with the UK, Turkey, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Russia at the top. These numbers attest to a widespread international recognition of the vitality, diversity, and quality of U.S. colleges and universities. And Europe remains a top destination for Americans. 176,000 Americans chose to study abroad in the European region in the 2015-16 academic year. I'm very much hoping that my son, who is a freshman at university this year, will be doing the same thing next summer, and hopefully for a full year later on in his degree program. In fiscal year 2015, the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs spent approximately $120 million on educational and cultural exchange programs between the United States and Europe. Program participants included approximately 7,000 Americans and 39,000 Europeans. The privately funded J1 Exchange Visitor Program includes 13 categories of education and cultural exchange, such as the au pair program and the summer work and study program. In 2016, more than 146,000 individuals, Europeans, participated in these private exchanges, and I'm happy to discuss that more later. They are very valuable. Through its myriad exchange opportunities, the Department of State enables regular citizens to immerse themselves in other societies and to develop an understanding of traditions and values that are at first foreign, but then come to feel familiar, whether as an international visitor, or a Gilman or Fulbright scholar, a Humphrey Fellow or an English language Fellow, or for the European region, a Fellow in our Young Transatlantic Innovation Leaders Initiative. Exchange participants make connections, collaborate on projects of mutual interest, and leave lasting impressions on the communities they visit. Take, for an example, some of our international visitor leadership alumni in Spain, who played a central role in condemning the Barcelona terrorist attacks this past August. They used broadcast media interviews, opinion pieces, social media messaging, and meetings with government leaders to condemn the attacks and to express their willingness to help prevent more. Or our participants in our Flex Youth Exchange Program and the Congress Bundestag Youth Exchange Program, who performed more than 125,000 hours of community service here in the United States following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey in Houston. These youth exchange participants worked side-by-side with other volunteers to give back and show support for the victims of the hurricane. They purchased and distributed supplies for FEMA campgrounds. They spent time at local shelters and churches hearing the stories of displaced families. And they also gathered food for local animal rescue shelters to help the pets that had been affected. While formal meetings between ministers and ambassadors are certainly a necessary part of how we conduct business in the diplomatic world, the informal network of people from all sectors of society is what sustains any accomplishments that we achieve. In this age of social media, online news, and virtual relationships, supporting personal, face-to-face relationships helps to bring clarity and perspective to ideas and claims of fact that circulate online. Setting Abroad, therefore, can serve as a bulwark against misinformation that is continuously put out on the Internet and that attempts to undermine our alliances by creating uncertainty and mistrust. The first-hand experience that international education provides allows a person to come to their own conclusions about a particular country and its people, and hopefully to share this understanding with their friends and relatives back home. The current administration takes its responsibility to advance the safety and prosperity of the United States and its allies, especially our long-standing relationships in Europe, very seriously. And it is committed to supporting all means to achieve those goals, including international education. I'd be happy to elaborate on this and to discuss any specific exchange programs. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. And thank you to NAFSA and to UCIP for hosting us and convening this important gathering this morning. I'm really happy to see NAFSA being led by Esther Brimmer, which is an excellent person for this task. I've had good cooperation with your predecessors as well, but I'm really happy to see you here now. And I'm also happy to see Dan on this. There was already a little plug made in Dan's bio for Concordia language villages, and I would like to make another one unsolicited because it's a wonderful place. And I think language is such an important thing and a key to open your mind to a new culture and to send young kids up to the northern part of Minnesota where you can choose from a number of word languages and immerse them for a week up to a month in that language and that culture is unique. It's the first step out in the world. You are still in the United States, but you enter another word and nothing better than the International Day to foster at Concordia language villages to foster an international spirit. So for anyone who wants to go and see it, I don't know if I... But it's a great place. No, no, I didn't, but I wanted just to say this. Now coming back to the European Union and what we do for international education. And it's just worth to remind people here we are still 28 countries in the European Union and one of our sort of motos is United in Diversity. And that is an important part to think of when you think of... or sort of make this kind of comparison that it becomes between the United States and European Union that European Union is, I must say, much more diverse in a way than the United States. The United States is more of a mixing bowl while in Europe, of course, the different countries have distinct cultures, distinct languages, which... and distinct also educational cultures and traditions that sort of divide us from each other in one way. But that the European Union now is striving to bridge over to create more of a sort of European belonging. So Union has all the project as such and we just turned 60 this year has always been to keep the peace, to overcome borders and to allow for free movement of goods, services and people and that's the common market, the integrated market. And 60 years now after signing the treaties of Rome we try to strengthen our sense of European identity and of course education is one of the best tools to achieve this. We also have a joint and common belief in Europe that high quality and inclusive education from childhood and on is the groundwork for social cohesion, social mobility and an equitable society. So the EU has taken this commitment to education and to combine it with the freedom of movement to become a global leader in high education, exchange and mobility. And for those who are not familiar with the common market or the single market is that we have the possibility to work or live wherever we want within the European Union but to be able to do that of course you have to have qualifications that you can adapt and that are recognized in another country. While we have been committed to this for quite a while we cannot rest on our laurels because as we all know there's a lot of challenges out to this and I'm very happy that this occasion to speak to you falls today because it's really the opportunity for me to break some news to you. Just two days ago the European Commission released several ambitious proposals for a new European education area and these proposals are going to be discussed at the summit in Gothenburg Sweden tomorrow. So this is just in the making. And these proposals they aim to build a Europe where we can harness the full potential of education and culture for jobs, social fairness, active citizenship very important today and the experience of European identity and diversity. Where learning and studying and research are not blocked by borders where skilled and resilient citizens can contribute to job growth innovation and that they feel empowered to shape our societies and where people can share a strong sense of European identity and feel connected to our common cultural heritage. So these steps, these proposals that will be discussed tomorrow include steps to increase the mobility of students, mutual recognition of educational qualifications and better cooperation among universities. And this is going to be done through a concrete set of ideas. First of all is a cure student e-card that will carry academic information and allow access all over Europe to university services like libraries and the like. To increase the number of students who are participating in the Eurasmus Plus mobility program by 2 million before 2020 and doubling the overall participation rates between 21 and 27. By 2025, graduating secondary students should have a good knowledge of two additional languages other than their mother tongue. And setting a benchmark for member states to spend a minimum of 5% of the GDP on education including additional financial support from the European Union. So these are the ambitions that we have. It's clear from these proposals I think that the ambition that the European Union understands the importance of the value of exchange and higher education mobility. But this is not a new development in Europe. The Eurasmus program actually turns 30 this year. And over those decades more than 9 million people have participated in some aspect of Eurasmus. Not revealing how old I am but I was just barely not able to take part of this for two reasons because it was when I graduated it was created and second because Sweden was not a member of the European Union which at that time was an obstacle. Now Eurasmus has a wider scope. Studies evaluating the Eurasmus program have shown that students experience studying and living in another EU member state contributes quite concretely to their developing a sense of European identity and citizenship. You can understand in these times of populism and nationalism and so on that the EU wants to grow this European identity that we all belong together. And therefore we want to give more students the opportunity to participate in this type of program. This Eurasmus experience I have even entered the pop culture. There is a film called L'Oberge Espanyol which shows several foreign students living together in Barcelona. It's funny that you just mentioned that. But my message to you today is that Eurasmus Plus is not only for European student. American students and universities can participate in many of the aspects of European Plus or the Eurasmus Plus program. Americans are eligible for short-term study abroad experiences, joint master's degrees and even financial support to study or teach about the EU. This year Eurasmus Plus is spending 3.7 million euros to support 578 Americans to study in Europe and 485 Europeans to come to the US. In addition, 44 students receive scholarships to undertake one of the over 100 available Eurasmus Mundo's joint master's degree programs. There is a call for proposals out and it came out a few weeks ago and it's open until February. And if you are at all interested to inform yourself about that, I turn to my colleague Tim Riviera and seek him out because he knows all the details about that. But Eurasmus Plus is just a small and recent part of educational relations between Europe and the United States as we have just heard. One can say many universities in the United States have actually European roots or sources created by faith communities or other heritage groups who wanted to preserve their culture and their traditions. And since the end of the Second World War, the educational relations have only flourished. So we are, as we heard, top destinations for reciprocal studies abroad. There is a significant higher number of Americans studying in Europe compared to Europeans studying in the United States and I think that is linked to the higher cost of education. It is a challenge for many Europeans. Some European countries have tuition-free higher education and other countries have significantly lower tuition than we encounter here in the United States. But the glories of that, several programs of scholarships, et cetera, has benefited students and I think the G1 program that you mentioned as well is an incredibly important opportunity for people to come over and get a firsthand knowledge of the United States. And most of them turn up again in a more advanced professional capacity and America remains in their hearts forever. We know that we can't take these transatlantic ties for granted and we are therefore very interested in increasing the number of American students that are studying European studies or that want to go to Europe. Universities are therefore key partners for us at the European Union delegation here in the United States in our public diplomacy outreach program. And we support a number of educational programs targeting secondary and university level students in the United States. It includes high school students participating in our Euro challenge competition on European financial and monetary policy. It's a competition that we hold each year for a number of years now. We also last year for the first time tried out a new challenge on European foreign policy for undergraduate students and we call that the Schumann Challenge. It was tested here in the DC region last year and we hope to be able to expand that. And because the best way of learning is by doing we have also just this week released three toolkits to help high schools and universities to run their own EU simulation or model EU programs. So we give also the opportunities to others without relying on us. Beyond serving as partners for these programs universities and schools are also important partners in other respects. And we often when we go outside the Beltway we try to travel more and more around the United States. Me, the ambassador, my colleagues, we always try to make speeches and meet students at universities. And we feel that there is a great interest and people really understand that they need this international experience to be able to have a chance in today's labor market. And particularly as I said before, dear to my heart and which is I would say challenging when your country is also a continent almost is the language education and the opportunity to learn other languages. Because the language and for us as Europeans is kind of natural but for you it's not really the same thing here. A language opens your heart and your mind to another culture and you just get such a better understanding of how other people think and why they do things that they do. It's a lot of the culture is hidden in the foreign language and that is something that I think is so important that we don't, that we not all go over to bad English so to say but that we try to foster these other languages. So I just want to conclude that we will continue to work for a transatlantic exchange and you can find out, we are trying to spread more information about that. You can find out that by using our hashtag EU at school which is on Twitter and Facebook. And we also have a blog on Medium where we promote our EU at school campaign so you can see and hear from people who have participated themselves. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good morning. I was delighted when Esther asked me to come. Esther and I are old colleagues and my family is linked to NAFSA because my wife who is a professor at Georgetown now got her first job at NAFSA when she came to Washington. And I've always had great respect for USIP and all the work that you've done. We've worked together over the years. So it's a great opportunity to combine those two ideas of education and diplomacy. Esther asked me to maybe take a case study and to think about this whole issue with regard to how Germany and the United States have developed their relationship. It's probably one of the deepest and broadest educational relationships we have with any country. And it intertwined so much with our security, our economics and our diplomacy that maybe there are some things to be gained from sort of looking more deeply at one example. And I think she asked me because my adventure with international education started when I was five on the deck of the ship called the SS United States. And my first glimpse of the world was when I saw the port of Bremerhaven because I was about to join my mother and father on a great adventure which was called US military life in Germany. And you know, I think it's important just to step back and understand that over 12 million GIs in their families lived in Germany during the Cold War period. Many were still there. It makes Germany the country that most Americans have lived in anywhere in the world, more than anywhere else. And that is obviously it was an investment in our security but it was actually brought huge educational, you know, developments with it, informed generations, a couple generations at least of Americans about Europe and obviously it was a family affair. You know, when I was a kid we were going down cobblestone streets. There were goomy bears, you know. We walked out on a frozen Rhine River. There was the AFN, the American Forces Network. There were the Dodd Schools, Department of Defense Schools. Four marks the dollar. And you know, it was obviously a memory. But it's just one memory of a million human connections that I think forged that bond after obviously great tragedy and world wars. And so people were the core of a U.S. security commitment to Europe at that time. But it was also a core to diplomacy and I think importantly was a core to reconciliation. Reconciliation became sort of a underlying theme of much of the people-to-people exchanges between the United States and Germany just as it has been with a number of other countries. You know, by the end of the 1950s, millions of Germans every month were visiting America houses that had been set up all through Germany as an opportunity to understand something about the United States and its culture. You could say the entire post-war German leadership had spent some time of their life living, studying, working in the United States. It was a formative, formative experience for that generation of West Germans who had come out of the war and had grown up in a different world. And it wasn't just the U.S. government. The Ford Foundation, NAFSA is part of this, AFS, Youth for Understanding. Many of these institutions got their start at that time. Fulbright was mentioned in the German context it still exists, American Council in Germany, the Atlantic Booker still have a very strong bilateral relationship. Visitors programs that were initiated by the U.S. government that still exist again brought just untold numbers of people to the United States, took them across the country. It's still a formative experience for many people who come to our country. And in the German context, it was a very important medicine for a broken national soul. It was a way for the Germans to rehabilitate and become reconnected with Europeans as well as Americans after the disasters of two world wars. And it was such a tool of reconciliation there are lots of stories. And many American institutions have their roots in this German connection many probably did not wear of. Just to give you one anecdote, the Aspen Institute. The Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies many people may be aware of that. It started in 1948 and the idea was how do you rehabilitate Germany after World War II? How do you get it back into the civilized world with all the emotions still very palpable? And a number of Americans said, well, let's start with culture. Let's start with education. And they celebrated Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who is sort of Germany's Shakespeare. And let's start with him. Let's honor his contribution to Western thought and so on. And let's bring a mix of