The first Crister S. Garrett Scholarship cohort
The first Crister S. Garrett Scholarship cohort concluded their projects.
After the start of the Crister S. Garrett scholarship was initially interrupted by the Corona pandemic, we are pleased that now all four recipients have completed their projects.
Find out more about the CSG Scholarship here.
We helped Mariama to enable a semester abroad.
Isa attended an international conference that was postponed several times due to the COVID pandemic.
And we enabled Paul and Elias to travel to New York to gain international experience there in non-profit organizations.
Paul and Elias’s experience in New York, supported by the CSG Scholarship
Elias and Paul
We, Paul Dombrowski and Elias Capelle, received the acceptance for the Crister S. Garrett scholarship in August 2020. Since it was not possible for us to start our stay abroad due to the coronavirus pandemic, we were all the more happy that two years later, in the fall of 2022, we could use the scholarship to travel to New York.
At that time, Elias had been offered a place as an exchange student at City University New York, enabling him to stay in New York for 10 months. Elias also had the opportunity to volunteer alongside his studies in the spring of 2023, from late January to May. Meanwhile, Paul arrived in September 2022 and spent three months in New York, during which he was able to volunteer at three different projects.
The time we spent in New York was very exciting, as it was the first time either of us had traveled outside of Europe for a longer period of time. It was particularly exciting to be in such a huge metropolis and to witness all its contradictions. The cultural offerings of many different institutions and projects in the different boroughs of New York was impressive and overwhelming in a way that neither of us had experienced before. At the same time, we found that life in this big city exposes social inequities within society. Because of this, it was also a special concern for us to volunteer in those organizations and projects that have emerged from these contradictions and try to create new social spaces and infrastructures, with a special focus on mutual aid practices of activist communities. Both of our main engagements, though spaced out in time, focused on the Interference Archive, a volunteer-run archive and project space in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which explores the connection between cultural production and social movements in New York City and around the world. The Interference Archive makes an important contribution to activist and social movement history with its archive open to the public.
It was a special experience to be part of this all-volunteer project that focuses on accessibility of archival materials and movement history and makes its holdings available to visitors for their own exploration and research, a place of collection that positions itself against institutionalized forms of archiving in order to live up to the claim of a community archive in which everyone interested in resistance and movement history can participate.
Two other projects in which Paul volunteered were God's Love We Deliver and The Bureau of General Services Queer Division. The former delivers fresh meals free of charge to households of chronically ill and/or addicted, (dis)abled people. With its origins in the AIDS epidemic of the 1970s and 1980s, the project's mission is to provide access to healthy and fresh food to those who, because of their illness and social situation, would otherwise have little or no opportunity to provide for themselves.
Queer Division is a queer bookstore that is part of the LGBT Center in the West Village in lower Manhattan. As a place for New York's queer community, the center provides a meeting place for various work groups to network and exchange ideas. The bookstore, as part of the Bureau, sees itself as a learning and working space for a self-aware, sex-positive, and mutually supportive queer community by offering books, publications, and art. Beyond selling queer-specific fictional and non-fictional literature and community magazines, Queer Division organizes readings and book launches that take place at the Center or elsewhere in New York, in addition to performances, film screenings, book discussion groups, and other workshops.
Meanwhile, Elias focused his attention on neighborhood spaces and Mutual Aid projects in his Bushwick/Ridgewood neighborhood, on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. Through a friend, he learned about the neighborhood community center Woodbine, a volunteer-run "experimental space" in Ridgewood, Queens, which offers workshops, lectures, and discussions as formats for meeting and sharing to develop the practices, skills, and tools needed to build an autonomously run space for the neighborhood. Woodbine houses a food pantry, organized by volunteers in Woodbine spaces since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in order to provide food to neighborhood people who have found it difficult to provide themselves and their families with food and other necessary products due to public health measures. Twice a week, people from the neighborhood can pick up pre-sorted food packages. The food was also picked up by volunteers from supermarkets with surplus food that can no longer be put on sale donated to Woodbine. Similar to Woodbine's other formats and projects, the Food Pantry is based on the concept of Mutual Aid, which is about coming together as a community, like your own neighborhood, to help provide each other with necessary resources.
Besides our goal to improve our English language skills, our volunteering in these projects also enabled us to become part of a social and activist network. In some places, we were able to draw on experiences from the volunteer work we had done, especially in Leipzig. However, finding our way around the new language and the new conditions in New York was a new special challenge that we were happy to take on. We learned a lot about life in the city of New York and were able to learn more about the historical and current context of these projects, which for many people represent an enrichment and necessity for their lives. We would like to express our sincere gratitude once again for the CSG Scholarship, without which we would not have been able to have this unique experience. We hope that future scholarship holders will have similar exciting and memorable experiences.
Besides our goal to improve our English language skills, our volunteering in these projects also enabled us to become part of a social and activist network. In some places, we were able to draw on experiences from the volunteer work we had done, especially in Leipzig. However, finding our way around the new language and the new conditions in New York was a new special challenge that we were happy to take on. We learned a lot about life in the city of New York and were able to learn more about the historical and current context of these projects, which for many people represent an enrichment and necessity for their lives. We would like to express our sincere gratitude once again for the CSG Scholarship, without which we would not have been able to have this unique experience. We hope that future scholarship holders will have similar exciting and memorable experiences.