In October 2006 I began talking to my faculty advisor for the club Global Grasp about creating a summer program which would allow Duke and Vietnamese students to perform research or service linked to coursework in a wide range of disciplines. In April 2007, in attempting to raise money to finance a feasibility study for this program, Ben Wilkinson, the Associate Director for the Kennedy School of Government’s Vietnam Program, suggested I contact Nike, as he said Nike was always trying to promote a better understanding of its operations in Vietnam. In talking to several people at Nike before my trip to Vietnam, it became apparent that they really liked the idea of connecting student-athletes to development projects. These discussions first prompted me to think about creating a civic engagement program specifically for student-athletes, who rarely can study abroad or participate in extensive service or cultural immersion programs in foreign countries. In July, I gained preliminary feedback about the idea from employees in the Nike Vietnam office and the chief official of the Dong Nai Sports Department. The specifics of the program began to take shape after my return from Vietnam, when I began talking to people in the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi and at the U.S. Department of State about their Sports Envoy program for professional athletes. My conversations with university rectors in Vietnam, in parallel with an increasing academic interest in educational policy, caused me to think about what American universities could do to improve higher education there.

I graduated from Duke with a B.S. in Psychology, concentrating in Neuroscience, and a minor in Physics. I wrote an honors thesis which is currently being submitted for publication. I was a member of the varsity women's tennis team, which twice finished in the top 7 in the nation when I was there. I was also the co-President of Global Grasp, one of the co-founders of the Duke Prospective Health Care Club, and the service-learning coordinator for the Durham Nativity School.

In April I was referred by Kit Morris to Stephani Kobayashi Stevenson in Nike's CR Department. Since then I have had several phone and email conversations with her about Nike's interest in helping to support a program of this nature. When I returned from Vietnam, Stephani mentioned that Nike was engaged in heavy collaborations with Duke's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship regarding an online collaborative competition with Ashoka. Recently, Stephani told me that Nike has been asked by its global community investment teams to encourage anyone they have been in communications with over the past year concerning sports for social change initiatives to submit their plans to the Nike Changemakers Competition regardless of how far along they are in the business planning process. She also said almost all of Nike's new projects in the next fiscal year will take place through this type of open source, competitive process and the competition was a great way to gain broader visibility from other major donors.

I was a member of the women's tennis team at Duke University, from which I graduated in May of 2007. I am currently doing a fellowship with the Robertson Scholars Program, a leadership development program that seeks to increase collaboration between Duke and UNC Chapel Hill. All of the UNC athletic teams and the Duke football, basketball, (and next year the women's tennis team) are sponsored by Nike. Over the past few months I have had conversations with several people at Nike, through referrals by Janet Hill and Nike's Director of College Sports Marketing. I have also talked to Wayne Lifshitz, the Director of CARE's Sport for Social Change Initiative, who said he thought the program was an interesting concept and could tie into CARE's work in Vietnam. He also said the CARE Vietnam office could help insure sustainability as the volunteers rotate through. I have talked to Barbara Addy at USAID about their partnership with Nike and CARE in East Africa.