Tamer Hassan Receives Projects for Peace Award

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Tamer Hassan

WATERVILLE, ME (04/05/2011)(readMedia)-- Tamer Hassan of Great Falls, Va., is one of two students at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, to receive a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant this year. Hassan will continue work on a documentary film series about intentional communities that model practices conducive to a more sustainable and peaceful future.

Philanthropist Kathryn W. Davis launched the Projects for Peace program in 2007 to mark her 100th birthday. Again this year she challenged students to design and implement innovative techniques that focus on conflict resolution, reconciliation, building understanding, and breaking down barriers that cause conflict. This summer students from more than 90 campuses will share more than $1 million in funding for projects in all regions of the world.

According to Hassan, an environmental studies major and a senior, his objective is "to reveal and inspire ideas for enacting peaceful and resilient community practices into mainstream consciousness through film." Continuing his work with Armand Tufenkian, a 2010 Colby graduate, Hassan will make three more installments in their documentary film series titled "Finding Community."

Hassan wrote that in making the first two films in the series, set at Twin Oaks Community in Louisa, Va., and Earthaven Ecovillage in Black Mountain, N.C., the filmmakers witnessed the "transformative potential that cooperation and communal support have on our environment, our political and economic systems, and the way in which we treat one another."

The other winner from Colby is junior Sulaiman Nasseri, a Davis United World College scholar from Afghanistan. Nasseri sees his project, "Empowering Afghan Women Through Embroidery," as a way to help families in Kabul. By providing women with the training, equipment, and materials to begin commercial embroidery, Nasseri hopes to improve their status and increase the literacy and educational attainment of their children, according to his proposal.