Partnership for Displaced Scholars

Supporting Human Rights and Academic Freedom

I coach knowledge creators for one admittedly self-interested reason: the world needs all the vision, insight, ideas, and discoveries that we can bring to the challenges we face today. Our future depends upon thinkers and teachers to light the way to a life-giving, humane, and sustainable way of being.

I am proud to partner with the Institute of International Education and Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) Alliance by providing pro bono coaching and professional support services to threatened and displaced scholars through their Ambassador Program. The Alliance is a global network of partners providing practical support to scholars from every region of the world threatened by war and persecution.

Rebuilding Fast – from Scratch

IIE-SRF scholars receive time-limited fellowships at partner institutions in safe countries. Scholars generally have three years to regroup, reorient, reconnect, and restart their lives and careers. Coaching supports them in clarifying their goals and mobilizing their strengths to re-establish their careers as quickly and fruitfully as possible.

None of these scholars aspired to leave their home countries, and the vast majority hope to return at the end of their fellowship appointments. For most, returning is impossible due to enduring threats of censorship, persecution, imprisonment, or violence.

Scholars from war-torn regions like Syria and Afghanistan have no research or educational infrastructure available upon return. Facing a future in exile, these scholars face the daunting task of creating lives of meaning and fulfillment in circumstances they did not choose. They make their way in an unfamiliar culture, with stereotypes and misunderstandings about where they come from, often in a foreign language.

Reimagining success is challenging.

I doubt that any threatened scholar would tell you that their lives are perfect. They have experienced displacement, separation from friends, family, students, and colleagues. They live with trauma.

Some scholars served time in prison, had their lives threatened, witnessed the persecution of colleagues or people from their ethnic, religious, gender, regional, political, or other groups. They may or may not like the country or university where their fellowship is. Their colleagues may or may not fully embrace them or accept their credentials.

Defying the Myth of Powerlessness

IIE-SRF scholars mobilize their strengths, reimagine opportunities, and continue to grow courageously. With the support of IIE-SRF, their unflinching hard work has resulted in disseminating these scholars’ knowledge through more than 10,500 scholarly publications, presentations, artistic, and creative works.

And their legacy will continue with the countless graduate and undergraduate students they have taught.

Many IIE-SRF scholars work toward their dream of returning to their homeland by contributing to and rebuilding their home communities abroad. They become consultants to NGOs, national governments, and the UN on everything from human rights and conflict resolution to cultural preservation and green economics. As they remake their lives and their careers, they remake hope – for themselves and many others.

That is the power of creating your own life.

Strength in Numbers

Today, there are more threatened and displaced scholars than at any point in my lifetime. In war-torn Iraq and Yemen, these scholars witnessed the dismantling of University systems. Academics receive persecution for their scholarship, political activities, and identities from Azerbaijan to Nigeria to Belarus.

Time and again, in the safety of host countries, these scholars rebuild their lives and careers and contribute richly to our professional fields, knowledge, and quality of life. They create lives of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment under the most challenging circumstances.

Coaching does not determine this rebuilding process; coaching helps accelerate the process while keeping the agenda for change in the scholar’s hands.

Coaching is confidential, so my clients do not know who else is on a coaching journey. But you can trust me when I tell you that you are not alone in working to create a life of your design. None of us can control the forces that shape our lives, but we can make better conditions for our talents to flourish.

Each scholar lights the way forward.

For each of us, our process is our own. We create the vision, set the goals, and do the work to get there.

But a coach helps train our focus on naming our desires, charting a path toward realizing them, assessing our strengths, building momentum in the journey, navigating obstacles, experimenting with new ways of doing things, and using continuous inquiry to reset our instruments to accelerate the path to fulfillment.

Our journeys are our own. Together, with the combined power of our individual processes, we turn up the brilliance.