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Atlantic Fellows Poised As Transformational Future World Leaders Ensuring Social, Economic Equity


Once a year, mid-career change-makers, policymakers, researchers, activists, movement-builders and social impact champions from around the world are selected as Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) to build “a catalytic, values-led global community.” The intense, one-year concentrated learning and mind-share of collective leadership across disciplines and borders address and help highlight the root causes of our world’s inequalities. Fully funded and held at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) International Inequalities Institute, the program augments Fellows’ leadership qualities as transformational leaders capable of impacting the future of their home countries and our world.

The fifth cohort of 17 Fellows, selected for this academic year, from Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, the Philippines, Peru, Scotland, Sierra Leone and Trinidad & Tobago, will start their fellowship in early September.

“We are looking for bold, imaginative individuals who are ready to challenge the status quo–who see the bigger picture of how inequalities affect people’s lives. The selection of the Fellows is a very rigorous process,” explains Dr. Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director of the AFSEE and Associate Professor in Social Policy at LSE.  

AFSEE is one of seven Atlantic Fellows programs across the globe each with a focused topic but sharing a common cause: “advancing fairer, healthier, more inclusive societies.” Besides the LSE, there are the Dublin and San Francisco-based Equity in Brain Health to Racial Equity in New York and Johannesburg, to Social Equity in Melbourne, to three Health Equity programs: U.S. and Global in Washington, D.C., South Africa, in Cape Town and Southeast Asia in Bangkok. The Residential AFSEE Fellows’ stream culminates with an interdisciplinary LSE MSc in Inequalities and Social Science degree while Non-Residential Fellows complete four intensive modules in London and return to their respective countries for the remainder of their Fellowship. Provided with tuition, a living stipend (Residential Fellows only), project funding–and a progressive family-care policy to encourage full module participation–Fellows also receive support from AFSEE’s “Connectivity Fund” to cover Internet connectivity expenses for online learning.

“It’s a lifelong program. After the first year, AFSEE offers opportunities for personal development via continuous learning and local and global networks. These include access to master classes, coaching, professional training courses, etc. We also offer a Network Catalyst fund, a £10 ($13,000) fund to operationalize a collaborative project involving other AFSEE Fellows around social and economic inequalities,” Ishkanian plans for an accreditation of certificate or college credits for non-residential Fellows.

In the research-rich LSE environment, Fellows learn from resident experts on inequalities, share insights with peers working closely with scholars, innovators, activists, and social change organizations. Fellows explore the “practices and contexts that make equitable change possible” from critical, systems thinking, to campaigning and community building. Mentored to further leadership, skills development, and project work, makes the packed experience as part of the lifelong community of Atlantic Fellowships worldwide.

Training Leaders For The Service Of Humanity

The Atlantic Philanthropies was established in 1982 by Chuck Feeney whose working-class Great Depression era upbringing endowed him a U.S. Army scholarship to Cornell University. When his duty-free business turned him into a wealthy man, Feeney, believing the rich should devote most of their wealth to the service of humanity, established the Atlantic Philanthropies–comprising an $8 billion fund in over 6,500 grants to individuals and organizations to make a difference in the lives of others.

In 2015 the Philanthropies’ largest investment of nearly $700 million established the Atlantic Fellows–empowering a global Atlantic Fellows community, investing in people to “realize a fairer, healthier, more inclusive world.” Feeney’s “Giving While Living” entrepreneurial approach to philanthropy inspired Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates.

Started in 2017 with a record £64 million grant, LSE’s program has 85 current and lifelong Fellows from 39 countries across Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, North and South America and the Caribbean.

LSE’s Residential Fellows write on a topic of interest as part of their MSc dissertation. With mentoring by Ishkanian and other area experts, Fellows shape their project, formulating a compelling case in determining how undertaking and successfully completing the MSc in Inequalities and Social Science will impact their social change agenda. A focused plan is then used to transform the knowledge and skills gained from the MSc in Inequalities and Social Science.

The Non-Residential Fellows work on an one-year achievable project using their $10,000 funds. They then present their completed projects to their peers, focused on challenging structural inequalities.

“Fellows must have 7-10 years of experience, openness to learning and sharing knowledge and be able to rethink their positions and share their projects with others. Once shortlisted, they go through interviews,” Ishkanian says while there are no age limits, Fellows must have achieved a certain degree of traction with collective action and leadership. Graduates of the fellowship become members of a worldwide community of Fellows coordinated by the Oxford-based Atlantic Institute. They join their peers working toward a common goal of “forging a global community for equity.”

Some notable LSE Fellows’ projects include a blog series focusing on how the Multidimensional Inequality Framework (MIF) could be used to eradicate poverty in Nigeria; an Israel-based online platform, Majority Magazine bringing together voices of Arabs and Israeli’s and such scholars as Noam Chomsky, to create a unified labor movement; a 42-page booklet analyzing the history and state of inequalities in the San Francisco Bay Area and offering feasible alternatives to create a more equal city/region; a policy paper focusing on the inequalities of Brazilian elections. LSE’s platforms highlight the projects in blogs and articles while Fellows receive individual media training to best communicate their narrative across in media interviews.

