Conflict Resolution in the Middle East and Grant-Writing Workshop

February 17, 2012 Location:  Champlain College

Champlain College, UVM’s Institute for Environmental Diplomacy (at the James Jeffords Center for Policy Research) and Security and the United States Institute of Peace present:

Conflict Management and Peacebuilding amid transitions in the Arab World

Friday: Feb. 17, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. in the Champlain College Alumni Auditorium, 246 South Willard St., Burlington.

Over the past year, the Middle East has experienced an unprecedented wave of popular uprisings. These events have swept from power autocratic rulers in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, threatened several other repressive Arab regimes, and altered relations among countries at the regional and international levels.

The United States Institute of Peace has been deeply engaged in efforts to manage conflict and promote peace in the Middle East. USIP’s Steve Riskin will discuss the fast-evolving situation in the region and, in that context, USIP’s peacebuilding activities at this pivotal time in the history of the Middle East.

The conversation will be preceded by a grantwriting workshop entitled:

Making good ideas come to life (and getting funding for them): How to develop and present winning proposals, 11am to 2pm in the Morgan Room in Aiken Hall on the Champlain College Campus.

More about Steven Riskin, Senior Program Officer, Grant and Fellowships Program:

Steven Riskin is a senior program officer in the Grant and Fellowship program and a Middle East specialist with particular expertise on Arab-Israeli affairs. He is also responsible for the Institute’s Priority Grant Competition related to Iran. He came to the Institute from the Ford Foundation, where he was a New York–based program officer and consultant on Middle East issues. He was responsible for program development and grantmaking in Israel, designing and implementing programs in the areas of human rights, social justice and conflict resolution. With the foundation’s Cairo office staff, he also engaged in program development in the Arab world. He has traveled extensively throughout the region.

Riskin has been a consultant to the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights and several foundations seeking to advance social justice and peace in the Middle East. He was a researcher at the Brookings Institution, a foreign affairs analyst at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress and a co-founder of the International Human Rights Funders Group, an international network of over 250 foundations and other donor agencies funding in the human rights field. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Compton Foundation, a California-based philanthropy that focuses its grantmaking on peace and security, environment and sustainability, and population and reproductive health.

He holds a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in Arab studies from Georgetown University.

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