News and Events

Alua Samat ’25, a Bard College student and activist for sex education, partnered with four other students from Bard and the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) to create Not a Shame, an online game which is being designed to be a resource for teenagers across the globe. In development as part of the online OSUN Network Collaborative Course Social Entrepreneurship, the game will differ from other existing sex education games in that it seeks to be more accessible to communities with specific cultural sensitivities and needs, and where global languages such as English or Russian are not widely spoken. Samat has collaborated with others for years to combat the stigmas that surround sexual education for teenagers. Reliable information on sex and family planning are sparse in Kazakhstan, where she is from, and young people can be left with no options but to learn from dubious online sources presenting inaccurate or harmful material, a contributing factor to the rate of teen pregnancy in Central Asia, which is over six times higher than in developed countries. Not a Shame intends to serve as an approachable and trustworthy information source which can be adapted to help teenagers in their local languages and with accompanying narratives that are relevant to their lives and cultures. 

In December 2022, it was announced that Samat’s team would be awarded a prize of $1,500 in the annual pitch competition sponsored by Bard’s MBA in Sustainability. Bermet Suiutbekova, the group’s instructor at AUCA, said that the game “will bring a positive change to Central Asian countries. With the help of $1,500 in prize money from the competition, the team is planning to release the beta version of the product in June of 2023 and go to market in July of 2024.”

As part of one of 26 women-led projects in 17 countries, Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude will participate in a project to regenerate natural fabric dyeing processes with traditional Moroccan weavers as part of a Daughters for Earth grant awarded to Around the World in 80 Fabrics. “These grants, totaling over $600,000, are a part of our mission to deliver critical resources into the hands of the women on the frontlines of climate action,” says Daughters for Earth of this year’s grant winners. Professor Jude will lead microbial dye foraging alongside our natural plant dye research as part of a team that “will bring together traditional weavers, researchers, designers, textile experts, scientists, anthropologists, and businesswomen to create sustainable dyeing processes that Ain Leuh Women's Cooperative can use.” The cooperative, which was founded by local women in the Atlas Mountain region of Morocco, has used traditional weaving techniques to support their families for decades. Today, because of the pressures of demand from global trade, synthetic dyes are used more frequently, produced with chemicals that impact weaver health and the environment. The collaboration between the Ain Leuh Cooperative, Artisan Project, Around the World in 80 Fabrics, the Microbe Institute, and Bard College will help to create “an open-source natural dye, plant, and microbial resource book with a map and dye recipes,” with the goal of improving the health of Ain Leuh weavers and the health of the local ecosystem.