Social Impact Fellowships in Central Asia: Integrating Learning, Research, and Engagement

Social Impact Fellowships in Central Asia: Integrating Learning, Research, and Engagement
 
Project Summary
The Lehigh University Office of Creative Inquiry has, since 2019, designed and implemented three “Impact Fellowship” programs - Global Social Impact Fellowship, Lehigh Valley Social Impact Fellowship, and Campus Sustainable Impact Fellowship. These three programs offer students and faculty the opportunity to work on multi-year, impact-focused projects alongside external partners in order to create new, tangible, sustainable, systemic changes. We propose to work with partner universities in Almaty and Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, to create similar programs at their universities, using best practices from Lehigh’s programs to develop, design, and launch a curricular infrastructure to support such project-based learning at those institutions. In turn, we anticipate that these urban universities will be able to work with regional institutions throughout Kazakhstan to build the capacity for project-based learning there. The creation of these programs will strengthen the research enterprise throughout the region, lead to more frequent and efficacious faculty collaborations within and outside Kazakhstan, and potentially increase student mobility between Kazakh higher education institutions and U.S. institutions like Lehigh. The real outcomes, though, will be measured in the number of projects supported and the social and systemic impacts that those projects will have.
 
Project Outline
Establish the core institutions in this consortium-based approachIdentify regional institutions who will participate and benefit from the implementation of project-based learning.Lehigh will share materials with faculty and administration at our core partners.Host series of webinars in Spring 2022 with core partners for regional universitiesLehigh students in-country for fieldwork in Summer 2022; convene a regional university summit while they are there. Workshops offered by Lehigh, AlmaU, and AITU.Brainstorming sessions for faculty in KazakhstanBring in ecosystem players, non-university partners to be identified