Welcome to Eisenhower Fellows

Fellows Give Feedback!

Author | 24.02.2008 | Category Uncategorized

Earlier this year, I had sent out an email asking each of the fellows some questions, to reflect if the fellowship had helped them professionally or personally. I have taken the liberty to put together a few of the responses and am posting them here so you can read their responses and assess for yourself what the impact has been. While the Fellowship is a long-term association to a progressive cause, this is a very short-term insight into their lives!

What was the biggest achievement(s) since your return from the Fellowship

Gunvor Kronman: I survived and actually won a few very tough battles in the Public Radio and TV Board, resulting in the sanctity of minority channels. This is a fight that will continue. I have successfully started the re-orientation of my center. Strategy processes are going well, and of course, I managed to reconnected with a number of old friends.

Farith Rithauddeen: I managed to learn to delegate responsibilities and coach my new team to allow them to learn and resolve issues in their own way. I also brought Babson College’s leading entrepreneurship university to Malaysia in order to collaborate with UNITAR, a private university here in Malaysia.

Roberto Guerrero: I was able to start a fund raising program for our law school shortly after my return. We launched it in October and in less than two months we have raised half of the targeted amount. I also implemented many of the management tools I learned for a law firm which helped 2007 become one of our best years in sales, revenues and internal organization.

Emine Kaya: Sharing my experiences of the Fellowship with my collegues from both the Dutch Ministry and the European Commission. The lectures I gave will be published in an article , dealing with the topic on linking integration-immigration issues with experiences from the EU-USA.

Everybody has to deal with diversity, not only societies, but also multinationals. Can the models of the profit and private sector be compared and if yes, what are the results? The private sector has already established, as a vision and a mission, that diversity leads to creativity which leads to inspiring working environments, innovative products and outputs.

On a societal level, diversity is dealt within the historical, judicial and cultural framework of a particular country. There can be discrepancies in national policy approaches (for example racist, multi-cultural, liberal etc) however pressing demographic and economic challenges are urging factors to re-design new answers to issues of integration and immigration in this global society.

Susie Perera: I faced the biggest challenge in my life up to now when I got back from the USA. Two months after I came back I was taken off my post as the Project Director of the WB funded project on HIV/AIDS Prevention which I assumed only in January 2007. I had to remain in the same project as the Monitoring & Evaluation Specialist, which I was before becoming the Project Director. All this was done through the influence of people ( so called professionals) who were jealous and not really performing, who had felt threatened by my position. These people even went on to hurt me emotionally and create a hostile work environment, through a series of hate e mail virtually amounting to ‘sexual harassment through words!’

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