people from different walks of life together not in Germany but in a little silver mining ghost town called Aspen, Colorado that no one had ever heard of except Walter Pepke, who was the CEO of Continental Cannes in Chicago. He happened to be the brother-in-law of Paul Knitze who's founded my school. And he said, we're going to go have a summer retreat. We're going to bring all these Germans with us but a lot of people from all over the world and we're going to talk about the impact of Goethe on our civilization. It was the only time, first and only time that Albert Schweitzer ever came to the United States. He got the invitation from Walter Pepke from Continental Cannes in Chicago so he flew to Chicago. He said, I am here. And they said, well, Dr. Schweitzer, you know, Colorado is another thousand miles so you've got to get back on the plane. Aspen still exists. It is a fundamental sort of part of the American NGO landscape and it is, you know, just very American. But it had this deep connection to Germany that I think was really important at the time to that generation of Germans. It was so important and so relevant that some decades later when the city of West Berlin was circled by a wall, there was again a discussion. What do we do to keep this little island alive? How do we sustain the viability of West Berlin in the middle of the Cold War surrounded by a wall and in the middle of East Germany? And the natural idea of our diplomats was, well, let's put the international organizations there. The United Nations should go to West Berlin. You know, any kind of internationalization. But of course the Soviets vetoed that every time because that wasn't their interest. They were trying to wear down the city. So the idea was the Aspen Institute. Let's take a small, little international education outfit to do what big ones, big public ones, couldn't do in that context, which was to bring people together, to go to Berlin, see what the Cold War was all about where you could touch it. And it brought countless American leaders to West Berlin to understand this dynamic and why we were engaged in Europe. And I happened to work there during that time. And the other thing which was done more quietly was we were the bridge to the East. We brought Soviet, East European regime leaders together with their critics in very small discussions in West Berlin of all places. And they came because they found it so interesting. It wasn't public diplomacy in a public sense, but it was diplomacy in a private sense. And Aspen, Germany now is still there. So these kinds of things sometimes can do more than big public institutions and big things with big splash. The same with not just Germany, but at the same time in Bologna, Italy, USAID said, you know, this is part of reconciliation with Italy, education. They set up the Bologna Center, which is part of our school, and it still educates thousands of people, including for the European Commission. I'm happy to say. So it was an important tool, but it wasn't one way. The Germans, too, said, this is exactly what we need to do. And it became, and still is, a core element of German diplomacy around the world and Germany's image around the world. Do you think of what the Germans have done on themselves? They are now one of the leaders globally in using people-to-people exchange and international education to promote their own foreign policy. And it was a key tool of reconciliation. The German Academic Exchange Service, the DAAD, the Humboldt Foundation, which brings thousands of scientists to Germany, the Goethe Institutes all over the world, culture again, had a huge impact on Germany's ability to reconcile with its neighbors and to position itself to be accepted after World Wars. And when that generation sort of was fading, they had a recreation in the 1970s and 80s. If you think about what happened, a lot of it was because of Helmut Kohl, who was very personally committed to this. But it wasn't only, again, the German government. But the Bosch Foundation, the Robert Bosch Foundation, created what's called the Bosch Fellows Program, which exists today, brings young American workers, I mean professionals, to Germany for an entire year. It's probably the best program I know of that you can go and work in Germany and really work. It's not a study program. And that has had a huge impact on lots of people. Dennis McDonough, who was President Obama's Chief of Staff, was a Bosch Fellow. He spent a year in Germany. It's that kind of example that really has a big impact Helmut Kohl created what is called the Bundeskanzler Fellowships, Federal Chancellor Fellowships. My former program assistant just got one and she's now in Germany for the year. These things all continue to exist. The Congress Bundeskart of Exchange Program, which is mentioned, is still very important. The Congressional Study Group on Germany. Helmut Kohl started a whole program with American university presidents. He had them come regularly to Germany and meet together with him about the future of international education. He created three Centers of Excellence in German and European Studies at American universities. And, you know, the Germans themselves inspired us again. Think about the work of the German political foundations. This was an effort by the parties in Germany to do civic education, which, of course, after World War II was really quite important. You mentioned how important it still is. They're all over the world. Each party that gets in the Bundestag gets some foundation. That was the inspiration for the National Democratic Institute of the United States, for the International Republican Institute. We took lessons back again from Germany to create our own types of political foundations, which again are engaged all over the world in civic education. Even the Greens and the grassroots movements of the 60s and the early 70s were a German-American phenomenon. If you go and interact with the Greens of Germany, they are the most American political party in terms of how they work. And a lot of it was because, again, of opposition activists. That counterculture across the Atlantic also created a huge amount of exchange. And then at the end of the Cold War, we faced another recreation. And again, both sides really committed to something but said it has to be different now. It's not rooted in our common security challenges, but in our common domestic challenges. Things that we might need to work on together. I was with Richard Holbrook when he was Ambassador in Germany, and we had to say farewell to the Berlin Brigade. The American military force that had stayed with West Berlin all those years, and they were leaving. And the Germans were a little nervous about that. American troops are leaving, now what? And we reached into a deeper tradition, which is education again. So by we created the American Academy, which now exists in Berlin, because before the wars, more Americans got their PhDs at the Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm Universität in Berlin that had Harvard and Yale together. Berlin was the place where you went to get your education. And we wanted to re-establish that tradition. So now scholars come to Berlin. We don't have to just send soldiers, thank God. But we discovered education as the link, the deeper link that united our countries, reaching back into some old traditions. In California, the exiles from Germany fled the Nazis and started to work for Hollywood. Bertolt Brecht, people like that, actually were Hollywood screenwriters. One of them was Leon Feuchfanger, a writer who lived in Pacific Palisades. And when he died and his wife died, the Germans bought the property, have created what's now called the Villa Aurora, and it's a house for exile writers from around the world. It's in California. It has a German heritage, and they have just done the same thing now, right down the street with the Thomas Mann Villa. Thomas Mann, another famous German writer. They're connecting them to think forward, but reach into a deeper tradition. There are a lot of things like that that we have done across the Atlantic that are really quite powerful. And so, I think today our challenge is how do we think about this so it's relevant to our generation, to our lives? And what I have seen is, what has become really relevant is how we can learn from the challenges we face as societies these days. The Kerber Foundation in Germany had a whole program called Usable, U.S. Able Usable. And it was good ideas and awards program. Good ideas from the United States for Germany. The community college system. Germans don't have that. Alumni networks at universities. Germans don't have that. Guidance counselors. Community organizers. These were all ideas that got awards through this German Foundation program for initiatives that are now taking place in Germany. But the Germans have done the same thing. The German American GAP program, which is Partners German American Schools. You can rent a German. They have a program called Rent a German. You want to have a German come to your classroom, they will match you. We actually have a program called Rent an American as well. But it becomes really rooted into our real interests. And the example I use is the economy today. Charlotte, North Carolina is the biggest center of German investment in the United States. It's not the big names. Oh, there are some big names there. It's all the German Mittelstein, middle-sized companies that invest there. And it's because of a partnership between the Charlotte, Carolina's partnership and the Chamber of Commerce in Karlsruhe, Germany decided to send business to each other. So all these German companies are now in Charlotte. And they're hiring people from Central Piedmont Community College. And what they realize that the people graduating from Central Piedmont Community College weren't quite getting the qualifications they needed as German companies. And so these two Chambers of Commerce decided let's have a certificate program so that the graduates of Central Piedmont Community College not only get a really good education, they get certified by the German system that they have the kind of qualification that those German companies in Charlotte need. And they're being hired just like you can't believe. The connection between education and the economy that often is lacking in the United States but is really central to actually how the German system works. And it's had a huge impact on the Charlotte region. So it makes a real difference in people's lives. So I think, you know, we could talk about how our strategic interests make our cooperation necessary and our values make it possible, but it's our complementarity in societies where each of us can learn something from the other that makes that type of education exchange so rewarding. And ultimately, it makes a real difference in an individual's life. And in the end, I think that's why we're all doing that. Thank you. Thank you to all the panelists for that rich discussion of international education and diplomacy. I will pose opening questions to each and then open the floor for questions we have about a little over 15 minutes, but we'll make sure that we have time for questions from the audience as well. So first, to Sharon Hudson, you talked about the importance of international education and studying abroad, particularly so that individuals can make their own decisions. In a world that is often now informed perhaps by what we used to call disinformation in the electronic space. Could you come a little bit further and show people by experiencing other cultures begin to be able to make their own judgments to become informed citizens. Sure. Absolutely. Pleasure. Yes, there's an expression that I've heard throughout my career. If you don't go, you won't know. And so much of that is directly related to personal experience being there, not just reading about it, not just seeing something online, but seeing in the environment and getting the entire experience. And that is very important in any type of an exchange program. The impact that it has so much of human interaction just sitting here next to you, having the atmosphere in the room, seeing the bigger picture. And that is what individuals who go on these programs, especially the long-term ones, really get the deeper understanding. And I agree completely and emphasize that when you are especially experiencing another language, how much more you come to appreciate the culture. And that's very important. In today's world, we are flooded with information. And so picking through that, all of the different narratives that are out there, all of the things coming at us, we are informed by our personal experiences and by our experiences of those closest to us. And so the opportunity to travel, the opportunity to speak directly to foreigners makes a big difference. In the old USIA, which when I started my career, I joined the US Information Agency before it was combined into the State Department. And we were very much focused on that mission of mutual understanding and the idea that you may, foreigners may come to the United States with some preformed opinions on some dislikes or some negative views. But the more that they get to speak with Americans, learn about our system, experience our culture, then there's an understanding. And so we will have differences but having that deeper understanding and the ability to talk directly is very important for our foreign policy, for our diplomatic relations and for the future of the world. Thank you. Thank you. It was exciting to hear the news and thank you for making news here about the new European Union education area. Could you come a little bit more about the timing? Are there actions that national governments of the European Union need to take to actually implement this? Will this be implemented, as you say, at 28 or 27? Thank you. Well, when it comes to the 27 or the 28, our principle is really that the UK is a member of the European Union until it's not. So they are a part of shaping this. They are, as you know, a very popular destination and it will be very important also for the EU to continue even after they have left to have education about the EU as such and the EU system of governance in the UK, of course, because they will be an incredible partner and so that is what it is. When it comes to education in the EU, it's not that the commission has the competence over that, as we say, as we have, for example, in trade policy, where the commission actually takes decision for the member states, negotiate for the member states. So, when it comes to the member of the sort of peer pressure, encouragement, joint goals, common goals, financing is a very important part of it also that we from the EU commission's budget put money and structures in place which allow for this. I don't think we can talk about what this has been which has sort of aligned the university exams in Europe. Actually, according to a US system, really, so you can value what type of education people have, how much they have studied when they get a certain degree, what level they have studied, etc. And this is a process that has been done for academic studies, but it's now with the new so-called Sorbonne process is going to be increased. As Dan mentioned, which I think is important for today, this apprenticeship systems also, we are not, I mean, it has a higher education of some sorts, but there also there is an effort to try to align those apprenticeship systems across Europe. So if you have a certification from some country in some type of skill or trade that you can bring that with you and get an employment in another country and they know what you know. I know this is a challenge in the United States between states and even between counties and we see that as something that really increased mobility and helps out with unemployment because if you are unemployed in some part of the European Union, well, you can move somewhere else where these types of jobs are offered or even where they are seeking for people with those competencies. But this has also for on a higher level, you know, doctors, lawyers, all those kind of sort of protected professions have a much easier move between countries. So that is an important part to try to continue to strengthen that in a society where education becomes so much more important because the low-skilled jobs are just not there and people with lower skills have difficulties to find employment is often an unsafe labour market for them. So that is a very important part. As you saw, as I said, some of these goals of increasing the number of Erasmus students and so on, it's a quite long horizon but up to 2027 I believe but it is still a push for all member states to make that effort. It is a help for the universities to connect with each other. There is this sort of mutual recognition part and also that you can bring your credits from one system into another, which is very important. Many students don't want to lose a semester or a year by sort of having to repeat to get their credits for their exam but that they can bring in the credits that they get from somewhere else. Thank you. It's very interesting that you mentioned of course the contribution of exchange and activity contributes to the workforce as well to greater qualifications and indeed one of the things we see is that the importance of the internationalization of at home phenomenon as colleges and universities are bringing global learning to campuses at home, the people who may not have the opportunity to travel are able to get some of the skills that come from global learning and so looking at how that helps as I say changing workforces role of education in rebuilding the Trans and Land Game Part and the deep roots that underpin important relationships. As you indicate that both Germany and the United States as part of their longstanding relationship have been talking about the points of values and indeed the certain principles. In this era where we see the prevalence of nationalism and xenophobia, are there particular responsibilities for the institutions that you describe whether it's universities, institutes and others that do provide this space for civilized discussion but what roles do you see for for instance these knowledge based institutions in this current climate? Well you know I'm involved with a number of these groups and I think particularly the Germans reaching out here and maybe Kirlien has similar I think they realized over the last, not over the last year but I would say over the last number of years that their outreach within the United States might not have been as reaching out as to as many parts of the population as probably they should have and that they are not engaged, sort of the profile of those engaged in these programs might have been a bit skewed politically or skewed in terms of gender or any other kind of background and I think there's a great push now among a number of the European embassies we have to really get out and make sure that people understand that we're not trying to skew this we're trying to really embrace a broader segment of the US population so I think that's one practical thing you see is happening I think the other though is to realize at least the transatlantic relationship it would seem to me can be an uncomfortable one because we hold each other to account we actually believe what we say about the values we espouse I believe and that when we feel the other side isn't the aspirations of the other side and their achievements of the other side are not quite matching we have the kind of relationship where we can critique that I think both within our societies but across our societies across the Atlantic that makes this sometimes an uncomfortable relationship but it's actually a foundational part of it because that's the nature of what democracies are about so I think the more these organizations can lock into that it's not necessarily a bad thing we should be