Honors senior Kelly Kirkpatrick, who studied in Thailand during her junior year, will return to a different part of the country for a Princeton in Asia fellowship year. She was awarded the highly selective fellowship to work with the Life Skills Development Foundation, a Thai-run nongovernmental organization based in Chiang Mai.To promote cross-cultural service and exchange with Asia, Princeton in Asia awards fellowships for talented U.S. graduates to do service in countries across Asia. Each year the program grants 85 teaching fellowships, mainly at universities, as well as 40 additional fellowships with nongovernmental organizations, media groups and businesses.
Kirkpatrick will be working for the Life Skills Development Foundation in its efforts to protect and promote children’s rights. “The organization works broadly on children’s rights issues in northern Thailand, which is really exciting,” she comments. The organization’s focus is on education, early childhood care and life skills training.
“A lot of what they do is based around learning centers in rural areas,” she explains, stressing the importance of the organization’s programs for children and parents along with its efforts to integrate the community into the learning centers. “Building relationships with the community is something SESP is very aware of,” she notes.
When Kirkpatrick studied in Thailand during her junior year, she worked on issues facing rural communities in northeast Thailand, including water and land rights and agricultural development. “I went there because I think we get a really great perspective on urban issues,” she says of her education at SESP, but she was also interested in international development issues. And she was curious about Thailand, which she describes as “an amazing part of the world.” She notes, “I think that it’s exciting that SESP is fostering more international social policy.”
Her work at SESP has other connections to her fellowship with the Life Skills Development Foundation. “They’re looking at promoting healthy child development, and SESP has given me a great background in that area — more than anything else building relationships between communities and schools and seeing schools as a partner in how children are raised,” she says. “This organization is trying to build relationships among different stakeholders around children’s rights. I’ll do whatever is helpful to the organization.” She imagines that she might be doing some English teaching, organizational development and language development.
Kirkpatrick found the Princeton in Asia program at a conference she attended as co-head of the Northwestern University Public Interest Program (NUPIP), a student-run organization that places Northwestern graduates in public interest jobs, based on the Princeton model. Throughout her years at Northwestern, Kirkpatrick has been actively involved in many types of service and community engagement, including activities with the Evanston Community Foundation and the Global Engagement Summit.
While her job with the Life Skills Development Foundation starts at the end of September, she’ll travel to Thailand about a month early to do intensive language study. “I’m so thrilled!” she says.
Last Modified: 4/9/10