American Corner Partners Sought

The American Corner is starting a new initiative called "American Corner Partners". As part of this initiative, the American Corner is looking for interested student clubs, associations, schools, institutes, and other civil society and non-governmental organizations with which it can form collaborative partnerships to help bring the American Corner experience to people all over Tunisia, whether they live in Tunis, Sfax, Gabes, Gafsa, Djerba, or anywhere else.

How would these partnerships work? As a first step, the American Corner will collaborate with official American Corner Partners to provide discussion topics and conversation hour articles, activities, and ideas. This means that other organizations around Tunisia can now bring the conversation hour experience to their local constituencies. Want to attend the American Corner's discussion hour on American foreign policy or the Ground Zero Mosque controversy but can't come all the way to Tunis to attend because you live in Kairouan? Well, if there is a local organization is Kairouan that is an official American Corner Partner, we will provide them with the relevant article that was discussed during our conversation hours, and now a local organization in Kairouan can put on a similar event for residents of Kairouan. This is the kind of idea sharing that the AC hopes to achieve by developing partnerships with organizations across Tunisia.

As a second step for the future, I hope to find ways that we can broadcast guest speaker events from the American Corner-Tunis to partner institutions across Tunisia. This would mean that if the AC hosted a major business leader for an event at the AC, we would show that event live, and any partner organization could bring that guest speaker event to its local members via the Internet. This really depends on the technology and the ability to find a web conferencing application than can perform such tasks. Therefore, this may take some time, but I hope to explore making this a reality as soon as possible.

There could also be other potential benefits and opportunities for collaboration that could result as things progress and our relationships with other groups develop.

If you are interested in becoming an American Corner Partner, please send me your name, your e-mail address, and the name of your organization/institution.

Please be aware that ONLY ORGANIZATIONS CAN BE AMERICAN CORNER PARTNERS. Individuals cannot be partners. They must be representing organizations. The only exception to this rule is English language teachers who want to bring AC-type discussions into their classrooms.

Thank you!

Ravi Kaneriya
American Corner Coordinator