debating the kinds of differences we have within our societies and across those that's what makes this healthy and vibrant so I would encourage more of that but I do believe we each have to look at who are we reaching out to for these programs who's getting our message who is not and could we do a better job at being more inclusive and trying to have a more inclusive discussion I think that would be a pretty practical agenda these days, thank you I'd like to turn to questions from the audience are there microphones are there any questions I always have a long list please there's a microphone yes if you could come up to the microphone that way we're sure everyone can hear you and please introduce yourself thank you good morning my name is Robyn Lathrop I'm from Irax the international research and exchanges board thank you for making the time to join all of us here today to the panel I have a question about diplomacy and I was wondering if the panel could share a specific example of how an international exchange moved our diplomatic relationship forward with a particular country a specific outcome there's one a German example let me just give you an example of after the Cold War was trying to rejoin the west we had to think of how do we connect people so one thing we did was create national guard partnerships with east European countries so US state national guards are paired up with various European countries and that's been extended now to other countries around the world so they do practical exchange on what they train to do and they learn a lot from each other and over time I think that has been one element of this integrative type of movement certainly for eastern Europe to bring it into the mainstream but what it has done I think is forged all of these other educational opportunities about civilian control of the military for instance if you wanted to get a practical point of the foreign policy how do you work with a country of authoritarianism to tell whatever other type of system to really make that principle real for a military establishment and sometimes it is because you have to interact with people who come from that other tradition and have that kind of mutual exchange so I would argue that that's one that really made a difference I think the other just to use the east European example is we created something called enterprise funds after in fact Bill Taylor is very involved in that which were we used investment advisors to say let's do the private sector let's actually create things that were based in the economy in eastern Europe and invest in companies and so on and turn it around but what happened is that they basically their idea was to go out of business at some point and they turned now into foundations so it helps to revive those economies coming out of communism socialism but also now as a foundation I was in Latvia last year because of the US Baltic freedom foundation which was derived out of one of those foundations there's an important one in Poland these days in Ukraine so I think these kinds of things really over time make a difference because they they were part of an integrative policy how do we reconnect eastern Europe behind the wall behind the Iron Curtain into the European mainstream and obviously while our EU partners did most of that the US played a role that's fantastic and putting in the larger perspective I have a lot of first-hand recent experience of the partnership between the Latvian military and the Michigan National Guard and that is tremendous many many examples of how that mil-to-mil relationship has expanded well beyond what the initial goals were and into bringing the countries together on a government level military level but also people-to-people level and that happens in many of our partnership countries all of our partnership countries I'm sure one concrete example that I have and can mention from the Fulbright program of something quite recent and perhaps slightly more specific than the broader one is a Fulbright Ukrainian Fulbright participant who studied at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013 to 2014 returned to Ukraine and set up a MOOC platform which is the massive online open courses platform and he this has grown dramatically since he set this up they have more than 150,000 users and are offering two dozen online courses what is strategically important in that is that he has a lot of Ukrainian students using the MOOC who are in eastern Ukraine and this is helping them as their universities or their educational opportunities are shut down or constrained they are able to stay on track with their personal goals but also to be a part of Ukraine the country Ukraine and it is our very firm policy that Ukraine have its sovereignty and territorial integrity restored as well as promoting reform within the entire system and so these courses are also helping to educate the next generation of leaders and business people and the community leadership as well who will create the more reform oriented and EU focused Ukraine and just to offer two more examples one I have read about one I have read about having left the department by this time amongst the team that was negotiating the joint comprehensive plan of action with Iran which is the EU 3 plus 3 and on the Iranian nuclear of course on the Iranian team the foreign minister had actually studied the United States and so one can speculate whether that ability I would say familiarity with interactions of how to interact may have been an important element in the personal dynamics of that negotiation one would speculate and then just to say I just said personally I studied in the United Kingdom and one of the students I studied with of course by the time I got to be assistant secretary for international organizations he was my opposite member in Thailand and so the times when we occasioned to call each other up on United Nations business it was in our countries and therefore it was nice to have I could I make another example that I wish is maybe not diplomatic but I think it's something that is a future challenge or is actually present challenge is how we are going to deal with the groups of people who are left behind on both of our continents and I was a week ago I was in West Virginia and had discussions just to try to understand the situation and I met with a group of young people who are trying to revitalize a sort of grassroots economy in the cold field areas they don't believe that the coal will come back there were other people in West Virginia who were strong believers in the comeback of coal but these people believe that you have to have another you have to find another way to revitalize the economy and one of these persons had who has a very central function young woman she had been in one of these German foundation she had been over to Germany to visit some of the areas of coal mining areas in Germany to see how how they are facing out of the coal coal economy and finding other ways to revitalize their communities and I think for her for people in West Virginia who feel very alone very abandoned very sort of some way hopeless for her that was just an injection to see that it is possible and that we are not alone this happening everywhere and we can find ways out of this this is something we need to do more we need to focus more on both in Europe where we have I must say exactly the same problem and here in the United States and if we can find ways to get these people together both from universities who seem to be pretty also alienated from the reality in West Virginia but also on other levels I think it would be very important to find solutions for for a very acute problem indeed just that to look at what mechanisms that governments can actually help as you say people in various different parts of the country learn about comparable situations that could be really relevant it's really interesting and you mentioned new news from the European Union I'll just note something that's happening that I would say is positive and bipartisan right here in Washington it's not often we can say that but one of the things that we saw this week and those of you who work a lot on international education will be familiar with the Paul Simon Steady Abroad Act named in honor of the late Senator Paul Simon and this act would create seed money within the Department of Education to encourage universities to create study abroad programs and the idea is then that you would build a public-private partnership on top of that but the idea is that this would be beneficial across the country urban and rural all 50 states and Washington would benefit from this the act has actually been introduced again in a bipartisan way by Senators Worker and Durbin in the Senate and just this week was again introduced in the House in a bipartisan way with Senator Bustos and Congressman Ross Leighton so it's interesting on this issue it's a recognition that finding ways for Americans to go abroad and learn skills, activity, see examples that they can bring home is really important so among the many different things benefits of international education is one is finding these examples that are directly relevant for your own home community so other questions on the floor please yes, yes, I Hello everyone my name is Shaun T. King I'd like to thank you all for being here and speaking with us today my question is actually for Miss Hudson Dean the open doors data stated that 71% of undergraduate U.S. students that have study abroad identified as white and understanding the importance of international education and ensuring there is a more accurate and diverse representation of U.S. citizens abroad and the U.S. graduates have the State Department put in place to increase diversity in the field and also what advice would you give to someone who feels study abroad is not for them thank you great questions thank you we take increasing diversity very seriously and there are certain ways that we try to move the ball forward into doing exactly what we're doing a more diverse population that focuses on international relations and foreign policy and that very much includes our own workforce in the State Department and in the Foreign Service and so starting with that we have initiated several programs over the last two decades to recruit more diverse candidates into our service we have a number of special programs with diversity candidates through graduate school programs and with doing internships at embassies abroad and then bringing them into the State Department I've worked with many of those candidates over the years and they are absolutely superb and I'm very gratified when I see them joining the Foreign Service and going out to work in our embassies and so those programs are continuing in addition to that we send diplomats to universities as diplomats in residence they tend to be our most senior people and they will go for one to two years and do a combination of things from teaching to recruitment a big part of their responsibilities at these universities is recruiting diverse candidates reaching out to those students who are not doing international relations are not really thinking that that's the way they want to go many of these diplomats are also sent to universities that are not your normal pool for the Foreign Service and so not your Ivy League schools but to historically black colleges or very large state schools and in addition to the work they do at their home institutions while they're on this detail they go to other universities in the area and so I know we have people at universities in the Midwest or in the south who really do that and so that's a huge in terms of also trying to bring in more diverse candidates to our overall program so from abroad coming to the United States because we feel that that's also a way to reach out to non-traditional American students in the foreign policy realm we've really increased our recruitment and special programs in non-traditional groups such as lower income or disadvantaged trying to reach out to more those countries that don't send many students to the United States so not so much Europe but more in Africa or in other parts of Asia or Latin America and trying to encourage them whether it's through educational advising opportunities information or scholarships etc to encourage them to come to the United States to bring in recognition that having a more diverse international student pool at American universities helps to bring in more American interest in it I personally saw one of these programs in action which I think is one of our crown jewels in the country of Zimbabwe when I was there started by an American woman who was our educational advisor married to a Zimbabwean student who would never consider a study abroad who just didn't have the information resources because they came from low income families their stories were really incredible there was one young man who he literally had to pan for gold in the southern region of Zimbabwe in order to get money to support his family there was another young woman whose entire family had died of HIV AIDS she was taken in by a distant relative but the key with these students is that they were performing very well in schools and so they got scholarships to go to Zimbabwe and good schools to get a decent high school education but they didn't have the connections or the know-how to apply for scholarships to U.S. universities and so that was the connection that our embassy was able to make was to help them through the application process and to do it as a group so that they felt they were not alone and when they got to the U.S. they were still part of this network and today it's a U.S. student achievers program USAP and you find these Zimbabwe and spread around American universities that are really achieving great things and so that those types of programs we try to address this issue and I think progress has been made and more should still be made just a historical note that indeed of course in the 19th century when African-Americans couldn't go to universities in this country they went to Germany so of course W.E.B. Du Bois got his Ph.D. in Germany and so the transatlantic links are quite interesting in many ways. We have just a couple minutes left any other questions make sure I haven't missed anyone. The gentleman there could you stand and come to a microphone please, thank you. My name is George Glass I'm down here from New York City from Education Theological Seminary where I'm a master's candidate in a program in interfaith peace building many of my classmates are actually foreign students from all over the world very interesting but my question was to Mrs. Visini you spoke about the European Union asking for a 5% GPA a budget 5% for education is that correct is that currently happening or that's the that's part so is that currently happening and then the other issue is how is the refugee situation in Europe impacting the educational process that you're talking about about creating a European identity so does the EU have a plan to create like an international curriculum or something okay thank you Thank you very much for your question it's true that today the average investment in education in the EU is 5% of GDP but when always when you take an average you know that there are those who are far beyond that and those are far below and the the intention is of course to move those who are below 5% up to the 5% limit interesting enough there are not you know always a correlation between success and education because for example Germany has less than 5% of GDP spent on on education while a small country like Estonia spends far more than 5% and have they have a very successful school system an educational system in Estonia so it is an ambition to lift up those who are lagging behind when you come to the refugee way that is a huge challenge absolutely and there has been a lot of debate around that in different countries in Europe Germany of course because they have taken so many students or so many refugees I see my own country Sweden where we also took a very large number of refugees but also other countries that are very unused to immigrants at all and that are less prepared in that sense I think it is almost easier it seems strange but it is that are already used to immigration other forms of immigration because they already have a pool of people who are for example mother which are teachers in different mother tongues for example they have people who can make help to make this bridge people who are already established for example Arab speakers if we talk about the refugees from Syria if you have a pool of Arab speakers educated people who are teachers already in the public systems etc it makes it much easier to make this integration because it is a system in place for a country like Bulgaria or a country like the Czech Republic who have no tradition it is more of a challenge they have much less numbers but however for them it is more challenging another thing which is very challenging is of course also to find the equivalence of people who are who already have a university degree so that you do not waste for example an engineer we have in general lack of engineering or people with an engineering exam in Europe so you do not waste an Iraqi or Syrian engineer by becoming a cab driver or some other type of job and that different countries are experimenting with different ways of doing this I think another sector the health sector is also because in many countries in Europe there is a lack of doctors and that we will see there is one of the problems that the UK will face if they choose to expel the other Europeans or sort of not providing them with the future that they will drain their health system of both doctors and nurses and other health professions because there are many there from the rest of Europe and also from other countries and that is the same in many other countries as well so there to find ways of ensuring that they get the right language training because in that type of job you really have to be able to communicate with people and to get their equivalence recognized that puts all the receiving countries as a huge challenge of course another thing that we are doing which has nothing I just want to mention it but we are putting we are supporting refugees both in Turkey in Lebanon and Jordan and one of our most important programs there is in education to see that the refugees kids and youth are not losing too many years of education so the EU are now I don't have the numbers but they are increasing in huge amounts to ensure education for those who have been forced to flee their own home countries thank you thank you, well this has been an extraordinary morning please join me in thanking the panelists for a stimulating discussion thank you so much that concludes panel one and we will have a coffee break next door thank you thank you any questions back everybody I hope you grabbed your coffee and snacks my name is Darren Cambridge I'm a senior program officer here at USIP I work in the academy where I specifically work on our global campus which is USIP's online learning platform and we offer a variety of courses focusing on critical piece building skills and I'll be the moderator for this panel and before I introduce our two panelists I'll just say it's an honor to sit up here with them and be a part of this larger conversation because my background is very much in the role of exchange educational exchange between various countries based off of things that are happening in the foreign policy realm so I can recall many many years ago one of the first programs I was a facilitator for with young people was with the future leaders exchange program which as many of you I'm sure are familiar with was started after the end of the Cold War to encourage exchange between students in the former Soviet Socialist Republics and then also the youth exchange study program which was started in the early 2000s where young people from predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa were doing exchange over here in the United States to start building those bridges and communities so it's a real honor to be up here this morning you all took a close look at the role of the policy in shaping higher education and exchange in Europe and in this panel we're going to take a closer look at some rising global powers Brazil and China and how they're expanding role in the world and the context in which they are rising are shaping their educational systems and the exchanges that they are have been developing with other countries so without further ado I'll introduce our two panelists first sitting next to me is John Holden he is the CEO of the U.S.