Carly Edwards
Carly Edwards received her B.S. in Resource Ecology and Community Issues in Africa from the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan in 2004. She has lived and worked with communities in South Africa, Ghana, and Morocco throughout her time at U of M and as a Peace Corps volunteer. In South Africa she interned at the Abe Bailey Nature Reserve in Carletonville/Khutsong for six months, where she assisted in training local youths to be field guides, presented environmental education at local township schools, worked with local street children on building life skills, and assisted with daily management and upkeep of the reserve. Later she volunteered at the orphanage and preschool at the Carl Sithole Salvation Army Center in Soweto. While studying abroad in Ghana, she organized and implemented a clothing drive to benefit residents at the Budumburam Liberian Refugee camp, delivering donated items to a local NGO at the camp, Children Better Way, for distribution. As a Peace Corps volunteer in a rural village in Morocco, her work focused on women’s empowerment, providing educational opportunities for women and girls, and engaging children in the local environment. She also served as the president of the Peace Corps Morocco HIV/AIDS Committee, which encourages and supports volunteers to implement HIV awareness activities in their communities. These experiences opened her eyes to the myriad challenges and contradictions of development projects, as well as the immense need for this assistance. With a career in development work in mind, she is attending Clark University, where she was awarded their Peace Corps Fellowship, for a Masters in International Development and Social Change.
Carly believes that all aspects of development are important and overlapping and that one should not be neglected for another, health over education or environment or local culture, for example. Her interests include finding ways to make development projects more culturally specific so as to be more effective and what cultural factors play a role in a project’s success or failure. Her work in Morocco has also made her particularly interested in gender issues and how religion plays a role in a woman’s ability to provide for herself and her family, as well as how marginalized women can work within the constraints of their cultures yet still become involved so that aid projects are more meaningful for all people. |
|
|
|
