Launching this year, Incite’s Global Change Program will endow change agents around the world with financial and intellectual support. Plus, find out how our first GCP grant recipient is tackling inequality in Colombia with art, dialogue, and the country’s first-ever community think tank.
Participants at a Re-imagenemos event in 2023.
While academic institutions are working to understand the most complex and pressing issues of our time–from climate change, to inequality, to public health, to failing trust in institutions—communities around the world are tackling these very problems with locally cultivated expertise and ingenuity. Though many academic institutions are realizing the value of community partnership, the relationships that underpin these partnerships risk reproducing hierarchy and extraction, rather than fostering collaborations that value multiple forms of expertise, enhancing capacities for both knowledge production and change.
At Incite, we’re experimenting with project models that break down barriers between the academy and worlds where change is made. To do so, we endow change agents with resources and intellectual support, whether through developing innovative public initiatives across the country with Assembling Voices, putting incarcerated writers’ perspectives in the same publications as academics in Logic(s) magazine, or empowering high schoolers to inform their local electorates with MyVote Project.
Launching this year, Incite’s Global Change Program (GCP) will further internationalize and develop our mission by partnering with project leaders around the world who are tackling issues ranging from poverty to climate change to unequal access to health care.
Each year, GCP will award $50,000 in grants to individuals leading campaigns that assemble their communities in service of furthering democracy, equity, and justice. Awardees will receive intellectual support from Incite, including assistance with project design and facilitated collaboration with a center or institute of their preference at Columbia. Through that collaboration, Incite hopes to generate scholarship and foster conversations about global challenges that remain rooted in the work of communities most directly grappling with their effects.
Evan McCormick, a historian and Associate Research Scholar at Incite is developing and leading this program:
This project is about bridging the gap between universities and communities that share in the task of answering urgent questions about the future of our world. By meeting project leaders where they are, with the support and resources they need to advance community-based work, we can actively bring local experience and perspectives into scholarly conversations happening at universities like Columbia.
If you or somebody in your network is interested in learning more about applying to the Global Change Program, reach out to Evan McCormick. Be the first to know when our applications open by subscribing to our mailing list.
Dr. Allison Benson-Hernández
To pilot the program in 2023–2024, Incite awarded its first GCP grant to Dr. Allison Benson-Hernández, a former Obama Foundation Scholar whose organization Re-imagenemos (Reimagining) is fostering the first national-level conversation about inequality in Colombia. Incite’s funding will support the project’s program of eight regional dialogues on inequality, followed by local dialogues in each of Colombia’s 32 departments. Through these dialogues, more than 150 people from different social backgrounds and professional perspectives will work together to build an agenda of community-led initiatives on inequality. With Incite’s support, Re-imagenemos aims to organize seven Cross-Regional Dialogues On Inequality reaching in excess of 20,000 people.
Chris Pandza sat down with Dr. Benson-Hernández to learn more about inequality in Colombia, Re-imagenemos, and Benson-Hernández’s ambitious plan for the next year.