-China Strong Foundation and in this role he works to expand U.S.-China Strong's presence, programs and mission to create more productive relations between future American leaders and their Chinese peers prior to joining U.S.-China Strong Mr. Holden was Associate Dean at the Yanxing Academy of Peking University a full fellowship residential master's program in China studies for international and Chinese students from 1998 to 2005 Mr. Holden was President of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations previously he served as Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China's Board of Governors and held senior management positions with Cargill Incorporated and Hill and Nolten Strategies in 2017 Mr. Holden received China's Friendship Award the highest honor given to foreigners and was also recognized by China's State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs for his outstanding service and contribution to education in China he's fluent in Mandarin and he's lived in Beijing Hong Kong and Taipei for more than 30 years and I just learned he's just moved back here to the United States just six weeks ago so welcome back and he's a life member of the National Council on Foreign Relations and is a non-resident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace so John thanks for being with us today thank you and next we have Mark Langevin he's a director of BrazilWorks and international advisor to the you're going to help me out here John with the pronunciation of this the Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian Association of Brazilian American Diplomacy, Boletim Meridiano, 47, Brazil, the Inter-American Dialogues Latin American Advisor, Journal of Energy Security, the Labor Studies Journal, Review of Renewable Energy Law and Policy, and Universitas. He is currently working on a book project inside the Cotton Dispute Seeds of Conflict, Politics of Compliance, and the Search for a Solution. So, Mark, thanks for being with us. I'd like to hand it over first to John. I'll give both of you 10 or 12 minutes to share the nature of your work. And then I'll have a couple questions, then we'll open it up to the audience. So, John. Thank you, Darren, and thanks to the organizers for inviting me to speak today. It's delightful to be back in D.C. It's also a great pleasure in this building, which was created under the leadership of Richard Solomon, a great China scholar, a dear friend, and tremendous who made tremendous contributions to the development of U.S.-China relations. He's deeply involved in ping-pong diplomacy and the establishment of U.S.-China relations. Last night I was at a fundraising gala which at St. Hankei, the Chinese ambassador, was honored. And it was noted that he had spent a year doing a master's degree at CIS early in his diplomatic career. And it's just one example of someone who has benefited from international education, ramifications of which continue and play out every day. He's a man who is a good friend of mine, and I've known him for 20 years. And he has a deep understanding of this country that I think must come to a large extent from that experience that he had here in D.C. Decades ago. I worked at the Yenchen Academy at Beida Peking University. My dean was a woman named Yuan Ming, who studied at Berkeley under Bob Scalopino back in the early 1980s and has herself a deep understanding of this country. I mentioned these two examples because they're positive ones, but we also have many cases of international students coming to the United States who do not actually learn much about this country. It may be because they're focused on learning, studying mathematics, chemistry, management and so on, but it also may be because it's just too easy to fall into a community of folks from one country that happens at many campuses with Chinese students, of which now there are 350,000 in the U.S., at least last year, according to IIE. Some universities are working hard to develop programs that will integrate them better onto campus to provide orientation programs, and there are many initiatives that attempt to address this problem. I created one at the National Committee in 2003 in partnership with George Washington University. I had observed that there was a unanimity of opinion amongst Chinese about the embassy bombing in Yugoslavia. It didn't matter whether people were studying in the United States and had access to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, et cetera, or were back in China, everyone thought that the U.S. deliberately bombed China's embassy, and it was difficult to have a conversation about that. So I said, well, let's see what people know about American foreign policy making. Do they understand how messy it is, particularly in contrast to China's own processes? And so we created the foreign policy colloquium. We made it possible for 150 Chinese graduate students to come to GW for three days and had them visit the DOD, the White House, CIA, et cetera, and talk to people who make foreign policy, journalists, think tanks, and various parts of government, including Congress. So the challenge of making, taking full advantage of the nearly 1.1 million foreign students who are studying in the United States, I think we still need, there's still work to be done. And I'm hoping that through this organization and others, we can share best practices and hopefully do a better job of making sure people do generate the kind of understanding and hopefully affection for the United States that can be beneficial in the future. Now China has itself been working on the internationalization of education for a couple of decades. It is still an ongoing objective of the Ministry of Education of the country. If you read newspaper reports about China, you might get the impression that somehow the country was closing down, it's not open to new ideas, but in fact, and there's some reason to be concerned, but in general, this trend is ongoing. And the program that I worked on at Beida was a good example of that. We recruited in three cohorts, 345 students from 66 countries to come on a full fellowship to learn about China, not just in classrooms, but to travel, to experience, to create programs. And it's this openness to experimentation that I think is still very much a hallmark of the educational field in China. Recently I met with presidents and senior leaders of second tier universities in China that you may not have heard of. They have budgets to bring in international students, to do conferences, they're interested in, and that money isn't necessarily from the central government, maybe from the province or the municipality, but there's a lot of money available for the internationalization of education. China, a couple of years ago, the number was 440,000 international students studying in China. I don't know if that's accurate, but it seems to me it's a little bit on the short side. Many of those students come on Chinese government fellowships and there's clearly a recognition in Beijing that bringing people to China is good for its foreign relations and ability of the country to cooperate and work around the world. From an American perspective, and I was thinking about this issue, it's pretty clear that the Colossus bestriding the globe that we were at post-World War II, our relative power and position is inevitably gonna diminish going forward. And if you just look at India and China with nearly well over two and a half billion people and those economies are growing, there's going to be an increasing need for Americans to acquire global skills, languages and knowledge of foreign countries. It's going to be important if we want to attract foreign investment. Chinese companies who are coming to the United States would be interested in a workforce that might have a few Chinese speakers, people who understood the country, who could help them communicate. So I think that the demand, the need for international education from America's perspective is every bit as strong as it is from China's. And so in my organization, the US-China Strong Foundation, which grew out of two Obama-era initiatives to get 100, the first to get 100,000 Americans studying in China, which was achieved in 2014. This was a cumulative number, by the way. And to get a million students, K to 12 learning the Chinese language by 2020, which is going to be a tough one to achieve because the number, best number of guests we have right now is it's about 400,000. But this speaks to a recognition of the importance of China to the United States and the importance of communication and cultural knowledge. So as I thought about, I've taken this position just six weeks ago, and one of the things I want to do is to expand a nascent initiative that's called an alumni network. What I'm hoping to do, and this is maybe something that people here can assist with, what I'd like to do is to make it possible for parents, students, employers, and programs to communicate with each other and share best practices, both virtually and in person. So I want to create a big network that will make it apparent to students that it's not only cool to learn Chinese, it is fun to come closer together, but it will never absolutely supplant the person-to-person human interaction that is essential for the deeper kind of understanding that is always necessary. So I'll just stop there and we can see how this plays out. Great. Great, thank you, John. Mark. Thanks, John. Well, I was thinking when John was talking, I went to the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, go, gooey ducks. And as I was studying public health, I also was dabbling in Native American studies, which is a hot topic in the state of Washington, as always. And there's a small tribe on the Washington, on the Pacific Coast State of Washington. And several of their leaders were teaching courses at Evergreen, and I attended some of these courses. And one of the first things I learned was that their tribe was trading with Chinese sailors in the 14th century. It opened my eyes, thinking about the world because I was steeped in Columbus Day in Italian food. And it really changed the way I looked at it. And I think that, just that kind of leap forward in thinking about the world has brought me here to the table today. And I wanted to tell a couple stories and then highlight a couple chapters in Brazil's efforts to internationalize education, primarily post-secondary education. And a last kind of paragraph of this chapter overlapping with China, who is now Brazil's largest trade partner and so forth. But when I started looking at Brazil, I moved from Chantalas, Nicaragua in 1987 to Brazil. And at the time, Brazil had about a dozen or so departments of international relations spread around its hundreds of public and private universities. Today, it has roughly 120, 130 undergraduate programs. That's just a proxy, of course, for Brazil looking outward, wanting to understand the world and so forth. In my own work, a couple interesting stories. I had been working with the Institute of Cotton in Mato Grosso, a private sector, R&D Institute, trying to modernize agriculture in Brazil. And of course, one of the things that they did is identify talented undergraduate agronomists who had a future in R&D. And the first subject, of course, was where are we going to send these young agronomists and Texas A&M and Texas Tech were always the top tier schools, Mississippi State, places like that, right? Now, I like Texas and I've worked in Texas, but sending a Brazilian to Texas Tech, that's a revolution. And a promising international incident in a bar somewhere in Texas. But it was very interesting because I started having discussions on trying to help them identify the best situations for these young scholars in terms of learning and then coming back to Brazil and contributing. And this was before Brazil's latest chapter, the Big Bang Theory on Science Without Borders, which I'll just mention as I go forward with this. Also, I had been teaching intensive courses on US foreign policy at Uni Seyubi, the kind of dynamic private university in Brasilia that doesn't receive the federal funding and really has to have a business model that works for students. It's a non-profit university in the midst of now thousands of for-profit private universities in Brazil. But in around 2009, 2010, the organizational leaders, president, dean of Uni Seyubi asked me to sit down and contribute to their process of internationalization. This is before Brazil mounted a foreign policy in an internationalized educational strategy of internationalizing post-secondary institutions and so forth, but they had a sense, mainly coming out of their department of international relations and educating undergraduates that the world was important, aside from football and soccer. So we actually went through a process and then I brought them to Lane in New Orleans, University of Northeastern Florida, just outside Fort Lauderdale, American University. At the time, I wasn't with George Washington University, but we also went to George Washington University's business school too. And we looked at how different universities in the United States were internationalizing the curriculum, recruiting foreign students, doing all these kinds of things, right? And out of that process, we decided that I would be a visiting professor in 2012 using CAPES. CAPES is the federal government's agency that supervises, regulates, and partially finances post-secondary instruction and research in Brazil. That CAPES then awarded me a visiting professorship for a year to pay for my expenses and so forth. We didn't take advantage of it because of some of the bureaucratic loopholes in the federal government and this particular program and so forth, which put up a few lights about the difficulty in Brazil of private institutions internationalizing, but within certain programs that were designed to foster internationalization throughout the post-secondary network. So what we learned right off the bat was that the federal government, because it has a vested interest in post-secondary education and research through its dozens and dozens, actually 99 institutions basically controlled by the federal government for post-secondary education and research that there was an inherent bias about working with private institutions. So that's something that's always been there in terms of internationalization in Brazil is you have this kind of dichotomy of a select group of federal universities and institutions that all the policies are designed around and most of the financing is there to drive that and then you have now thousands of private institutions of course mostly for-profit, but some non-profit, some religious, some civic minded like UNICEF and so forth that have a difficult time integrating with the federal government in terms of its push to internationalize education in Brazil. So those were kind of lessons learned and thinking about how you go about this and I coming more from kind of a private educational institution although I did interact and regularly give presentations to some of the departments at federal universities around Brazil. But so we had this kind of decentralization chapter that's been ongoing for post-World War II period and continues to this day at George Washington University at the Elliott School. I work with a couple private universities to actually bring their students to Washington D.C. for kind of an intensive week or two like this is the world, right? Because Washington's a great crossroads for that. So currently I'm working with Facampi, a private university spin-off of UNICOMP, one of the most prestigious universities and part of the Sao Paulo state system. Working with UNICEF in Brazil as well and also working with Facampi, a private university in Sao Paulo that's very internationally minded and very interested in China and learning about the world and so forth. So it's easier on these decentralized avenues to work with private, highly motivated dynamic universities in Brazil right now. The federal universities are stiff but they are highly financed and encouraged to internationalize. So what has happened is I think the federal government recognizing kind of the stiffness of the federal university system back in 2000, 2011, attempted to formulate a new strategy to really push internationalization at these universities up to the Science Without Borders program that was launched in 2011. Most of the federal universities, their top ranking scholars traveled the world at someone else's dollar to provide presentations about Brazil and this, that and the other thing. And also, let's say those graduate students and researchers that were associated with the very top tier schools had monies available by the federal government administered through CAPES to go to universities in Europe and North America and Australia to study, get their doctorates or do what is very common and many of us know the sandwich program which is as you're working on your doctorate you spend a year somewhere studying associated with the university. We have many Brazilian sandwich scholars here in Washington DC at all the wonderful universities here. So that was the kind of practice until 2011 and then the launch of Science Without Borders which many of us have heard about and this was kind of the big bang theory of internationalization in Brazil where the federal government would commit financial resources to moving from maybe at best 20,000 graduate scholars and researchers out into the world to push up over 100,000 undergrad and graduate scholars and there were financial resources made available to do this starting in 2012. And then of course it kind of exploded in many US universities as well as many of the universities in Portugal, France, Canada and some of the other UK. Some of the other countries were Brazilians out of the federal universities have typically gone to largely because their professors went to and earned their PhDs in universities in France, UK, Canada, the United States and so forth. This program didn't have a lot of conditions on it. And so it was a big bang. If you went to any major university in the United States you would meet up with some of the students with the science without borders program, many undergraduates. It was initially, except for the last year, based on kind of STEM and natural sciences, engineering and so forth. There were many kind of scandals that broke out about individual students basically buying laptops and traveling the world and things like that. But the bulk of students, many of which were not in the top tier universities and had no access to study abroad opportunities either because their universities couldn't organize it or their family income couldn't provide the resources, now could actually go and travel. And there's many hundreds, if not thousands of stories of Brazilian kind of lower middle class or gifted working class, you know, undergraduate students going to France and the United States and studying a wonderful, wonderful story. But obviously not enough conditions to understand how the big bang would impact internationalization in Brazil. So about the time that the political crisis and the corruption scandal and