Chile To South Africa, Atlantic Fellows Paving New Socio-Economic Paths To Equity

The 35-year-old Anita Peña Saavedra, AFSEE Senior Fellow (2018-2019) from Santiago, Chile is directing research on women’s solidarity networks on COVID-19: the case of Valparaíso, Chile (2020-2021) funded by the LSE’s Covid Rapid Response Fund. An associate researcher in the Laboratorio de Transformaciones Sociales at the University of Diego Portales, a PhD candidate in Social Sciences, with an interdisciplinary approach exploring social reproduction in environmental conflicts in Chile, she holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administrator, Masters degree in Gender and Culture Studies from the University of Chile, and MSc in Social Policy and development from the LSE. With 12 years’ experience in the design, implementation and monitoring of social policies with a gender perspective, she authored “Memoria y Visibilidad: la casa de la mujer de Valparaíso (Libros del Cardo editions–2020) and since 2019 has been a COES sponsored student in Geographies in Conflict and a member of the Editorial Committee of the Nomadías Magazine of the University of Chile since 2014.

An activist in Chile’s feminist movement, Peña has organized campaigns with young women at Chile’s Valparaíso University, worked in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico with Red Mesa de Mujeres, to end violence against women and girls, and was part of the feminist resistance in Honduras. Including among her many feminist activities is abortion rights campaigns in Chile, and as advisor to Vice-Minister on sexual reproductive rights issues and gender policies in Chilean government’s office of the Vice Minister of Women, during Michelle Bachelet’s administration.

“The Fellowship’s value is being part of this international social movement for change, allowing me to embrace this energy to work with the memory of what Chilean women did in the past, and ways to replicate and revive their modest experience. When I face struggles and live all the injustice and feel no reason to continue, this incredible institution tells me you can do anything–they believed and invested in us,” Peña has used her $50,000 AFSEE rapid Covid response fund to work with feminists to interview and document community grassroots actions carried out by the marginalized women in Chile’s Valparaíso port city, famed for its steep hills, clifftop homes where Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s house museum sits.

The women-led grassroots actions on pandemic prevention, organizing food drives and support groups is now a documentary film,  Mujeres En Resistencia capturing how the marginalized women in the very poor communities hit the hardest by the pandemic in Valparaiso embraced and revived the “solidarity economics.” Interviews conducted with the women led to working with municipalities to shape social local policies to preventing violence against women, Peña explains. It allowed for services and awareness of actions by neighboring communities across Valparaiso’s isolated hilltop communities. The documentary film, Peña hopes will inform and enlighten other communities across Chile–disconnected from Internet and social media–to become advocates for women’s rights since their mistrust of authorities prevents them from seeking help. The notable results from the research have widely changed the perceptions that gender-based violence is a community problem, she says, so in Chile and in Latin America violence against women is addressed as an individual problem. The challenge now is to replicate the Valparaiso successes across Chile via education and economic empowerment with the screening of the documentary in August.  In July, Anita Peña shared the research results with the 47 women, ages 20 to 81, who participated in the research.

The 32-year-old Masana Ndinga-Kanga, AFSEE Senior Fellow (2017-2018) from Johannesburg, South Africa is an economist in a country where few black female economists work in civil society and fewer still on feminist economics and sharing information with fellow activists on how to transform the economy to be more equitable and just.

“There is a real hunger amongst activists to say I might not be able to talk formally about the economy, but I can clearly see that fuel levy increases are raising the price of food,” Ndinga-Kanga, committed to shift the narrative as a black South African woman economist, had neither the language for advocating for equitable economies nor the confidence to do so until the LSE Fellowship became a reality. “For so long, I felt in isolation campaigning for a degrowth agenda and people-first economics. The fellowship helped me build a community of people who were in the same struggle for discursive and practical change around economics – as we were. While not easy, the willingness to show up as ourselves had the biggest impact. This group, this community–committed to this agenda of equality–changed my life.”

Recently included in Apolitical’s Top 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy 2021, Ndinga-Kanga is Program Director at Sonke Gender Justice, a South African-based non-profit strengthening the capacity of governments, civil society and citizens to advance gender justice and womxn’s rights. Her multi-disciplinary background in African Studies, politics, economics, international development, and law includes a MSc in Political Economy of Late Development from the LSE, a BA in African Studies and a B. Com. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Cape Town. An alumna of the South African Washington International Program and the David and Elaine Potter Fellowship, she is a former Chevening Scholar.

Ndinga-Kanga’s multidisciplinary and activist research “Triple Jeopardy” documentary series examines South Africa’s black middle class at the intersections of race, class, and inequality. A first such study that doesn’t include civil servants, it distinguishes between the black middle-class, government servants of the early 90s with salary packages able to maintain their middle-class status. The current vast majority of middle-class black South Africans live in economic precarity as part of the transient middle–class who “in their lifetimes frequently dip in and out of poverty levels,” also reveals the role of remittances– “black tax”– sustaining access to food and education for rural or peri-urban and urban area populations. Including her mother–a medical doctor who, on a single salary, afforded to put nine siblings and their children through school–revealed her mother’s impact to allow Ndinga-Kanga “to even imagine going to LSE.” Her mother’s sacrifice, and her own black tax expectations, allowed for a self-analysis not just as an “economic agent, but of political agent.” 

The consequences are clearly reflected in Ndinga-Kanga’s activism and ability to connect with doctors, lawyers, and activists to discuss how they are political agents within those systems. Offering healthcare professionals a political economy training, she demonstrated how access to vaccines was a political economy issue and how professionals within that system were political agents capable of change.

“Atlantic Fellows are not just Fellows. We’re finding one another and building coherence and policy so that the policies we are pushing for in South Africa–like the National Health Insurance–disrupt the global political economy. We are ensuring that it is progressive and there’s coherence around our policy demands,” says Ndinga-Kanga. “I’m very certain that many of the next set of transformational leaders we see at a national level, will be Atlantic Fellows–and that’s the wonderful part.”



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