Education

I believe that education has the ability to changes lives. By educating one student, we have the potential to radically change quality of life for three generations. First, by providing the student with the opportunity to succeed, second by providing their future children a stepping stone for success, and third by allowing the student to be better capable of reaching back to assist the their parents later in life.

This is why I am proud of our work at the Balkhi Foundation. By making college more affordable and funding technology training for K-12 students we are doing our small part to further educational attainment and provide pathways to success. In the 2020 award year, we were also able to fund a second year of study for our 2019 scholars. I believe that this approach to recurrent scholarship funding is essential to supporting our scholars throughout their educational careers.  

I am also incredibly proud of our family’s continued support of Cambodian Village Fund and our historical support of Pencils of Promise which have allowed us to improve access to education for children in Guatemala and Cambodia.

Ethical Practice 

Throughout graduate school, I developed an interest in ethical practice and the processes that can be used to encourage ethical decision making both within and outside the field of psychology. This interest has come to the forefront while working at the Balkhi Foundation, as I have had the privilege of designing our scholarship and grant giving processes from the ground up using an ethical decision making framework.

I am incredibly proud that the Balkhi Foundation’s scholarship program operates under a blinded review protocol and has since we launched the program in 2019. Blinded scholarship review, similar to blinded peer reviews in academia or blinded recruitment in the world of industry, allows for students to be evaluated based on their merits and the narrative that they choose to provide to the scholarship committee while minimizing the impact of unconscious bias. I believe that this process is critical to ethical practice in a scholarship or grant giving organization.   

Mentorship

Over the last decade I have personally reaped the benefits of quality mentorship. Both academically and personally, the impact of having a strong and reliable mentor is well documented. While at the University of Florida, I had the distinct pleasure of authoring a paper on the Progressive Cascading model of mentorship and supervision within the Division of Medical Psychology and working along with my own set of phenomenal mentors. 

It is my hope that as the reach of the Balkhi Foundation grows we can build a community of direct and peer mentorship among our scholars so they too can reap the benefits of these collaborative relationships.