the onset of recession occurred in the second half of 2014, people were asking the question, what to do with science without borders? So people were already thinking about a second generation set of reforms to internationalize. And so that's kind of the second chapter. Where we're at right now is this kind of second generation reform that unfortunately is concurrent with the federal government's efforts at fiscal consolidation, meaning they're cutting the budget. And in post-secondary federally subsidized education and research in Brazil, they've suffered three consecutive years of significant budget cuts. So science without borders has been closed for business and the government has basically done two things. They've kind of taken the old programs that sent some of the gifted scholars abroad, repackaged it into a rubric, which is more science, more development, right? That's the name of that. Then what they've done, maybe in anticipation of applying the lessons learned from the Big Bang science without borders, but within the context of looking forward to overcoming the fiscal duress of the federal government in the coming, is they've launched the Brazilian University's Excellence Initiative, which is not a good name for what they're trying to do with this. And also there's not really money behind it at this point to push it forward. But in a nutshell, what they're trying to do is say, hey, we're not gonna just offer a Big Bang, big balloon full of money so that students can just travel the world. Each university, and obviously it's pitched mostly to the federal universities who are getting most of the money for internationalization under this kind of scenario of fiscal distress. But private universities can qualify as well that simply put, they want the universities to develop an internationalization strategy. Similar to what Unisei Ubi did in 2010, 2011, with my participation, so forth. Now all the universities are required to do this if they're gonna get any money for any internationalized education activities. And they have to come up with a strategic plan, which they did at the beginning of this year, and it requires a couple things. The incorporation of international testing so that they can externally validate what they're doing in their academic programs undergraduate or graduate. They need to have reciprocity agreements. So when they send scholars abroad or students abroad, the credits can be applied to their program or dual diplomas which they've developed with a couple Argentine universities and some other universities where if you earn an undergraduate degree in international relations, the degree counts in both countries and so forth. This is kind of a miracle, so common market thing, so forth. But they're really looking for these reciprocity credit transfer agreements. Also the involvement and hiring of non-teaching staff to run the internationalization programs. And this is where NAFSA and other organizations are so important, right? To help build the capacity of these universities to strategically internationalize. And I think the latest, what we know, CAPE has just published a survey of top, the top tier universities and the second tier universities about their efforts to respond to this new policy. The publication just came out last month, only in Portuguese at this point, but it does indicate how these universities are currently preparing to really systematically internationalize their institutions. What's missing, of course, is the money. So we have to wait for the money to come to see if these great ideas about this transversal cross-cutting effort across the entire university can come to the fore. Thanks. Great, thank you, Mark and John. So I've got two questions, and then I would like to turn it to the audience as well, so get your questions ready. The first one is, I realize as I'm hearing you talk that I'm a product of international exchange, so my dad grew up in Guyana and was one student in the mid-60s that got a Fulbright to go and go to university at McAllister College in Minnesota where he met my mom and the rest is history. But he tells a story that, like I think a lot of, not a lot, but a fair amount of students that do exchange programs, there is a desire by their home country that they will eventually return and come back and apply their skills and their knowledge to their government or their country in some way. My dad did not make that choice, and there are many other people who may have been part of a program where the intent was essentially for them to return home, but they didn't. I referenced the Future Leaders Exchange Program and the Youth Exchange Study Program at the beginning of this panel, and I think there's actually part of that agreement is that those young people have to return for a certain amount of years to their country. So my question is, in both of your experiences working with exchange programs, John, you mentioned lots of Chinese students that come and study in the United States, particularly in the science and engineering field. What is the trend or culture around how many of them return to China to apply those skills? And you mentioned at the beginning of your talk, Mark, about the training of agronomists and the question of, well, where do these agronomists go once they get this training? So in China and Brazil, how has that played out in terms of people who go and learn and study abroad returning to their home country to apply those skills? John, let's start with you. Sure, great question. China is aware of a brain drain, and it's lost a lot of talent to the U.S. and other countries. And there are a lot of reasons for that. Part of it is sort of the slightly ossified nature of some of the institutions in China, universities in particular. They've got a lot more money nowadays in labs and so on, so you have some of the best equipment in the world, but the soft, the infrastructure that goes with that, the software is often missing. But they have a very deliberate program called the Chenren Ji Hua, the Thousand Person Plan, that provides significant funding to bring back top, mostly scientists, to come back to China. And it's relatively easy to get money for grants to fund research, and this is a tremendous advantage for some people who've been frustrated by the difficulty of getting research grants in other places. So it's been successful in general, but it's also not that easy. If you have a family that's been used to breathing clean air in Denver, going back to Beijing, kids may not like it, you may not like it, you hate the traffic, and there are other reasons why you may not want to go back. But it is important that Chinese actually, from the leadership perspective, have been quite less a fair about this over the decades. They said that the way they thought about it, and they said, hey, we're going to go to a young shopping. Listen, let's get these people go out there, they'll come back, some of them will come back, some of them won't, but we've got a lot of people. And so it sort of happens in a semi-organic way. And I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, how many are coming back and how many are not. Interesting. Yeah, before I comment on that, I wanted to thank Esther for inviting me. Esther was a key faculty member at the Elliott School at George Washington, and I'm not over it yet, but I'm trying. She's gone about a year now, but when I came on as the director, she was leaving, and I said, that's not fair at all. So Esther, thanks. Great question. I think for Brazil, it's a little bit different. I mean, just on the isolated case of the agronomists going to study, they were under a contract to come back, but the Brazilians were very open too to potentially inserting them into multinational corporations like Lonsanto, who were doing research that would ultimately benefit. So it was an internationalized vision, and this comes from a sector, agribusiness in Brazil, that's very internationalized and understands the need for the internationalization of education and research. I think one of the interesting things, and I think we see this in Washington, there's been studies about different nationalities coming to Washington, mostly as economists for the banks, right? But not exclusively, and there's a couple nationalities, including Brazil, that have a high rate of return to the home country, that they say, they'll spend a couple years here, and then they go, no, I wanna go back to Brazil, and that's why I think the Fulbright and other funds that allow Brazilian scholars to come to the United States for a year, six months are so popular, because they do wanna come and participate and involve themselves in collective research and some teaching and so forth, but Brazil's a place where they wanna come back, and of course, if they're highly educated and so forth, Brazil is a rather delightful place to be. So the magnetism of coming back home is strong enough, I think, although you will find a few Brazilians here in the United States that pitch a 10 and so forth, but it's mostly working class Brazilians that come to the United States and wanna start a new life, a new life here, not the highly educated. Great, thank you. Yeah, I mean, it just, it got me thinking about, we use the term internationalization of education, but the way I was thinking about it, and these are not kind of mutually exclusive, but the question I had in my head was, how are universities used to further internationalize the world versus how is the world used to internationalize universities? And I think different programs are structured in different ways that attempt to kind of address those two questions, so I heard both of those kind of coming out in your examples. So here's my second question, and it's about shrinking budgets, so you mentioned this Mark in your comments, and I think shrinking budgets around funding higher education is something that has impacted multiple countries around the world, and it's made higher education less accessible to a lot of individuals, and it forces us, I think to, dare I say, disrupt the traditional university structure, or maybe a better word is re-imagine how university and that level of education works, particularly when there's an increased desire to have a more internationalized experience and access to more global exchange. And so some of the work we do here at USIP through online education is we attempt to do that. I mean, we're not a university, so we don't have the infrastructure or the accreditation that traditional universities have, so that requires that we think about how do we bring people from all over the world together to learn together, particularly around topics of peace and conflict. So given your experience in China, your experience with Brazil, and their interactions with US universities, do you all find yourselves thinking of ways to fundamentally re-imagine the two-year or four-year university structure where young people or people of all ages, but people go to a brick-and-mortar campus, they're there for two or four years, maybe there's an international exchange opportunity, they seize it, but it's kind of, that's the format. But with technology, we talked about Blackboard earlier, we're not huge fans of it, but we talked about it, you talked about the program where students are learning English across borders. How do you see technology potentially allowing us to fundamentally rethink how higher education systems work? Mark, yeah, Mark, let's go with you. Well, in the Brazilian case, I think there's two factors now that would influence our work, say at GW's Elliott School working with partners in Brazil. The first is that even though many of the scholars on Fulbright that come to Washington around the United States are very skilled in English, the median undergraduate student is not. So that's a problem that Brazil has to take care of. I don't know if there's a solution in the United States to do that without some heroic funding and so forth. The second is that the new policy of the government internationalized to have institutions strategize about the internationalization, one of the things that that's gonna force is for these institutions to pick partners in the United States and potentially in China and in Europe and so forth. Partners that can work with them to deliver high quality internationalized undergraduate curriculum that is credit transferable or diploma transferable and obviously graduate school and research and so forth. So in my own particular case, for example, we're really working hard with FAPI, FACAMPI, UNICEF, because they look like us at George Washington, private civic minded universities with an internationalized curriculum, a strong international program. They wanna come to us not necessarily to study about the United States, but to study the world here in Washington DC and so forth. And my associate from the Graduate Student Services Office, I don't think he's here today. He said he was gonna be here. I'll give him a hard time for that. But we have to kind of pick our partners in Brazil too and I think we're trying to do that, but we need to make some changes. For example, one of the things that I've done for these groups that have wanted to come to Washington like FACAMPI and FAPI is to tell the school that, no, this is a master's student recruitment exercise. Then the organizational leadership understands that, oh yeah, okay, so we'll open the doors and so forth. We need to do more of that in terms of expanding some of our resources and also easing it up for these students to come and get some accreditation for their work here and so forth. And then lastly, I think, and this is a topic that all of us are interested in, is that I, in the past 18 months, I have strongly recruited Brazilian students for our master's degree programs at the Elliott School and of course the money is always the problem, but it intersects with the visa. That the liquidity demonstration that our Brazilian colleagues that could have easily done it in 2009, 2010 with the exchange rate can no longer do it. And I think that in the long-term benefit of this incredible foundation of US post-secondary educational institutions that we have here in the United States, that's a problem that's gotta be bipartisan and we all have to work together to overcome that and ease the way so that we can internationalize our partners in Brazil and China can be successful. We really need to work through that because there are way too many talented young Brazilians who need some help in coming to Washington and to study the world. And Washington is a great place to study the world as we all know. Yeah, Darren, I don't have a lot of data about this, but just observing the MOOCs, for example, are now quite common. Peking University has developed its own online courses. Students that I've known have taken courses from universities in the United States. Distance learning is probably the only solution to rural education in China because you have people living in places that no teacher would go to. It's just too remote, too poor, no resources. So getting access to good teaching is gonna have to be done online. So there's a lot of effort going into this. Venture Capital is pouring into the education field in China. The next Global Education Summit is gonna happen in Beijing on the 27th to the 29th of this month. So there's a lot of things happening. I just don't know enough about to give you the data. All right, so let's turn to the audience. Who's got some questions? Let's start with you up here. Hi, my name is Sean Moore. Thank you so much for coming today. My question is for you, Mr. Holden. I have moved back from China this year and I spent several years there, about three years studying intermediate and advanced Chinese and several years teaching English as well. And from my perspective, I feel like US China Strong's mission couldn't be more important that Americans catch up with learning Chinese and that we are able to interact with China, especially as China is, as you mentioned, well on its way to becoming the global economic superpower, right? So my concern is with Chinese education, Chinese language education in America. My experience has been that I've met people who study one, two years in China and when I speak Chinese with them or when I hear them speak Chinese with native speakers, you get that feeling like, oh, you can speak a little Chinese, that's great, right? And then coming back here in America, meeting students who are studying this in elementary school and middle school, it's almost like it's more drastic, like the level of fluency they have is very interrupted. They learn to twinkle, twinkle a little star or something in class and it doesn't seem like a very practical use of school time and funds and things like that. So I'm hoping you could share some inspiring stories, great programs for the public schools and charter schools and talk about what do you think is the importance of that aspect of educating children in America in Chinese language, especially in context of the success of Spanish immersion programs or something like that, where this is something that students use every day. Yeah, thanks, Sean, and I'd love to talk to you more about this afterwards. I was at the Yuying, the Washington Yuying School the other day, they have 550 students learning in a Chinese immersion program from native speakers and they're going to do very, very well, though there will be that continuity to get them into, through high school with an advanced level of Chinese, they're going to be very desirable at top universities around the country, but you've identified a big problem, which is that sometimes there just isn't enough focus on the language and it's done, it's a very thin veneer of language that doesn't enable people to get to college and then slot into third or fourth year Chinese and really get to a level of proficiency. I've heard stories of Chinese language teachers at universities saying, oh, you did this in high school, well, forget about it, it's a waste of time what you did before. That's unfortunate, I don't know how prevalent it is, but clearly there are challenges there and making this leap from a smattering of knowledge like my Spanish when I was seven to a usable level of proficiency has got to be very, very important for us. The numbers by themselves, if we have a million people learning Chinese or 10 million, if they never get to a point where they can use it, then it's just a bit of a novelty, it's good for brain development and it's a curious thing, but it doesn't have the impact that we want to have, but it's a great question. Yes. Good afternoon, I'm George Glass, I'm from New York City. I wanted to follow up on this gentleman's question here because I've recently retired from Monclera, New Jersey, public school system where we do have a K-12 program for learning Mandarin. One of my daughters graduated from our school before we had that and she went on to Bates College in Columbia and double majored in Chinese and East Asian studies and she's working at SIPA now, but the issue here is in terms of education and also one other comment, I lived in Singapore for seven years where we have bilingual education. One of our problems with Chinese education in America is, first of all, certification. It's one thing to be a language teacher, but if you really want to be useful, you have to be certified, not just in the language, but also in some other grade six, I mean middle school and high school ability. So a good thing to follow up on, I think would be the issue of getting native speakers who are certified in math and science so that we could start doing kind of bilingual education. That is not happening. So it's one thing to learn the language but then to have that other skill is really important. So we can follow up on that later. My question to you is about the Confucius Institutes that are happening in many universities. I think Americans in general do not understand what 1.3 billion Chinese people looks like compared to 320 million Americans who are very diverse. And so where do you see the Confucius Institutes in American universities because there's some controversy about them and how they might be impacting higher education? Are you familiar with what I'm talking about? Yeah, sure. