Last Fall, we launched our third cohort of Project Pengyou Leadership Fellows where Paul Francis Wilson and Hiram Rios Hernandez along with around 40 of their peers learned leadership and community building tactics and skills. After returning to their home campus at Western Kentucky University (WKU), and the Harvard Kennedy School, Francis and Hiram have worked hard to build Project Pengyou Chapters to encourage exchange between Chinese and American students on campus.

Francis and Hiram were selected as two of fifteen student delegates to attend the Strait Talk Symposium at UC Berkeley (and Francis was highlighted by the WKU student news organization,) where they discussed cross straits issues between Taiwan, China and the US.

Great work Francis and Hiram! We are so happy you represented Pengyous at Berkeley.

About Strait Talk:

Strait Talk is a non-partisan dialogue program that seeks to transform international conflict by connecting young people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait and the United States and empowering them to strive for peace. It is a bridge between grassroots youth advocacy and elite-driven network theory. Its process is based on the Interactive Conflict Resolution method, which has been used since the 1960s to facilitate dialogue between people engaged in apparently intractable conflicts. The basic goals of ICR are to create personal trust across conflict lines and to develop creative and workable ideas to help spur official dialogue.