United by Love

United by Love is applying for the Elevate Prize to revolutionize our programs and scale our operations to further our mission of nurturing a world united by a common humanity and lived through perpetual peace. 

Foremost, the flexible funding that the Elevate Prize provides would allow our executive director to truly become a full-time staff member, the organization to hire a project coordinator for Nepal, and the organization to hire a full-time staff in Southeastern Europe, in addition to running a modified version of the Bridging Backgrounds program in Hawai’i.

Additionally, while our team are experts at implementing social development programs that address controversial issues in unstable countries and have extensive knowledge of the social, political, and economic circumstances for the regions we operate, we are not experts at social media. Developing a mass digital following would greatly help with creating sustainable funding sources and opening new program opportunities.

Moreover, as we look to introduce new program models and expand our operations to the United States, as well as other regions, the mentorship and connections that the Elevate Prize would provide would be priceless in helping the organization reflect on our previous work and evaluate how best to move forward. 

Born in Honolulu, I am the great-grandchild of refugees who fled Europe for the United States. As a Jew and Middle Eastern American, I understood discrimination and intolerance from a young age. In my final year of high school, I received the YES Abroad Scholarship from the US State Department to live in Macedonia, a small country in Southeastern Europe, for a year.

From my first day in Macedonia, I witnessed the Balkans most infamous attribute – ethnic tension – when I saw an ethnic Macedonian man and an ethnic Albanian man fighting over a piece of shade at a bus stop. As I progressed through my year in Macedonia and continued to learn more about my host community, I had repeated conversations with my fellow young Macedonian peers in which they explained how they understood the problems that plagued their community but felt they had no agency to solve such problems.

After my year in Macedonia, I designed the Bridging Backgrounds program to address ethnic tension and youth civic apathy (other answers describe this program’s structure and impact). Providing hundreds of young people the opportunity to catalyze positive change in their communities ignited my tenacious passion for social development. 

United by Love empowers young people to foster tolerance, expand inter-ethnic understanding, and promote knowledge of human rights in communities healing from conflict and genocide. Southeastern Europe, the first region we have worked in, is infamous for the episodes of ethnic cleansing that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. While Southeastern Europe has seen relative peace since then, ethnic tension continues to be omnipresent throughout the region, impacting everyday life in the form of segregated neighborhoods, schools, and bus routes. This tension is exacerbated by unresolved historical injustices, common political corruption, and limited economic opportunities. As a result of these circumstances, most young people in the region, over 90% in Macedonia, for example, wish to leave for Western Europe.

To address these challenges, we empower young people with the skills and resources to directly foster tolerance and deepen mutual understanding in their communities, thus providing them a pathway to meaningful civic engagement and attachment to their communities. Through this grassroots, bottom-up method of change, we have been able to cultivate young leaders who represent the ethnic, economic, religious, gender, geographic, and sexual diversity of Southeastern Europe and look forward to doing the same in Nepal and Hawai’i. 

United by Love’s work is innovative due to both our founding philosophy and program structure. Our theory of change is that communities progress most when ordinary people are empowered to create extraordinary change. We understand that the people with the greatest potential to solve a communal problem are those most proximate to such a problem. Concerning inter-ethnic tension and civic apathy among young people, those closest to these problems are young people. As such, our programs directly empower young people with the skills and resources to foster tolerance, deepen inter-ethnic understanding, and promote human rights in their communities.

For example, our flagship program, Bridging Backgrounds, has two phases: learning and activism. In the first phase, participants attend a two-week residential training where they participate in restorative practices workshops, human rights education activities, community activism training, field trips, and talks with guest speakers from the fields of activism, academia, and politics. In the second phase, participants return to their communities to design and implement projects that nurture tolerance, deepen inter-ethnic understanding, or promote knowledge of human rights. In doing this, participants naturally develop their leadership skills, attachment to their communities, and passion for civic engagement. 

The mission of United by Love is to nurture a world united by a common humanity and lived through perpetual peace. Our organization is having a positive impact on humanity by empowering the next generation of passionate and principled leaders who will secure a just peace and solve human rights challenges in communities that have been plagued by conflict and genocide.

We achieve our mission and impact through the implementation of programs that directly empower young people with the skills and resources to foster tolerance, deepen inter-ethnic understanding, and promote human rights in their communities. With this program model, we have demonstrated great effectiveness in reaching diverse, marginalized communities, developing the leadership capacity of underprivileged youth, and providing young people a path to meaningful, lifelong civic engagement.

While we have primarily discussed the Bridging Backgrounds program in this application, we have also previously implemented Bright Start, a program similar to Bridging Backgrounds but for university students. Additionally, we are beginning construction of a secondary school in a rural ethnic minority community in Nepal that will be the first school in the country to have a human rights education curriculum. Moreover, we will be implementing a modified Bridging Backgrounds program in Hawai’i.