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Interesting first comment and we can talk about that. Confucius Institutes I think are generally a very positive thing. They provide resources at campuses for the study of Chinese that benefit students and are nearly always very, very positive. There have been a couple of instances where there has been some controversy but I think in most cases that I'm aware of, Hanban, which is the parent organization, is quite flexible in how they design these programs and how they work with universities. So university administrators should not be afraid of stipulating what they require out of the Confucius Institute. And some of these are small, some are big, some of them are established at universities that would never, ever have the means to offer Chinese. But the well-endowed universities sometimes choose not to have them because they have their own programs. They don't feel that this is something that they need or perhaps even want. But in general, I actually, it reminds me, I went with our vice president of the National Committee to the Ministry of Education back when they were considering doing this program and the advice that we gave to the Ministry of Education was to do something similar to what the Germans and French do. Of course they didn't take our advice and they ramped up this global Confucius Institute program very, very quickly by leveraging existing resources at universities. And I think it's, they manage these things with quite a light touch, really. And so I think generally they're very, very positive. Good morning, everyone. I'm, my name is Pallavi, I'm studying in Johns Hopkins. I'm on a graduate exchange program from Singapore. And my question is, do you think there's a need for a shift from a science and technology-based exchanges and scholarships to focusing on humanities, public policy, and public administration, particularly to enhance diplomacy and peace in the world? Thank you. That's a great question, relevant to Brazil and I think many other countries too, because when they did the Big Bang Science Without Borders, it was basically STEM. And then obviously the obvious constituency of humanities, social sciences, so forth, began to get involved and demand the extension of the program at a time when the fiscal duress started to set in and so forth. But I think that generally in my own, I kind of am around different educational research circles in Brazil. And the STEM people are very internationalized for obvious reasons. The social sciences oftentimes are not. And I know one of the things that I've tried to do in the Brazil initiative is to have a conference on innovation and international relations to help faculty and researchers in Brazil to understand innovation on a global level and how it might impact Brazilian foreign policy and so forth. So I think actually I would agree with the underlying assumption of your question is that while we do need STEM, of course, because these solve human problems, but the social engineering of peace and development is just as important, and of course that's what we're trying to do, say, at the Elliott School and other places in Brazil, the United States, is to mix that up in an interdisciplinary mix. And just to finish this off, one of the problems in Brazil is that interdisciplinary studies has not been encouraged or financed. So they're in a traditional iron cage of studying political science or sociology, anthropology. And they have a hard time kind of cross cutting and looking at, say, public policy formation or these kinds of issues that are essential to solve human problems, right? And they're almost, I daresay, more important than the iPhone. To be honest, maybe I have a vested interest in this and don't own stock in Apple, but I think we need to pay attention to these things too. And I know the Elliott School, the leadership, is totally vested in regional studies and interdisciplinary modes of learning and so forth. I think we need more, not less. Yeah, it's a great question, interesting coming from Singapore, whose government sends its best and brightest around the world to top universities. I recruited a number of your fellow Singaporeans to the Engineering Academy, they're marvelous people. It's shifting a little bit, China's case, the number of people coming to study humanities and social sciences is rising. And that's just an organic development to people see the need, they see an opportunity and they're curious to do more in this area. So you can foster it, yes, but it'll happen sometimes just by itself. The last thing on interdisciplinary, that was a huge problem for us at our program at Peking University. The departments are very siloed, they're very rigid. It's a Soviet style education system and we still have people on campus can understand why we have something called China Studies as opposed to Chinese history or Chinese literature or sociology or political science. But the US is well ahead of the field, I think, in this area, possibly UK is fairly close behind. Well, Mark, John, thank you for a kind of deeper dive into these rising powers of China and Brazil and thanks to the audience and the questions, great questions and comments. We'll leave it at that and we'll move on to the next panel. There, thanks. So we're gonna move right to the next panel so everybody can just stretch their legs and stay in place. Okay, she's great. That's a really good one. Here's the one. I like this one. That's great. That's great. How's it going today? Fine, thank you. Yeah. Our second panelist, they'll be right in and then we'll get started. We also are going to have a little, and you'll see why, we're going to have a little technology use here. Okay. Yeah. I'm always, I'm always afraid to mess with you. You always have a problem no matter how much you practice, too. Okay. Okay. Okay. So that's fair. So she can just click on, oh yeah, I saw that when I watched. All right. So let's go back to her now. One of the last questions was about the use of technology, and so part of what we're going to do in this last session is to see how technology can be of use. Good morning, Julia. Come on up. So while Julia is getting herself settled, I'm going to go ahead and introduce this final panel. I'm Jeff Helsing. I'm the Associate Vice President here at the U.S. Institute of Peace overseeing our Academy, which is the education and training arm of USIP. And I'm really excited to have both Julia and Bridget on the dais with me, and I'll explain why based on a discussion we had at USIP earlier this year in which we wanted to as an institution that tries to promote peace building around the world. We wanted to find ways of promoting innovative ways of elevating peace building so that we could see what new and interesting ideas, programs, activities would be worthy of support to both advance our field, if you will, but also find new and innovative approaches to peace building. So with that in mind, we launched a grant competition. We got a number of really interesting, innovative proposals. And two of the most interesting ones, and those that we really found were the most worthy of support, were those that combined new processes, new methodologies with enhancing what we would call local voices. That is, really finding ways to leverage local voices, local approaches, local stakeholders in conflict affected societies so that the impact of conflict, the impact of peace building could, in essence, resonate, have an impact be highlighted for those in policy circles, those who are in diplomatic circles. And so one of the things that we've been talking about this morning has been to make those connections between different communities around the world. And I think both of these organizations that you're going to hear from do that in very unique ways. And so you have both Julia's and Bridget's bios in front of you. And I want to just very briefly mention the two organizations, Partners Global, in which Julia is the President and CEO, really focuses on empowering local leaders and doing so by leveraging and creating a global network. So those connections that we've been talking about are essential to the work of Partners Global. But the focus is very much on transforming conflict and helping to develop the tools to do so, to help develop the tools for conflict transformation, as well as sustainable development. And Bridget's organization, Peace Direct, also works to provide support for and tools for partners, local stakeholders, local civil society organizations to prevent and stop violence, to transform conflict, and to tackle and address violent extremism. And it's very rooted in grassroots peace building. So a lot of what we've talked about has been sort of global education. And it's important to sort of connect the dots between global education and local peace building efforts, because as we've heard from most of our speakers, we shouldn't think about global in a macro sense, but global as a way of connecting local, connecting communities and enhancing the learning and the tools that will help in building peace and in enhancing or strengthening diplomacy. So that by way of introduction is a way to welcome both Julia and Bridget to this discussion. So I will start with Julia, only because her slide is up first, either way. But I have a clicker for you, or you can stand up here. We'll be going with this. Okay. So we'll get you. All right. Hi, everyone. I'm sorry to come in a little bit late. It's a real pleasure to be here, and thank you so much to Jeff for the invitation. And just to clarify, so Partners Global, we've been functioning for about 30 years now. We used to operate under the name Partners for Democratic Change, and I'm sitting here looking at one of our former board members, so it's nice to see you. And as Jeff says, we function as a network. So we invest in local affiliate centers for change and conflict management, and we share a brand. So we're Partners Global, and we have Partners Poland, Partners Yemen, Partners Nigeria, Partners Columbia, Partners El Salvador, that function as independent local NGOs, and we all function as a network. And yes, we do a lot of that bread-and-butter conflict transformation work, working with marginalized populations, helping to kind of have citizen input into policy dialogues. And we've been doing a lot of this type of work and a lot of different issues and more than 50 countries around the world. And when our network came together last year for our director's meeting, one of the top issues that was coming from our colleagues was this topic of public narratives, that our values as a field, whether it's in Mexico City working on human rights versus kind of a security agenda, whether it's in Bulgaria, Hungary, thinking about kind of a pro-Europe, pro-western democratic values that somehow the zeitgeist that they were marinating in, their values feeling that that was under attack, and that the community-based work that they were doing seemed to be a drop in the bucket to address this broader kind of influences of how society was really kind of digesting narratives. And it seemed like there was a shift. Because I do want to say that narratives, the way that we've been engaging in media, that's been a part of our field for a long time, and there's a lot of experts on this. And we've engaged in some of those issues as well, but it seemed like there was changes in the field. We needed to up our game, and we needed to do that through a partnership approach. It's really what we as a network decided. And so this new initiative on narratives for peace that came out of this, now we're working with USIP under their grants program, really was about a year in development together with our umbrella organization, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, because we also happen to be institutional members of the Alliance and were co-located in the same office. So we really wanted to make sure that what we were doing from Partners Global also had a field-wide perspective. So one of the challenges that was addressed, and we've talked a lot about this in a lot of our network and Alliance meetings, is how fragmented our messages are, or our narrative frames. So we all know that it's a wonderfully diverse field. And in fact, the way that our education system also with many, there's over 800 master's programs now in peace and conflict resolution. We just did a study for the Rotary Peace Centers program. Everybody has a slightly different piece of peace. And so we talk a lot about how those who are kind of really pushing, let's say, counter narratives to our values are really organized and simple in what they are communicating to a public to create this environment where we're marinating these narratives. And so we did want to just demonstrate all of the different things. We're promoting democratic values. We're promoting maybe empathy. We're promoting the role of women and young people. Sometimes all of that kind of cacophony of messages gets lost. And so one of the aspects of the research that we're doing right now is how we might think about a frame, a narrative frame, for peace. And then how do we embed that in our work? But also it's really a partnership strategy because how we communicate what we do brings other people into our space. So one of the central questions is, can we come up with this narrative frame on our own? Or are we maybe a little bit too close to it? And do we need support from other fields? I'm going to go back to this. The partnership approach that we've come up with then is to essentially say that there are a whole bunch of other professions that really look at narratives from a business perspective and have a lot of success in selling ideas because they do it for profit. And there's a business model out there to get under people's skin. And so what we tried to do over this last year is really reach out to a lot of different industry leaders to then say, well, how do you go about crafting narrative frames, engaging with those narratives, and changing people's concepts? Or are we changing them? Or are we really trying to kind of, what they talk about is kind of jumping on an existing narrative stream and hijacking it for our values? And so what we've started to do is really build partnerships with these kind of advertisers, marketers, design folks, brain research folks who really then look at how we are digesting information and all of the cognitive biases that we know that we have. And so really starting with some very in-depth social science research, looking at how the models of how to really kind of think about the audience that you're working within. We've been convening a series of these creative brain trusts, and I'm going to show a short little video just of one of our brain trusts in New York so you can see how we've tried to really strategically engage with people outside of the peace-building community. The other aspect is then trying to kind of identify, well, okay, then what does this mean for us? Is it just strategic communications? Is that what we're trying to do and just have each of our peace-building kind of local organizations do this better, or is there a way of really just thinking of a series of questions to then be able to partner with other industries to bring them in? And then we've been ultimately matchmaking between the creative industry leaders and peace-builders, and that's the thing that I want to focus the most on. What I wanted to do, though, is put up all of these brands of the groups that have been participating in this initiative with us, because to a certain extent now is our moment as a peace-building field, and I think globally there's a lot of different industries that are really interested in being a part of our values in our brand. So I'm just going to show you a quick little video, only because I want to let you know that the intentionality of bringing these different industry leaders together to then think about peace and peace-building led us to a whole new academic field that they're more connected to, and hopefully this works. I want to show you this video. One, it's obviously a marketing piece for Tom's, by the way, and Tom's supported this influencer's dinner, so the company that makes shoes was really interested in having this influencer's dinner with us to identify some other influencers in their field around Creative Week in New York. They were giving an award for Best in Marketing, and they had access to all of these other people that we as a peace-building NGO would not have had access to. The folks from Google, we don't even know to appreciate all these superstars in the advertising industry who were there, but the intentionality of reaching out and figuring out how to reach out to these groups has been a big learning for Partners Global of building these partnerships and then having a field-wide connection with them through educational initiatives, and that's what I want to say. Our entry point for continuing the relationship has been through to say, okay, what are the young people that then feed into your industry, and how can we approach them so that they think about their peace-building opportunities as designers, as marketing, as communicators, as advertising professionals in the future. And so there's an organization called The One Club that does give out kind of the best in design. It's a professional award that all of the advertisers compete for. They have an educational initiative every year where they invite 800 companies from around the world to basically have their students submit a social brief. And so our peace-building agenda is now this year's social brief. So that not only, and again, I'm excited about the brief. I'm excited to see what the students submit. The top 10 students get to come to New York. Last year we were involved, and they came from India. They came from South Africa. They came from Sweden. They came from all over the world. And pitched some of the most well-respected industry leaders their ideas for how to sell peace. This year we're in relationship with the UN Together campaign. So the specific aspect is around solidarity with the world's migrants or refugees to make it a little bit more specific. And then whatever they come up with as their campaign, the UN Information Center is going to distribute through their network of 23 field offices around the world. So the student's work actually gets to be seen and used. What I'm the most excited about though is we've gotten to know all of the professors and mentors. We've gotten to know all of the people who are really the recruiters in these ad agencies, who now are thinking about, oh, this is really cool. That the students are being inspired by what they can contribute socially. And that that can also then be a part of kind of our agency work in the future. And the other thing that I'll just say very quickly is Universal Spirits is another initiative under our Narratives for Peace platform, which is working with music schools in the Berkeley School of Music. Essentially bringing together musicians from different cultural backgrounds, different ethnicities, to then compose and record and tour together and linking them with local peace builders. And we're starting this initiative in Lebanon because Berkeley also has a center there. What is my main point when we think about education for peace building? We are really committed to breaking out of our NGO development field. We want other fields to be considering themselves peace builders, meeting them where they are, and finding opportunities to influence the educational systems in that way. I have a lot more to say. I'm going to stop to let Bridget talk and then hopefully we can have a good conversation. So thank you very much. Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry. I think I just took out Bridget's. Let's take it down. So Bridget. Let's put these here. I'm going to do a little show and tell. That's perfectly fine. Thank you so much. Thanks to USIP and to NAFSA for organizing this and for having us here. And thanks to Julia for that presentation and all the work that you're doing. This really is always inspiring to hear about what you're doing. I know we need to partner and work together more. I'm glad we get to do that a little bit already. So I want to talk a little bit about Peace Direct's work. And I'm just going to use a few websites as I do that. And give you some background and I'll do three things. I'll say a little bit about Peace Direct in general. What's our mission? What's our approach? I'll talk about some of our resources which I think may be relevant for educators and for diplomats and others in the audience that may be useful. And then I'll talk more specifically about a particular project which we're working with USIP on, Local Voices for Peace, and how that emerged and what we hope can come from it in terms of education for a peace building and particularly connecting, as Jeffrey mentioned, the local voices, the local peace builders and situations of conflict with international decision makers, which is one of the areas of work that we try to concentrate on. So just in terms of Peace Direct, please go and find out more about us. We're relatively new in the US. We've been in the UK for about 12 years now. And we have a small US office in Washington with a few people here and also a representative in New York. And our office in London is only about 15 people. The heart of Peace Direct, though, and who we are, is the partners that we work with and the networks that we engage of local peace builders around the world. So Peace Direct was founded by two women in the UK because they really asked this question of, how can we directly support those people who are most impacted by violent conflict and who are working for peace in their communities? And they looked around and they actually didn't find many ways that they felt they could directly connect with and support those people. They've thought a lot of international NGOs doing peace building and knew that they could connect with those. But they said, where are the voices and the people who are doing that community level work? Which the instinct was, we know that that exists. We know there are local peace builders in any situation of violent conflict, no matter how dire, who are doing brave and important work. And so why don't we see them more often? And why can't we support them more often? Those instincts from our experience over the last 12 years proved true in the sense that we have found that wherever we have sought out local people doing the work of peace building in places like Syria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, even places that all we hear in the news, all the narratives that we hear are about the violence and the violent conflict. There are always those local peace builders. So our model at this point is that we have strategic partnerships with about 10 partners around the world in about 10 countries. And you can see some of those countries here. And you can go and find out more about those partnerships. And those are long-term relationships where we really are trying to directly support the leadership and the work that local people, local peace builders, think is most needed in their communities. And we find ways of mobilizing resources, mobilizing support, lifting up their voices and their profile and their work to decision makers so that they can garner greater support. And this is really also part of our approach, is that we do believe local peace builders and local people in situations of conflict, local civil society are the experts. International folks have certain expertise as well. And we want to work and partner together. But in terms of the conflict realities that people face, the local people are the experts. And so we're trying to learn with them alongside them. And that is sort of a mutual education from our perspective. So we have a number of areas of work that our partners are engaged in. You can see there everything from prevention efforts, early warning systems, to tackling violent extremism, our partner in Pakistan that we've worked with for a long time, work with women, et cetera. And then another important part of our approach and our work is to work not just with strategic partnerships. And I'll just bring up another where we have these in-depth relations for a long time, because we're small staff, so we can only manage a small number of those. But then to lift up the profile and the work of as many local civil society groups who are doing peace-building work around the world that we can. So one of the things that you often hear, and I worked within US government as a fellow on a trustee prevention USAID for a couple of years, and I would even hear this in that context sometimes, you will hear policymakers sometimes say, well, there's just no local civil society capacity. There's just no capacity in that country. And I find that an offensive and an untrue and unproven for any situation comment. And so Peace Insight is a website that we run working with a network of local peace-building experts in about 28 experts who are covering 44 conflicts to really look at what are local civil society groups doing in the area of peace-building in countries around the world impacted by conflict. So does someone want to choose a conflict area? And I'll just show you how this works, because this is one of the resources I wanted to highlight as I move into talking about resources. Yes? South Sudan. Let's look at South Sudan. Now, before I click this, we have just transitioned this website. So let's make sure that all the information is there. Great. So this website started as basically a static database. It was a list of local peace-building groups. And we've just done a lot of work over the past year to try to add in more interactive elements and overlay the peace-building data. So with the peace-building data, you can choose to display local organizations, international organizations. You can zoom in and see who are these organizations. What are they doing? You can go in and read more about individual organizations and what we know about them and their work. And sometimes there's contact information as well. And then we've now added conflict data as well. So if you add in conflict data, it's got a question mark, so let's see if it works. From other sources, you can also see, well, where are the flare-ups of violence? Where is the conflict happening? And then where are the peace-building groups in relation to that? So this is a resource that can be very valuable for educators and for students we found. We always recommend this for students when they're doing projects and research on conflicts. But also, we hope for policymakers in the sense of understanding where is conflict going on? And then what are those local capacities for peace that we know exist? How can we reach them? How can we find out what they're doing? How can we generate more support for them? So this is one of the resources that we offer. You can see there's also then, in addition to the organization information, there is information about, from our local peace-building experts, there's blogs, and then there's the incorporation of other information from other resources, other experts or other organizations who are doing work in South Sudan. So that is peaceinsight.org. So I recommend that as a resource if you're interested. We also do a lot of research. I won't go into that right now, but we do do a lot of research on both the obstacles to supporting local peace-building groups. Why is it hard for donors in the international community to support them well and sustainably? And then what are the opportunities? Where are good practices? We're doing some research with USAID. We do some research with the Peace and Security Funders Group, a lot of different lines of research going on as well to help us improve what we do, as well as hopefully help educate and inform others in the field. And then one more resource that I'll mention before I talk about the other project is that we've really started to do more intentional evaluations with all of our partners, our strategic partners, because one of the areas in the field of peace-building that is so important is that evidence base that we keep hearing doesn't exist, we can't prove prevention, we can't prove that peace-building, especially local peace-building and communities, has a big impact. So we've started trying to do very intentional, independent evaluations with our partners, document those work, which lots of peace-building groups are doing now, but then I said, well, you know, I work in Washington, so a 50-page evaluation when I go try to talk to somebody at the State Department isn't gonna help me, it's not what I need, so I've said you have to condense them into snazzy four-page documents or six-page documents that we can give to those people who are making decisions that have to be made very quickly with whatever information they can acquire quickly. So we now have evaluations that we're doing of our peace-building partners and their work. This one is on Burundi and a country-wide monitoring and reporting early warning and early response network that we've supported for a number of years there, one on Sudan that works with peace committees in Sudan, and we're doing more of those all the time. So those are also available on our website. Others are not for security and sensitivity reasons, so feel free to ask me if you'd like to see some of those. So then finally, the project that we're working on, Local Voices for Peace, and this is kind of a project that has emerged over the last couple years through work we had been doing on more of an ad hoc basis. So one of the things we realized as we worked with local partners and often worked with maybe one or two groups in a country was that they really wanted opportunities to network more and they would ask for support to network and engage with each other. So we started convening what we called peace exchanges and this was just a space where local peace-building groups would be invited to come to share their analysis, to share their work, to help design an agenda for the exchange, what do they wanna get out of it, and then often to talk about peace-building strategies in their country, what's working, where could they collaborate more, are there ways that Peace Direct or others could help seed more collaboration and more work. So we were doing these peace exchanges just sort of when we had a chance, we did them with all our partners from different countries and then last year we did one specifically in Northern Nigeria and we said, this is so rich, we should really write a report about, we should make this more intentional in terms of capturing this information, this analysis, this expertise from the local groups and getting it up into the conversations in the hands of decision-makers so that they're informed about what the conflict analysis looks like from the local perspective and what the recommendations are from local peace-builders. So we did that on Northern Nigeria and we found it was really, really helpful. It wasn't only helpful for me working in Washington to have those conversations, but our partners said, these reports are great, can you send me more, I'm going to Abuja and I wanna go have a conversation and bring this report. One of our partners was invited to give a workshop based on something that was in the report about their work on community-based responses and prevention to violent extremism. So we started to say, well, we should really have a more intentional project around this and also we should then bring those local peace-builders to the US, to Washington and to New York where we work and engage with UN decision-makers so that they can share the information and their perspectives directly. And we had done that on and off, but we hadn't done it in such a systematic way. So we're doing that now much more with the Local Voices for Peace project. Just as an example, we also, the next one after Northern Nigeria that we did in person like that was Zimbabwe. And so now we're getting more traction out of our Zimbabwe report and I have a few of those if anyone's interested because it's quite relevant for happenings now. And then we started to realize, well, how could we do this on a broader scale? And we were looking at technology options. So I guess maybe this is where the innovation part comes in. I never think we're very innovative, but we have a fantastic tech person who is innovative in London. And we found one tech platform that does online dialogues. It was actually a marketing company that usually would do this for market analysis or for corporations who wanted to figure out how to brand their new product. And we said, well, we could use this for peace building, couldn't we? And so we did our first online consultation, our first online peace exchange in a way in Pakistan. And we had 62 local experts, practitioners, peace builders, academics participate in that for five days online. It went extremely well. I was extremely skeptical of it. I said, I don't believe in technology. It's gotta be face-to-face. And I was amazed at the richness and the depth of the conversation that was happening online. And the feedback later we got from people saying, I was actually more comfortable online because I felt safer. I was able to say what I wanted to say. I was able to come in and out. So it was an interesting learning for us. So we then said, well, what if we did this in multi-country contexts? And we did a next one online with the issue of violent extremism. And we invited local peace building groups around the world in different countries who were dealing with different forms of extremism to have an online consultation. And we had 118 people participating from 30 or 40 countries. And it was, again, it was incredible. So we did a report. So we are now continuing this and we follow up each report now with an educational visit from participants to Washington DC and to New York. We organized round table events. We organized discussions face to face one to one with key decision makers on those issues. And we're really encouraged and excited about this project and how it's hopefully helping link the local perspectives with the international decision makers and bridge that gap of knowledge and understanding really about the realities and what can be done. So our next one's coming up. There's one on atrocity prevention, which is coming up at the end of this month. Again, it'll be a global consultation. We're gonna do one on youth and peace building next year, which will be part of the whole UN's youth, peace and security process. We're gonna feed back into that. And then we're looking at some other country contexts like Somalia and Mali where we might do the in-person version. So we have this option now of in-person and online and it's been exciting for us to work on this and see where it goes. And I will say that for our partners, one of the most valuable things is hearing them say that this is valuable to them and that this is helping them in their work and in their communities. And that hopefully is ultimately a big part of the goal too. So thank you. I'll stop there and we'd love to have discussion and questions. Thank you very much, Bridget. I will start with just a question to each of you and then we'll open it up to the audience. The first question I have for Julia is to what degree is the creation of a narrative focused on sort of the right narrative or the right may not be the right correct word. A narrative that becomes compelling as a way to brand and market peace. And is that distinct from what we hear particularly around this town sort of counter messaging and counter narrative as ways of sort of countering violent extremism, et cetera. And then for Bridget, I guess the question I would have is about elevating local voices and getting those to be heard by policymakers. Do you run into any problems of sort of whose local voice? And how does one sort of, is it about local voices plural or is it sort of thinking about what voices need to be heard? I was just bringing up another presentation that I did because I think it's helpful. First of all, let me say I am just learning about all of this. So this very good question that you just asked, like I don't even think I know the answer yet but I can tell you at least kind of how we're thinking about it thus far. First of all, I think it would be helpful to like give you a little definition about what we mean by narrative because I think that we throw around that term a lot. And you know, George Mason University, CERECOB has done a lot of work on narratives and conflict resolution. And so the way that in a very personal way we engage in narrative as a key element of understanding empathy and breakthrough is a field unto itself. And that's not what we've been really talking about. But with that said, I do think that the definition of narrative that I got more from a private firm that deals with businesses that I found helpful that a narrative is a story a person tells his or herself and others to express deeply held beliefs around an idea, an industry, a product, a cohort, and a narrative articulates feelings and drives action. And I think when we think about, sometimes we don't even know consciously the narrative that we hold that story we're telling ourselves that drives our belief. And so what I'm learning is that the concept of pushing a counter narrative is completely faulty. That you essentially have to, first of all, do the social science research to understand narratives. And it's not through a survey. What do you think about X issue? And then somehow we're gonna understand then how I can message to you better. It's observing people talking and then coding that in a way to say it looks like their narrative is this. Or they do all of this big data analysis of looking at the conversations on social media and pulling out the way people talk about it. So when we say hijacking narratives, we have to say can we somehow kind of jump onto the way they're already thinking and talking to kind of influence it a little bit? Or do we eventually come up with our stronger way of communicating our own narrative but specifically understands how personal and how identity related, a lot of the CVE work obviously knows about this. But the private sector of folks say don't try and convince them not to think the way they think. Yes, let's see here. There we go. Who's local voice? Absolutely. Important question, we don't have all the answers and we certainly can't claim to represent all local voices. I was asked to be the civil society respondent on a panel to one of the UN officials. And I almost laughed because I thought how can anyone be the civil society respondent? Civil society is so diverse. People have different opinions, different experiences, different positions on issues. So what we try to be very upfront about is that we are trying to lift up the voices of local peace builders. So we're trying to find people and organizations who are committed to the work of peace in their communities and demonstrate that and have legitimacy within the communities. The communities say yes, those are peace builders in our community and help amplify their voices. When we do the consultations for the Local Voices for Peace Project, so we do some work with our strategic partners that's often one-on-one, one particular group. We're helping amplify their work. But for these processes, we actually put out a very open public call for applications. And we always get