A Student Initiative to Support Education and Learning

A group of AGS students teamed up with several international students in Paris to form a nonprofit association named Biblion Project, which seeks to promote better education and quality of learning at both the local and international levels by supporting student-run projects.

AGS Master of International Relations and Diplomacy students Brandon Roddey, as president and co-founder, and Joseph Mangarella, as treasurer (both Class of 2011), along with Elodie Gérôme from AGS's partner university Paris Sud 11, who also attends courses at AGS through a dual degree program, together engaged in this humanitarian initiative. They have also had the support of other students in Paris including AGSers Lisa Albright, Michael Durkin, and Kelly Archambeault (Class of 2012) who helped with the organization’s collective efforts to design and select student projects to undertake.

Biblion started in Spring 2010 and currently supports two projects: the first, "Books for Haiti", consists of collecting textbooks from the student community in France, sorting them, and sending them to Haitian libaries according to their respective needs. It is run in partnership with French NGO Bibliothèques Sans Frontières (Libraries Without Borders).

The second, "Cultural Awareness in the Classroom", consists of conducting workshops in primary school classrooms in Paris to promote tolerance and cultural diversity. The goal is, through non-formal and recreational methods such as song, dance, and games, to have the young "écoliers" begin to incorporate into their worldviews the values of respect, tolerance, solidarity, and friendship that accompany an understanding and appreciation of cultural difference.

See Biblion Project website

Biblion Project wishes to engage other volunteers in this enterprise. If you are interested, you may contact the association directly at: biblionproject@gmail.com.