National Post (National Edition)
CANADIAN SCHOLARSHIP TAKES GLOBAL APPROACH TO PROBLEM SOLVING
While teaching a class of first-graders in her home country of Guatemala, it
became clear to Michele Monroy-Valle that something was very wrong with two of her students.
One girl was emaciated. “She was bone to skin. The other one was very short, very tiny, and he was crying all the time. Whenever I had food, he would look at it. So I was feeding him, but it was not enough,” she recalls.
“My task was teaching them how to read and write, but it wasn’t possible. They couldn’t concentrate.”
That experience sparked her lifelong passion to improve malnutrition in Guatemala. A key moment in her career came in 2018, when she was designated a Queen Elizabeth Scholar as a result of a partnership between her alma mater, the University of San Carlos, and the University of Saskatchewan.
Monroy-Valle was able to travel to Canada and gain valuable research and volunteer experience at the Saskatoon Food Bank & Learning Centre.
“It was refreshing to see how malnutrition and poverty and food security are approached in Canada,” she says. “There are community-based programs, and the overall community participates and gets involved in many ways. In Guatemala, (the approach to social problems) is more of an individualistic thing.”
The Queen Elizabeth Scholars is a made-in-Canada initiative that fosters global connections by enabling both Canadian post-secondary students to study abroad and international students to study in Canada. To date, more than 1,000 scholars have completed placements across 59 countries.
The program is led by the Rideau Hall Foundation, in collaboration with Community Foundations of Canada, Universities Canada and Canadian universities. The Victor Dahdaleh Foundation is a catalytic contributor, along with a network of other partners.
Dahdaleh is a Canadian philanthropist based in the U.K. He says the Queen Elizabeth Scholars program supports two foundational pillars of his philanthropic work: education and empowering young people to become global leaders in their fields.
“Sometimes in philanthropy, we provide funding to solve a problem. But the Queen Elizabeth Scholars program provides funding to create problem solvers,” Dahdaleh says.
“It empowers young people with the tools to go beyond just solving one problem and gives them the tools to tackle the fundamental and lasting changes we need for the future.”
Dahdaleh adds the program is more important than ever as the world recovers from the isolation necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating the need for global connections to tackle global challenges.
“Being in a different country and surrounded by a different culture—those are the things that will expand how we think and see the world,” he says. “By funding not just education but global experience, the Queen Elizabeth Scholars program is building profound connections.”
Marina Melanidis credits the program for setting the rewarding trajectory of her academic and work career.
As an undergrad studying natural resources conservation at the University of British Columbia in 2015, she applied to be a Queen Elizabeth Scholar in India.
“When I was in India, for the first time I could really visualize how conservation rubs up against social systems and justice and equity,” she says. “It gave me a global perspective I needed and changed the whole pathway of my career.”
In 2019, Melanidis founded the global non-profit organization Youth4Nature, and now works on it full time, having recently defended her master’s thesis in UBC’s forestry department.
Youth4Nature works to educate, empower and mobilize young people worldwide to find solutions for ecological and climate crises.
“Often, all a young person needs is that first opportunity to be able to snowball that into a whole career,” says Melanidis. “That late-night decision to apply to go to India —there’s a direct connection between that decision and where I am right now.”
Her inspiring story, says Dahdaleh, illustrates how the Queen Elizabeth Scholars program provides game-changing opportunities.
“I am often amazed at their leadership. These young people are at the cutting edge of their fields and are the driving force for new ways of solving problems.”
Back in Guatemala in 2020, Monroy-Valle’s role as a Queen Elizabeth Scholar enabled her to do on-theground research and work on malnutrition in a Mayan town called Chichicastenango. The opportunity gave her invaluable insights into the problem and potential solutions.
“I became part of the community. You get to know the people by name, and get to know where they live, you’ve been to their houses,” she says.
“What is very cool about being a Queen Elizabeth Scholar is, you can be invested in working for climate change and all these other problems, but when you have a face, a name to those problems, it’s easier to work with them and easier to think of solutions to help them because you know them personally.
“Because how do you start working on a big problem like that? It’s just one person at a time, and that’s the
“SOMETIMES IN PHILANTHROPY, WE PROVIDE FUNDING TO SOLVE A PROBLEM. BUT THE QUEEN ELIZABETH SCHOLARS PROGRAM PROVIDES FUNDING TO CREATE PROBLEM SOLVERS.”
opportunity Queen Elizabeth (Scholars) gives you, that
opportunity to work one person at a time.”
Monroy-Valle’s work exemplifies the value of the Queen Elizabeth Scholars program, Dahdaleh says.
“Regardless of where we are in the world, we need to make sure people are at the centre of finding solutions. Michele’s work comes full circle from research to people to broader societal challenges.”
Monroy-Valle is now back in Canada as a PhD candidate at the University of Saskatchewan. Over her career, she has witnessed the advent of community-based nutrition programs in Guatemala, a vast improvement from previous eras when malnourished children were taken away from their families.
In the face of an overwhelming problem, such “little achievements,” as she
calls them, are big wins.