Help a student-activist go to the Israel-Palestine territories, to attend a learning-journey in conflict

Tl;dr:

Hello, my name is Jahnavi. I’m a fourth-year student of global politics and social change at Minerva Schools a KGI; a college where I have spent the last three years travelling the world with students from around the world. I have had dialogues that have made the political become personal; I have been able to interact with people that belong on the enemy’s side of the border, and then find friends in them. You can read more about this here. I am now in India and it’s politically polarized and emotionally charged climate, trying to work on how those dialogues can be had in the outside world, and what the impact of that would be.

I’ve been invited to a week-long learning journey on political conflict and dialogue, in the Israel-Palestinian territories. You can learn more about this program, in·sight, here. This will be incredible exposure to how these conversations would look in the real world, and offer critical insights into how I can bring these dialogues home. I need to raise $1400 to cover the costs of my flights, visa etc., as the program can only cover my program costs.

I need to confirm my attendance by midnight tomorrow, the 30th of June - and without this money will not be able to do so.

A longer ‘why’:

I went to college, specifically this nomadic one, to learn about political change, and ended up discovering through colleagues that became friends and political debates that became empathetic dialogues fuelled by curiosity and vulnerability; that the political is truly personal.

The Minerva community represents a meaningful chunk of the world’s different nation-states, races, socio-economic strata, ideologies, religions and genders. This has been a wildly fascinating and gutting experience for me (and I believe I speak for many others in my community as well), because of how personal the political has been. It is one thing to academically debate political conflict and the possibility of war breaking out in the South Asian peninsula. It is another thing to be cooking a meal with friends who have family on the other side of the border, when the news of surgical strikes hit you. Or to know that you may never be able to visit your friend’s home, or attend her wedding because you cannot possibly go to her country.

What is most powerful about this community ultimately, isn’t that it is a fairly accurate microcosm of the world; but that it is a microcosm of what the world could be in a more hopeful, less conflict-ridden tomorrow. That the people in it, are willingly having uncomfortable, yet thoughtful conversations about what is political. You can read more about what we were trying to do here: (https://www.minervaquest.com/2018/12/13/we-need-to-talk/).

Today, with another year to go for my education at Minerva to be complete, I am back in India. India, with its several active conflict-zones spread across the country’s remote corners and the long-running, hot-potato-like rivalry with its sister-country, Pakistan and now a politically polarized and emotionally charged population nation-wide that has been seeing communal and caste divides only get more overt, unapologetic and violent.

I am working now, on trying to understand how to replicate the dialogues that transformed my micro-community in Minerva, in the real world. And the endless potential of what doing that could result in.

A reminder of the Ask:

I’ve been invited to a week-long learning journey, happening this August, on political conflict and dialogue, in the Israel-Palestinian region. You can learn more about this program, in·sight here: https://www.insightjourneys.org/. This will be incredible exposure to how these conversations would look in the real world, and offer critical insights into how I can bring these dialogues home.

I need to raise $1400 to cover the costs of my flights, visa etc., as the program can only cover my program costs. I need to confirm my attendance by midnight tomorrow, the 30th of June - and without this money will not be able to do so.

I’m asking you to help me grab this opportunity and bring those lessons home, and the clock is ticking! I’m incredibly, incredibly grateful that you took the time to read this and for whatever you contribute towards this goal!