Spotlight on the Fellows

Kutina is an attorney and Diversity Fellow at the Charleston School of Law. Previous to becoming a Carl Wilkens Fellow, Kutina developed considerable lobbying experience as the state chair for CARE USA, in which capacity she lobbied federal lawmakers for the health and educational needs of women and girls. Her passion for human rights advocacy, especially where focused on disadvantaged ethnic and racial minorities, was the original motivation behind her Carl Wilkens Fellowship.

 

In early August, Kutina will lobby with a group of Southern Sudanese in Washington, D.C. The group will focus on the referendum for the self-determination for South Sudan and on the concerns of the Diaspora. Also in August, Kutina will begin preparing a secondary school curriculum geared towards teaching policy-making to High School students, for which genocide prevention will be the feature policy issue.  

Claude is a human rights activist from Rwanda who survived both the civil war and genocide in Rwanda. He spent time as a refugee in countries surrounding Rwanda before he moved the United States. The lasting memories of the genocide and the civil war in Rwanda and of the countless victims who died senseless deaths motivate his drive to see prevention of genocide and mass atrocities. Having advocated for the Congolese victims with a several Congolese Activist organizations, Claude applied for the Carl Wilkens Fellowship to learn how to have a higher impact as a community organizer and advocate.

 

Recently, Claude has developed working partnerships with a number of people in the greater Nashville area, including a former teacher who opened up opportunities at her school to raise awareness on the current mass atrocities taking place in the Burma, Congo, and Sudan. An opportunity to speak to students in classrooms at Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet School resulted in further conversations with interested students and teachers on future projects and activities related to genocide prevention. Another engagement at the Tennessee Governor's School for International Studies and a fall semester meeting at Hillsboro High School also will contribute to Claude’s growing constituency of anti-genocide activists.

Jan has built a career in the fields of multicultural education, prejudice reduction, violence abatement and grassroots program design and mobilization, with speaking and consulting engagements at, among others, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, and the American Academies of Psychoanalysis and Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. For the last few years, Jan has been involved in a coalition-building program in Rwanda and the Congo and considers her Carl Wilkens Fellowship an opportunity to focus additional time and energy on raising awareness around issues of collective violence, especially by and against children, and on building coalitions for global peace and justice in response to them.

 

Jan is working on a large-scale gala fundraiser to benefit the Friends Peace House in Rwanda, Interfaith Paths to Peace in Louisville, and Genocide Intervention Network. The project, titled "The Shirt off My Back,” is based on the story of one Rwandan woman who raised funds for her village children by selling used clothing. The Shirt Off My Back will raise funds to prevent genocide, to help those who have suffered as victims of genocide, and ultimately to build the capacity of civil society in areas of the world where genocide and mass atrocities are taking place.