In August 2011 the Pan Valley Institute of the American Friends Service Committee launched the Tamejavi Cultural Organizing Fellowship Program (TCOFP) to build the capacity of ten fellows to develop community and heritage-based, cultural and art projects that will intersect with civic engagement and actions for social change.
During the seven months that the ten Tamejavi have been enrolled in the program, they have attended several planning and evaluation meetings, visual and social media communication trainings, and have participated in one residential gathering to study disciplines such as popular education, participatory research and cultural organizing. The fellows have taken back to their communities what they have learned so far by first forming a working team that will support their cultural organizing endeavors. The Tamejavi Fellows also have the task of documenting all activities and discoveries they encounter throughout the process of enhancing their cultural organizing skills. At the present, Tamejavi Fellows along with their working teams are enthusiastically engaged in working on a cultural inventory and a community assessment.
This cultural inventory and community assessment will provide the fellows and their working teams with opportunities to list the cultural wealth and assets of their communities, as well as reflect critically on the key cultural problems, challenges, and opportunities they confront. The findings of this cultural inventory and community assessment will be the basis used to choose and organize the creative, cultural and artistic endeavors the Tamejavi Fellows will engage in and publically present in late 2012 to early 2013.
We have created this blog to follow the progress, experiences and challenges the Tamejavi Fellows encounter while doing their cultural inventory and community assessments. Enjoy the readings…
Pan Valley Institute Blog 
Looking forward to reading feedback.
Para mi es un poco dificil el reto de conseguir hablar con la gente su cultura porque muchas de las personas no saben de su cultura.
for me one of the challenges of the community assessment has been securing a meeting location, as well as an agreeable time for everybody.
Setting up a meeting where all my members can make it has been difficult because each one of us has a busy schedule and things always seems to be coming up. We were able to meet recently to discuss our progress of the community assessment and update on retreat. Unfortunately, we have not completed our assessment. We then discuss each other’s challenges in not being able to complete our part of the assessment and then found a way to support each other in overcoming these challenges. In our meeting, our challenges were: work, family matters, and school (which are very challenging in its own due to the great amount of time each requires). Our way we found to support one another is: 1) we created a facebook group in which to keep each other updated and keep our communication open and 2) be honest with each other and let each other know when we are not able to complete a task. During our meeting, we developed a survey questionnaire and linked it to our retreat website and facebook (we share the survey with our Cambodian Collegiate Association group in hopes for their participation and to reach a wider community).