more applications of groups than we can fill. And they're specific to peace building. We ask for groups that are working on peace building issues. And so then we do have to figure out, well, who do we include? And so for the Zimbabwe one, there were 19 groups included. In person's always smaller than the online ones. The online ones are great because they let us include so many. But we do very intentionally then look to try to have diversity of gender, diversity of geography, diversity of religion, diversity of types of work, peace building work that they're doing. And there's a process of trying to do that. I'm sure we don't get it right all the time, but we try to be inclusive in that process so that we're able to at least offer some diversity of perspectives. And for instance, on the violent extremism consultation, which had so many groups from so many different countries, different forms of extremism. We didn't come up with, here's the one thing that you should do to help prevent violent extremism. We came up with dilemmas in some cases and debates. And we just tried to lift those up and said, here's one perspective. There was a trend towards some people saying, peace builders don't wanna be involved with the violent extremism agenda. And others said, no, peace builders want to use that agenda for good for their work. So I think it's trying to represent the diversity as fairly as you can. But it is intentionally groups working for peace and for peace building. So we are selective in that way. Great. Questions? Yes, if you could go to the microphone. Thank you. Hi, my name is Katie Russell. I work for a place called the International Student House. And my question is for you. You just mentioned how, of course you get many applications and you can only choose a select few. So my question is actually, do you know of other organizations essentially doing what you do? Do you work with them, the community based organizations on the ground, those who don't get selected to work with you? Do they work with each other? And kind of how does that, how does that network kind of work in terms of collaborating? Yeah, that's a great question. We do do some, for instance, we have in the past when there's been a consultation and there were groups that were, we usually have a group process with our local peace building expert in the country who is the person, so the local peace building experts are the people in charge of the mapping. So they, you know, they're local folks who really know the peace building sector in the country and they know a lot of these groups. And so we work with them on these processes and we'll often say, you know, these three groups, we can't include them in the consultation, but you know, should we go out afterwards and invite them to another event or can we make sure that when we share the report, we engage with them and somehow, somehow. And then those local peace building experts are always, most of them are natural networkers, you know. And so they're trying to engage and include people and push out information and bring in information and perspectives. So we can't do it all the time, but we are trying, we're also all trying new models. So for instance, in Mali, we are starting a new program this year where instead of doing strategic partnerships with one or two groups and having a local peace building expert in the country, we're doing what essentially will become, we're doing five peace exchanges in one country, which we've never done before. So it geographically different to include more groups. And then we're going to be doing small grants to as many of those groups as we can to do different kinds of collaboration projects. So that's a whole new approach for us. We're excited about it because it helps us reach more and include more groups. But yeah, I'm sure there's more we could be doing if we knew how. And you know, I was sitting here thinking, why don't we know all of partners, you know, organizations in the countries? You have a Nigeria, and is our local peace building expert even connected with your Nigeria office? So we have a lot of work to do on networking more. Yeah, and you find also that locally, people are networked. There's a desire to network more and they often ask for that, but often the groups are networked more than we realize to. So. I think that's right. Yes, sir. Hi, I'm Ed O'Brien. I'm the State Department and I think my question is for Julian and for either of you, just to kind of bring back to this topic today, what's been the role of educational exchanges in some of your efforts, especially toward governance is what I'm interested in. But just in general, in which way have you seen more value in terms of US people going to universities and to do their or going the other way? Yeah, so our organization started in 1989 and there was definitely in the beginning, I would say a lot of more US-based exchanges with Central and Eastern Europe because that was kind of the focus after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I don't think we've done kind of a US-based training or exchange in like 15 years. So most of what we, very similar actually in approach, but maybe not at such a grassroots level as Peace Direct, most of our exchanges were promoting within regions. And so we've got teams of academics who study religion and conflict and the role of religion and governance from Brazil, then going to El Salvador and working with academic teams there. So a lot of the exchanges that we've seen to be the most helpful have been the kinds that we do. I hate, I do not use South-South, but that's kind of like the shorthand for that concept of experiences within academics. And now though, having said that, we were just talking at the break about how much I personally have been benefiting from the reverse learning from my network to come and share with us with regards to challenges that they have of working on a peace building and governance agenda and a really divided polarized society. And so I think that what we're seeing is more and more kind of really great academic exchanges and other exchanges of colleagues who have been working in really difficult contexts coming to the US and sharing how they walk that fine line with being bridge builders and activists and working on issues of corruption and at the same time trying to kind of maintain that kind of neutrality to be able to be a good convener of different partisan lines. Yeah, I was gonna mention that idea as well. I do think that we need more exchange for the US right now too on peace building experiences around the world, but I'll give a shout out to the State Department's International Visitors Exchange Program as well because a couple of our partners, I didn't find out until they were here and we were talking to the State Department and someone said, oh, I'm from that, and so I know Saba is from, one of our partners from Pakistan is a graduate of that program. And then the other one who was here from Nigeria said, I am too and I didn't even know. So that program and that program, sometimes I've spoken to groups from that program. That's a really important program I think. In addition to education school and academic exchanges, those programs, people, and I know I will just say, keep the funding for those programs from a peace building perspective because they really do plant seeds and encourage leadership and build connections that you may not see the results from until years later, but I think they're really important. So yeah, I think those exchanges are really part of the work. And I just say one last thing, I was cause you mentioned governance in particular. Obviously, in our world where there used to be kind of this knowledge transfer concept that somehow we're gonna talk about good governance and we're gonna tell you how to do it and based on our experience. So there's a real legitimacy question that we have working on governance issues around the world now, because that's partners for democratic change. We're mostly a democracy promotion organization with conflict resolution interspersed in there. And it's a challenge, it just is. And so I think that this kind of humility of like, wow, we're all facing challenges now. And how do we work on them collectively? Just that posture in an educational mind frame is helpful. This time for one more question. Yeah. Everybody, my name is Sumit. I'd like to thank you for being here. I work for the Global Partnership for Education. We work with 65 countries and we help them to strengthen their education systems. Most of our support goes to the countries that are in some kind of conflict situation. So our objective when we work with such countries to make sure that schools remain open while they're going through the conflict. So, and we, at the same time, we also work with local civil societies. My question is, can you think of any example where any local civil society organization acted, played as a broker between the parties to make sure that the schools are safe and open? If there's an example, the second question would be what kind of capacity building training that civil societies need the most? Yeah, those are two questions. Thank you. Sure, I'll start. I don't have an exact example of the specific local group mediating to ensure that schools stay open, although I'm quite sure it happens in places in a lot of different ways. But it just prompts me to say that we do have partners who work with schools and on education, peace education. So for instance, our partner in Northern Nigeria works with peace clubs, and they've started peace clubs around Northern Nigeria that provide both a forum within schools. So a lot of them are in-school peace clubs where young people have an opportunity to engage in constructive activities together where they're sort of reaffirming their belonging to a group other than an armed group that's trying to recruit them kind of thing. And they do activities for the community. They have a lot of peace football clubs, soccer clubs in Nigeria because it's big. But also the importance of the peace clubs outside the formal education system. So a lot of times local peace building groups are also, and similar with our partner in Pakistan, they've worked in the madrasas to try to provide girls' rights education, human rights education, work with the madrasas to sort of ensure that some of that's included. But they've also found the importance of informal education peace clubs or peace education opportunities because sometimes the schools either can't or are unable or unwilling to really provide what's needed. So I think that that is part of the work. I also, we have a partner in Syria now, and I know they've done a lot on rebuilding schools and working with youth in Idlib province and working with the local councils on a variety of issues, which may include, I'm not sure, but might include some of the issues around education as well. So thank you for that work, it is important. And then on the question of capacity building, we've been having this conversation in Peace Direct about that word, capacity building, and how do we actually get rid of it or change it? Because, I mean, it suggests that we have all the capacities and we just need to, it's a one way transfer somehow. And actually, what local partners and local civil society tell us they want, first and foremost, is recognition and respect. And they want to be able to make decisions about the future of their communities. So they really want us to build our capacity to listen and to respect that they have knowledge and expertise that can actually be the most informative and the best capacity they have in terms of designing solutions, they want support, they do then want support and engagement on often technical skills. Maybe there's an area where they want to do peace education in schools, but they need more examples of curricula from other places that they can then copy and adapt as they want. Or whatever, so there's a technical skills. There is a financial reporting and financial capacity building that because of the way that external donors require accounting and based on our needs for accounting, et cetera, there's often a need for that kind of technical skill as well. But we're trying to shift it to think about how do we do capacity building as outsiders alongside them or something. Yeah, I was just thinking just quickly about kind of examples that you may look at for civil society groups and kind of protecting that school space would be in Columbia, because there was a lot of really good examples of those kind of, and I can't remember the exact term, but like the peace zones where the communities really stood up to say, no, we really wanna protect our space, including schools. So I would get with some Columbia experts on that. Yeah, and then again with regards to, I would just a couple of things with regards to education. I mean, another aspect building on what Bridget was saying is we also focus a little bit on kind of the kind of democratic voice of young people in these environments and a lot of schools. So if the local councils, there's some kind of process for leadership of young people to also get together and voice what they see needs to happen and it's a little bit of just flexing that democratic governance muscle with young people. And so embedding within the school system, a lot of schools have strict student councils, in fact. And so ensuring that there's gender diversity in those councils, but really fortifying the space where they're also participating in some kind of democratic process in their schools, ensuring that that kind of feeds into their concept of citizenship going forward. And so that's a focus of a lot of our network members. And then finally with regards to, I totally agree, we don't really use the word capacity building. We talk a lot about accompaniment of just we're all accompanying each other because we do acknowledge we're in an ecosystem. All of us function in an ecosystem. I'm here in Washington. I have access to the State Department and others. My colleagues in Yemen do not have that same access and at the same time they want the respect. And so really just also just being an authentic partnership together to say, well, I have access, I have networks, I have partnerships, you have your knowledge and you're gonna have your local leadership and how do we just be in partnership together to build on each other's talents and networks and partners. So we spend a lot of time on the business model of not needing to be the prime recipient of funding. That's, I mean, we've spent 25 years like really carefully stepping out of that funding ecosystem, which entails a ton of financial management and reporting and the rest of it. So that's part of it. More and more though, we talk about organizational resiliency for what our partners are really looking at how do we adapt? How do we reach out to new partners? They're very good networkers, that I agree with, but how do we get out of our own bubble to think of other partnerships, whether it's the business community, whether it's, you know, and that that partnership approach to their own financial sustainability one, but also just to kind of be bringing more people into their, we end up both doing a lot of workshops and we actually broker new relationships between different sectors and then accompany them on a process of building those new partnerships, both for their own financial sustainability so they don't need foundation or US bilateral support anymore and that there's some kind of support locally through and we're well positioned to help them with that partnership approach. Terrific, thank you. So please join me in thanking our panelists. I'm gonna say a few concluding words and then I will ask Esther to come in and close out this morning. As an Institute of Peace, this has been a really terrific discussion, not just because of the connections that we want to promote through education, but that peace building and conflict transformation and conflict resolution depend upon the contributions of so many different fields and disciplines so that when we think about education, you know, yes, we want people to people exchanges, we want to learn from each other, but there's also the ways in which peace building itself is strengthened by the contributions of other perspectives, disciplines approaches and that I think is clearly embodied by sort of partners, globals attempt to draw upon other fields. I think about, for example, some of you may know that Drexel University just this fall launched a peace engineering masters program. So there and there are other fields that are starting to expand their curriculum so that you've got peace or conflict related topics or courses that build upon things that we've learned from the peace building field, but using that lens to enhance what's being done in a particular discipline. And the other thing is I just make a point that exchanges, there's sort of a cycle to exchanges and somebody asked the question about, well, when do you see the payoff of some of these things? I will commend one program that I think that somebody mentioned in passing that has had a really interesting impact on some of our work and that's the Humphreys Fellowship. And in two ways, the Humphreys Fellows actually are providing what I would call in many cases sort of mid-career exchanges where individuals who are engaged in public administration or public policy or law or policing are coming to the United States at the mid part of their careers and they're getting more professional development. We've had a longstanding relationship with the University of Minnesota Center for Human Rights which has hosted many Humphreys Fellows. So through that program, there have been a number of police officials, particularly from Northern Africa, from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia. We do training of police to help the police in a sense move beyond or move to a more community-based policing to really think about protecting and serving communities. When we have done programs to transform the training that police provide, Humphreys Fellows who have passed through our doors have been point persons to help make the case in their senior departments or themselves have become senior officials to help in laying the groundwork for some really interesting transformation of police training curricula. And that seed was sort of sown 10, 15 years ago through a program like the Humphreys Fellowship. So that's part of this kind of international education. I mean, yes, there's a lot of young people who are coming through, but it's also about education and learning at all levels, even at sort of professional levels as well as academic levels. So that's why for the US Institute of Peace, we find these discussions in the many programs to be tremendously rich and oftentimes do have very interesting payoffs. So with that, on behalf of the US Institute of Peace, thank you all very much for coming and participating in your excellent questions. And Esther, we will give you the final word. I'll just quickly say thank you to the USIP for cooperation on this event. This has really been a stimulating discussion as we looked at and since the narratives that we do tell ourselves and how we use exchanges to deepen our knowledge in order to be able to broaden our perspective and to challenge some of our narratives as well. And to pick up on your point about the importance of exchanges throughout one's whole career, that indeed that we think about the habits of learning that we may first take up and maybe in that first exchange program is an openness to ideas, challenging our assumptions and being open to learning from all disciplines from many different places. It becomes a habit of mine and that's something I think NASA and USIP support. So again, thank you to all of you here this afternoon. Thank you to USIP for hosting. Thank you for those of you who joined us online. Good afternoon. Thank you.