BUILD wins Davis 100 Projects for Peace competition!

On Friday, February 6, BUILD was informed that it's application had been selected for the 100 Projects for Peace Prize of Tufts University. Prize winners receive $10,000 towards a project designed to promote Peace. The Projects for Peace Website describes the mission of the contest:

In its third year, Davis Projects for Peace is an invitation to undergraduates at the American colleges and universities in the Davis United World College Scholars Program to design grassroots projects that they will implement during the summer of 2009. The projects judged to be the most promising and do-able will be funded at $10,000 each. The objective is to encourage and support today's motivated youth to create and tryout their own ideas for building peace.

BUILD's proposal centered on the 2009 Community Development Plan that had been developed with the people of Santa Anita la Union. Funds from the Prize will go towards the purchase of 20,000 grafted, arabica coffee plans as well as materials necessary for the construction of an almacigo, a structure that serves as a nursery for baby coffee plants in their first 18 months of life.

The following is an excerpt from the winning proposal:

While Santa Anita is only one small cooperative among a sea of agricultural communities, they represent a unique demographic--resettled combatants that handed in their weapons for the prospect of peace. They now grow coffee, a crop that represents more than 150 years of exploitation, to earn a living, and the government has been indifferent, at best, towards their economic plight. The men and women of Santa Anita fought for land and a better life, yet, twelve years after the Accords, they find themselves in debt, their farm in danger of repossession, and their children migrating to the cities and to the US in search of those very opportunities that were promised to them more than a decade ago. We designed our project based solely on their voices and their expressed needs, and we hope to serve in what way we can to provide economic, organizational, and moral support to realize a better life for this community that has spent blood, time, and dreams in search of an escape from poverty, equal treatment, and a piece of land to truly call their own.

For more information on the Davis Projects for Peace contest, please see their website at www.davisprojectsforpeace.org