MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice.

Mackenzie Berg and the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group

Mackenzie Berg is a master's student at the University of Denver, earning a degree in international and intercultural communication. As she finishes her first year in the program, she is focusing her work in the interrelatedness of sustainable development, environment, and human rights. She is also eager to explore the use of creative media, such as art, photography, and film in advocacy work for social justice and environmental conservation.

Both during and after studying for her undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology, Mackenzie traveled and worked in a variety of developing countries that brought her face to face with one of the paradoxes of globalization—that even nations who are becoming increasingly democratized, and whose economies have reached the world market, are still characterized by great disparities in wealth, power and opportunity.

Through interaction with the cultures she encountered during her travels, and observations of their daily lives and struggles, she gained first-hand a sense of how marginalized populations often remain stuck in poor conditions due to their exclusion from policy-making, and from a lack of access to capacity-building resources like basic education.

As an AP fellow with the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group in New Delhi this summer, Mackenzie's work will involve building a communications toolkit aimed at improving Chintan's advocacy communications; as well as a photo documentation project called Images for Change, that will highlight and profile one of the marginalized populations that Chintan supports—the wastepickers or waste recyclers in Delhi.

She is excited to contribute to Chintan's grassroots work, collaborating directly with the poor and marginal communities in Delhi with the idea that new partnerships will help move us closer to a vision of an environmentally and socially just world.

Upon her return in the fall, Mackenzie will finish a final quarter of grad school, and then hopes to move onto fieldwork that will continue to bridge her passions for travel, art, and humanitarian issues.

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