Davis Projects for Peace is an initiative for undergraduate students at Davis United World College Scholars Program institutions, including Denison, to design and implement grassroots projects that promote peace and address the root causes of conflict among parties. Applicants are encouraged to use their creativity to design projects and employ innovative techniques for engaging project participants in ways that focus on conflict resolution, reconciliation, building understanding and breaking down barriers which cause conflict, and finding solutions for resolving conflict and maintaining peace. Through a competition on more than 90 campuses, 100 projects will be selected for funding at $10,000 each. Projects must be implemented during the summer of 2013. Mrs. Kathryn Wasserman Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist who is now over 105 years old, has committed $1 million to fund 100 projects for peace.

The Davis Projects for Peace program hopes to encourage student initiative, innovation and entrepreneurship focusing on conflict prevention, resolution or reconciliation. Some of the most compelling projects to date have reflected one or more of the following characteristics: contributing to conflict prevention; ameliorating conditions leading to violence/conflict; looking for and building on shared attributes among differing peoples, races, ethnicities, tribes, clans, etc.; fostering diplomacy or otherwise contributing to advancing peace processes underway; promoting economic opportunity and entrepreneurship among those in post-conflict areas; finding creative ways to bring people on opposite sides of issues together, such as through art, sports, music or other techniques to promote a common humanity; developing leadership and mediation skills training for those in conflict or post-conflict societies; starting or leveraging initiatives, organizations (e.g. education, health) or infrastructure projects to build/rebuild community. In general, projects should be building blocks for a sustainable peace. The overall program is intended to be worldwide in scope and impact, but specific projects may be undertaken anywhere, including in the U.S.

Undergraduate students at any of the Davis UWC Scholar schools (including seniors who would complete their projects the summer following graduation) are eligible. Groups of students from the same campus, as well as individual students, may submit proposals.

The intention is to fund 100 projects, with at least one at each eligible school. All eligible schools are invited to select and submit one lead proposal and one alternate proposal that might also be funded. The Denison selection committee, coordinated by the Gilpatrick Center for Student Research & Fellowships, will select Denison’s proposals no later than February 11, 2013. Final decisions on all grants are made by the Davis UWC Scholars Program office and are expected by March 15, 2013.

For each funded project, the responsible student(s) must prepare and submit a final report to the Gilpatrick Center by September 2, 2013. The report is to be limited to two pages of narrative and a one page accounting of the funds expended.